case - openCaselist 2015-16

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Off The 1AC confuses regulation with prohibition. The move to legalize merely regulates transgression into impotency and creates new avenues for guilt, anxiety, and dominance. Dean 7 - Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York (Jodi, http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/18/41, Why Žižek for Political Theory?, 2007, Volume One, Number One - Why Žižek? pp 27-30) NAR Žižek argues that the crucial feature of late capitalist societies is the way that transgression

has been normalized (Žižek 2003: 56). Rather than conforming to stereotypes of responsible men in the public sphere and caring women in the private, contemporary subjects are encouraged to challenge gender norms and boundaries. Men and women alike are enjoined to succeed in the work force and in their family lives, to find fulfilling careers and spend quality time with their children. Networked communication technologies (high speed internet, cell phones) enable parents to work harder even as they attend to familial relationships. Similarly, emphases on the value of diverse cultural and ethnic traditions have replaced earlier injunctions to assimilate. These emphases find material support in consumer goods ranging from clothing and accessories targeted to specific demographic groups, to film, television, and print media, to, more recently, drugs and health plans designed for particular populations. What is now quite clear is a shift in the understanding of social membership away from the worker/citizen and toward the consumer. [4] Thus, what disciplinary society prohibited, contemporary consumerism encourages, indeed, demands . Contemporary consumer culture relies on excess, on a general principle that more is better.[5] Excess drives the economy: super-sized meals at McDonalds and Burger King, gargantuan SUVs, fashion magazines urging shoppers to pick up “armloads” of the newest items, extreme sports, extreme makeovers, and, at the same time, bigger closets, the production of all sorts of organizing, filing, and containing systems, and a booming business in mini-storage units all of which are supposed to help Americans deal with their excess stuff. These makeovers, these fashions and accessories, provide material support for injunctions to be oneself, to create and express one’s free individuality, to become the unique and valuable person one already is, to break the bounds of conformity. Excess also appears in other aspects of life under communicative capitalism: 24/7 news, 800 channel television, blockbuster films, television shows advertised as the “most unbelievable moment of the season” and the “unforgettable series finale.” Self-help books tell us not just how to achieve sexual ecstasy, spiritual fulfillment, and a purpose-driven life—they tell us to achieve sexual ecstasy, spiritual fulfillment, and a purpose-driven life. Exaggeration

is part of the very air we breathe. We are daily enjoined to enjoy. Ours is a society of the superego. One might object at this point that Žižek’s emphases on contemporary injunctions to enjoy is misplaced. Does not the rise of religious fundamentalism, for example, suggest just the opposite, that is, a return to old sexual prohibitions? And, what about persistent warnings around health—don’t smoke, just say no to drugs, watch your weight, cut down on fat and carbohydrates—what are these if not new forms of discipline? Žižek’s response is, first, that one

should not confuse regulations with symbolic prohibitions, and, second, that so-called fundamentalism also relies on an injunction to enjoy (Žižek 2003: 56). The regulations we encounter everyday, the guidance we come under as we navigate late capitalism, are not symbolic norms . They are regulations that lack a claim to normative authority, but are instead installed by committees, by experts and pundits. Everyone knows they are ultimately contestable , carrying no symbolic weight. Experts argue over all the time over proper diets, the necessary amount of exercise, the benefits of red wine. In Žižek’s terms, these

regulations, then, are regulations of the very mode of

transgression ( Žižek 2003: 56). This makes sense when we recognize the way that these regulations fail to provide any real breathing space, any relief from the injunction to enjoy. In fact, they function much more perversely insofar as they never fail to remind us that we really aren’t enjoying properly, we really aren’t doing anything right. Thus, they reinforce the malevolent superego, empowering it to torment us all the more. Žižek argues, moreover, that contemporary fundamentalisms also enjoin jouissance. Their seeming adherence to law is driven by a superego injunction to transgress contemporary regulations. I think of this in terms of a culture of cruelty. Opponents of gay marriage, in the name of family values, free their congregations to hate; indeed, they organize themselves via a fascination with the sexual enjoyment of same sex couplings, thereby providing enjoyment. Opposition to gay marriage gives opponents permission, in fact it encourages them, to find and weed out homosexual attraction. Might a boy be too artistic, too gentle? Might a girl be too aggressive? Christian fundamentalists opposing gay marriage urge that ambiguous behavior be identified and corrected before it’s too late. If necessary, of course, they can provide retraining, that is, they can install young people in camps and programs that will “turn them straight.” The preoccupation with excess also characterizes the multiculturalism and political correctness associated with Left and liberal politics. Žižek argues liberal tolerance is in fact a “zero tolerance” of the other in the excess of the other’s enjoyment (Žižek 2002: 174). If the other remains too tied to particular religious

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practices, say those that involve the subordination of women, the denial of medical treatment to children, the rejection of scientific findings regarding evolution and global warming, well, this other cannot be tolerated. This other is incompatible with liberal pluralism; differently put, liberalism wants another deprived of its otherness (Žižek 2003: 96, Žižek 2002: 11). White Leftist multiculturalists, even as they encourage the flourishing of multiple modes of becoming, find themselves in a similar bind (one in which class difference is inscribed): their support of differentiated cultural traditions means that they oppose the racism, sexism, and religiosity that bind together some poor whites. Just as the superego imperative operates in conservatism to encourage hate, so can it be found in liberalism and Left multiculturalism as well. Correlative

to the pervasive intrusion of superego enjoyment is a decline in the efficiency of symbolic norms, what Žižek refers to as the “collapse of the big Other.” [6] The decline of symbolic efficiency refers to a fundamental uncertainty in our relation to the world, to the absence of a principle of charity that pertains across and through disagreement. We don’t know on whom or what to rely, whom or what to trust. Arguments and pervasive in one context carry little weight in another. In short, although the symbolic order is always and necessarily lacking, ruptured, today this lack is directly assumed. We no longer posit an overarching symbolic. We

are so attuned to pretense and manipulation, “spin,” that we reject the very possibility of a truth beneath the lie or of a truth that cuts through the assortment of lies and injunctions to enjoy constitutive of the present ideological formation. What we presume instead are a variety of partial fillers, partial substitutes. Thus, in place of symbolically anchored identities (structured in terms of conventions of gender, race, work, and national citizenship), we encounter imaginary injunctions to develop our creative potential and cultivate our individuality, injunctions supported by capital’s provisions of the ever new experiences and accessories we use to perform this self-fashioning (what Žižek refers to as the direct super-egoization of the imaginary ideal). (Žižek 1999: 368) In

place of norms grounded in claims to universal validity, we have rules and regulations that are clearly the result of compromises among competing parties or the contingent and fallible conclusions of committees of experts. And, in place of the norms that relieve us of the duty to enjoy, that provide the prohibitions that sustain desire, we find ourselves at the mercy of the superego’s injunction. We are expected to have a good time, to have it all, to be happy, fit and fulfilled. This compulsion results in overwhelming guilt and anxiety. On one hand, we are guilty both when we fail to live up to the superego’s injunction and when we follow it. On another, we are anxious before the enjoyment of the other. Given our inabilities to enjoy, the enjoyment of the other seems all the more powerful, all the more threatening. The other all too easily threatens our imaginary balance . An ever present reminder that someone else has more, is more fulfilled, more successful, more attractive, more spiritual, the other makes our own lack all the more present to us. That the fragility of contemporary subjects means others are experienced as threats helps make sense of the ready availability of the imaginary identity of the victim—one of the few positions from which one can speak. When others smoke, I am at risk. When others over-eat, make noise, flaunt their sexuality, then my American way of life, my values, are under attack . Indeed, in the terms provided by the war on terror, to be “civilized” today is to be a victim—a victim of fear of terrorism, a victim that has to be surveilled, searched, guarded, and protected from unpredictable violence. In all these cases, the imaginary identity of the victim authorizes the subject to speak even as it shields it from responsibility toward another (Žižek 2003: 166-168). The victim role, in other words, is one wherein the subject who speaks relies on and presupposes the other as an object enjoying in its stead, and, moreover, as threatening, even unbearable, in that enjoyment. One

might have thought that the disintegration of restrictive symbolic norms, especially in the context of the speed and flows of communicative capitalism, would have ushered in a time of remarkable freedom. People in pluralist and pluralizing societies would be free to make the choices about who they want to be and how they want to live unhindered by racist and patriarchal conventions. Žižek’s thesis, however, is that the decline of symbolic efficiency has introduced new opportunities for guilt and anxiety, new forms of submission, dependence, and domination . His account of the fixity of enjoyment explains why. Given that activity depends on passivity, that the very capacity to act relies on a nugget of enjoyment, the emergence of new opportunities for domination makes sense. In

the face of injunctions to freedom, compulsions to individual self-creation, demands to choose and decide even when there are no reliable grounds for a decision, subjects will cling all the more desperately to the objects that sustain them , whether these objects are the myriad available momentary enjoyments provided by capital or the others as objects enjoying in our stead. We depend on these contingent enjoyments to be at all. Indeed, Žižek argues

that

contemporary imperatives to freedom produce even more radical attachments to domination and submission . This attachment repeats the simple dynamic of transgression. If authorities say don’t do X, then doing X will provide enjoyment

(because prohibition relies on the fantasy that were it not for the prohibited object, one would enjoy).

authorities say, do X, then not doing X provides enjoyment.

Conversely, if

Thus, Žižek insists that contemporary

subjectivities

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confront an “obscene need for domination and submission” and he defends is point with reference to “the growth of sadomasochistic lesbian couples.” (Žižek 1999: 360, 344) I think this example is absurd (and likely an instance of where Žižek’s own enjoyment irrupts in the text). We can find much more powerful and widespread

examples of contemporary attachments to domination in enthusiasm for coercive law, strict sentencing, the death penalty, and zero tolerance toward lawbreakers. And, we can better account for impulses to submission, for the surprising willingness of many to accept even the most unconvincing pronouncements in a time of fear, uncertainty, and insecurity, by emphasizing, again, not sexual anecdotes but the need for relief from the injunction to decide for oneself when one has no grounds for choosing. Submission enables someone else to do what needs to be done for us, to be the object or instrument of our will—and, precisely because we don’t even know what to will, we don’t even have to will—we escape from the pressures of guilt and responsibility.

This interpolative force of the Big Other results in dehumanization and genocide. Reed et. al 5 - Professor, Director of Command and Leadership Studies, U.S. Army War College [Professor George E., Guy B. Adams, Professor, Public Affairs, University of Missouri-Columbia, Danny L. Balfour, Professor, Public and Nonprofit Administration, Grand Valley State University, “Putting Cruelty First: Abu Ghraib, Administrative Evil and Moral Inversion,” Paper prepared for presentation to “Ethics and Integrity of Governance: A Transatlantic Dialogue,” Leuven, Belgium, June 2-5, 2005 http://soc.kuleuven.be/io/ethics/paper/Paper%20WS5_pdf/ Guy%20Adams.pdf, 24-28]

Total guard aggression increased daily, even after prisoners had ceased any resistance and deterioration was visible. Prisoner rights were redefined as privileges, to be earned by obedient behavior. The experiment was planned for two weeks, but was terminated after six days. Five prisoners were released because of extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and/or acute anxiety. Guards forced the prisoners to chant filthy songs, to defecate in buckets that were not emptied, and to clean toilets with their bare hands. They acted as if the prisoners were less than human and so did the prisoners (Haney, Banks and Zimbardo, 1973, p.94): At the end of only six days we had to close down our mock prison because what we saw was frightening. It was no longer apparent to us or most of the subjects where they ended and their roles began. The majority had indeed become "prisoners” or "guards," [were] no longer able to clearly differentiate between role-playing and self. There were dramatic changes in virtually every aspect of their behavior, thinking and feeling. In less that a week, the experience of imprisonment undid (temporarily) a lifetime of learning; human values were suspended, self-concepts were challenged, and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature surfaced. We were horrified because we saw some boys ("guards") treat other boys as if they were despicable animals, taking pleasure in cruelty, while other boys ("prisoners") became servile, dehumanized robots who thought only of escape, of their own individual survival, and of their mounting hatred of the guards. This experiment suggests that group and organizational roles and social structures play a far more powerful part in everyday human behavior than most of us would consider. And we can see clearly how individual morality and ethics can be swallowed and effectively erased by social roles and structures. One is rarely confronted with a clear, up-or-down decision on an ethical issue; rather, a series of small, usually ambiguous choices are made, and the weight of commitments and of habit drives out morality. One does not have to be morally degenerate to become caught in a web of wrongdoing that may even cross the line into evil . The skids are further greased if the situation is defined or presented as technical, or calling for expert judgment, or is legitimated , either tacitly or explicitly, by organizational authority, as we shall see below. It becomes an even easier choice if the immoral behavior has itself been masked, redefined through a moral inversion as the "good" or "right" thing to do. Administrative Evil and Dehumanization The Stanford prison experiment provides a fairly powerful explanation for at least some of what happened at Abu Ghraib. But it also does not fully fit the specifics of the situation. Unlike the Stanford experiments, the guards did not act in an isolated and controlled environment, but were part of a larger organizational structure and political environment.

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They interacted regularly with all sorts of personnel, both directly and indirectly involved with the prisoners. They were in a remarkably chaotic environment, were by and large poorly prepared and trained for their roles, and were faced with both enormous danger and ambiguity. However, like the Stanford Prison Experiment, tacit permission was available to those who chose to accept it. In his ground-breaking book, The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg observed that a consensus for and the practice of mass murder coalesced among German bureaucrats in a manner that (Hilberg, 1985, p.55), “…was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization .” In another study of mid-level bureaucrats and the Holocaust, Christopher Browning describes this process in some detail as he also found that direct orders were not needed for key functionaries to understand the direction that policy was to take (Browning, 1992, pp. 141-142): Instead, new signals and directions were given at the center, and with a ripple effect, these new signals set in motions waves that radiated outward… with the situations they found themselves in and the contacts they made, these three bureaucrats could not help but feel the ripples and be affected by the changing atmosphere and course of events. These were not [unintelligent] stupid or inept people; they could read the signals, perceive what was expected of them, and adjust their behavior accordingly… It was their receptivity to such signals, and the speed with which they aligned themselves to the new policy, that allowed the Final Solution to emerge with so little internal friction and so little formal coordination If something as horrific and systematic as the Holocaust could be perpetrated based more on a common understanding than upon direct orders, it should not be difficult to imagine how abuse of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere occurred, with otherwise unacceptable behaviors substituting for ambiguous, standard operating procedures. While the Nazi Holocaust was far, far worse than anything that has happened during the American occupation of Iraq, it has been amply demonstrated that Americans are not immune to the types of social and organizational conditions that make it possible and seemingly permissible to violate the boundaries of morality and human decency, in at least some cases, without believing that they were doing anything wrong. It would be naïve to assume that the “few bad apples” acted alone, and that others in the system did not share and support the abuses as they went about their routines and did their jobs. Before and surrounding overt acts of evil, there are many more and much less obviously evil administrative activities that lead to and support the worst forms of human behavior. Moreover, without these instances of masked evil, the more overt and unmasked acts are less likely to occur (Staub, 1992, pp. 20-21). The apparent willingness and comfort level with taking photos and to be photographed while abusing prisoners seems to reflect the “normalcy” of the acts within the context of at least the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib (and is hauntingly similar to photos of atrocities sent home by SS personnel in World War II). In the camps and prisons run by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, orders and professional standards forbidding the abuse of prisoners and defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior for prison guards could be found in at least some locations posted on some walls, but were widely ignored by the perpetrators. Instead, we find a high stress situation, in which the expectation was to It would be naïve to assume that the “few bad apples” acted alone, and that others in the system did not share and support the abuses as they went about their routines and did their jobs. Before and surrounding overt acts of evil, there are many more and much less obviously evil administrative activities that lead to and support the worst forms of human behavior. Moreover, without these instances of masked evil, the more overt and unmasked acts are less likely to occur (Staub, 1992, pp. 20-21). The apparent willingness and comfort level with taking photos and to be photographed while abusing prisoners seems to reflect the “normalcy” of the acts within the context of at least the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib (and is hauntingly similar to photos of atrocities sent home by SS personnel in World War II). In the camps and prisons run by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, orders and professional standards forbidding the abuse of prisoners and defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior for prison guards could be found in at least some

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locations posted on some walls, but were widely ignored by the perpetrators. Instead, we find a high stress situation, in which the expectation was to extract usable intelligence from detainees in order to help their comrades suppress a growing insurgency, find weapons of mass destruction, and prevent acts of terrorism. In this context, the power of group dynamics, social structures, and organizational ambiguities is readily seen. The normal inhibitions that might have prevented those who perpetrated the abuses from doing these evil deeds may have been further weakened by the shared belief that the prisoners were somehow less than human, and that getting information out of them was more important than protecting their rights and dignity as human beings. For example, in an interview with the BBC on June 15, 2004, Brig. General Janis Karpinski stated that she was told by General Geoffrey Miller – later placed in charge of Iraqi prisons and former commander at Guantanamo Bay – that the Iraqi prisoners, “…are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you’ve lost control of them.” Just as anti-Semitism was central to the attitudes of those who implemented the policy of mass murder in the Holocaust, the abuses at Abu Ghraib may have been facilitated by an atmosphere that dehumanized the detainees. In effect, these detainees, with their ambiguous legal status, could be seen as a “surplus population,” living outside the protections of civilized society (Rubenstein, 1983). And when organizational dynamics combine with a tendency to dehumanize and/or demonize a vulnerable group, the stage is set for the mask of administrative evil.

In place of the Superego's injunction we posit our alternative: a community of believers. Dean 6 - Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York (Jodi, Zizek's Politics, © 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1, p.174-7 ) NAR In place of the obscene transgressions of the nightly law , Žižek posits a community of believers in a cause . We saw in the example from Ballard’s Super Cannes the

idea of a community united through its transgressions . One element of this unity emerged out of an enlivened moral sensibility, an invigorated and expanded sense of the self in a moral world. As an alternative to such a community united through experiences of hatred, obscenity, and violence, the community that sustains and supplements the public law, Žižek draws from the Pauline remnant to envision a connection that also enlivens one’s experience of the world but that does so by eliminating law’s superego support. The Pauline law

of faith suspends “the obscene libidinal investment in the Law, the investment on account of which the law generates/solicits its own transgression.”80 Rather than having her relation to law mediated by superego, the Pauline believer alienates everything to the law, becoming herself an object . The subject is compulsion, testimony to a cause that has transformed it. Thus, Paul posits the new community of faith as following the law but not libidinally invested in it. Accordingly, a crucial aspect of this community, one Žižek analogizes to a collective of outcasts, is that it has traversed or overcome the fantasy that law is all powerful, all knowing, and always right. As Žižek points out, superego is precisely the object that attempts to conceal the impotence of law and to fill it in with force .81 The new community accepts that law is non-all, recognizing its limits as opportunities for love. Law will not solve all problems; its abstractions, however, establish a space within which we struggle for solutions . One might respond by asking whether withholding nothing and

different communities might understand and enact love in radically contrary ways, ways that do not simply differ from but actively oppose each other. What is to prevent one kind of committed community from seeking to wipe out all others? Nothing. There are no guarantees. As Žižek explains with reference to psychoanalysis, its ultimate goal “is not the confessionary pacification/gentrification of the trauma, but the acceptance of the very fact that our lives involve a tragic kernel beyond redemption, that there is a dimension of our being which forever resists redemption-deliverance.”82 Submitting to the law, then, rests not on being convinced of its reason or rightness; much more simply, it rests on an acknowledgment of where we are and of a working toward something better from where we are. Bluntly put, leftist attempts to leave the law behind are basically provocations that have little to do with actually attempting to exercise political power to effect change. Žižek’s treatment of Paul suggests another way, one that attacks the obscene supplement of law and works to traverse the fantasies that attach us to law as it focuses on the task of building radical collectives.The Interpellation of the Legal Subject: To the Vitality of the Engaged Activist Žižek

finds in Paul “a commitment, an engaged position of struggle, an uncanny ‘interpellation’ beyond ideological interpellation, an interpellation which suspends the performative force of our ‘normal’ ideological interpellation that compels us to accept our determinate place within the sociosymbolic edifice.”83 Rather than involving recognition of oneself in the ideological call or the seeing of one’s self from what one takes to be the perspective of law, “ uncanny”

interpellation disconnects the

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subject from its symbolic identity. This identity simply doesn’t matter; it cannot fill in the lack constitutive of the subject. At best it provides a screen onto which are projected the images of whom can be counted or recognized in law, images imbricated in the obscene fantasies that limit the law and images that we perpetually reject for their failure to account for who we “really are.” Uncanny interpellation, however, suspends these fantasies and acknowledges the lack: only a lacking subject is capable of love. Thus,

Žižek reads Paul’s account of the fulfillment of law in terms of a traumatic event that ruptures law from within; law remains, but without its interpellative force . This trauma, moreover, unites a new collective, one engaged in the radical project of enacting their faith. For this reason, Žižek takes from the Pauline message the political message to “practice utopia.” 84 The practice of a new collective cannot rely on the old ways—on previously given norms or on the fantasies formerly underpinning law . Instead, its practice is a new beginning out of the rupture with the old . As we have seen with Paul and Lenin, this practice is in between the old and the new; it is a bringing into being of something else. Such a moment will be transitory. Indeed, this very transience appears clearly in the fact that the institutions that might provide a symbolic identity are not yet present. To this extent, Žižek’s discussion of love as the fulfillment of law suggests the possibility of building something new from within something old, in the course of a changed, transformed relation to what has been. Conclusion: Hope in Law Such a building from within can also be understood as a moment already within law. If we return to the fact that Žižek’s account of law is synchronic, we can recognize the way in which, like law’s founding, this possibility of a love that ruptures, this incompleteness, can be understood as already present, as persisting in law in its utopian dimensions. There is in law something more than superego enjoyment that attaches us to it; inhering in law, in its very circularity, in the irrationality of its injunction, is belief, or faith. What makes law law is a belief that there is more to law than violence.In the monstrosity of their acts, Sethe and Keyser Soeze posit this other moment, this utopian alternative that inverts the existing order. In the case of The Usual Suspects, the possibility of such an order is hinted at through the retroactive presentation of the murder of wife and daughter. The scene is murky, indistinct, part of the fantastic, originary trauma constituting the mythic Keyser Soeze, who appears throughout the film as the singularly unimpressive, indeed, “crippled” petty criminal, Verbal. The story of Sethe is clearly the more powerful. In Beloved, hope in a time and space of African-American freedom is the dream—the tomorrow that persists once Beloved is forgotten.85 Belief in this dream is what enabled and even inspired Sethe to act. If we continue this emphasis on the utopian fulfillment of law as persisting within it, we might understand as well Žižek’s emphasis on the letter of law. Yes, it is ambiguous and indeterminate, but this opens it up for emancipatory as well as repressive meaning. Thus, when confronting a cynical age, an age when the worst, most corrupt alternatives seem not simply to proliferate but no longer to surprise or outrage, finding a utopian dimension to inhere in law may be truly radical. To this extent, the idea that law is law expresses more than the violence of the injunction; it captures the hope inspiring law as well. Belief in law is a belief that violence is not everything. Just as the founding violence persists in law, so does the founding dream that things might be otherwise, and indeed, this dream tends to be concealed as well, suppressed by injunctions to compromise, to accept the way things are, and to give up naïve belief in something better. Ultimately, then,

the revolutionary fulfillment of law is contained within it. The task is thus to find ways to attach ourselves to law through belief in the founding dream rather than through the enjoyment of founding violence .

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Off TPA is top priority and will pass – PC is key Farm Futures 12-26-14 (“Tide Changing on TPP Negotiations,” http://farmfutures.com/blogs-tidechanging-tpp-negotiations-9315, CMR) the president’s recent call for passage of Trade Promotion Authority is positive for passage in 2015, and he expects Congress to take up a bill early next year. TPA gives the President the ability to take any finalized trade deal to TPA passage Dave Salmonsen, senior director of congressional relations at the American Farm Bureau Federation, said

Congress for just an up or down vote. Vetter said TPA is “critical to getting a trade deal across the finish line.” It allows negotiating partners to understand that whatever deal is agreed upon will be the one put into final

Leaders in the House and Senate have made strong commitments to advancing the legislation. She reported the administration is working very closely with both houses of Congress in a bipartisan fashion in hopes to move forward on TPA “ early next year .” Salmonsen added that technically TPA is a revenue bill, so will have to pass the House first. He expects the Senate could hold its own hearing prior action.

to the House advancing a bill though.

The plan destroys Obama’s agenda Romano,13 – attorney, founder of Massachusetts Marijuana Compliance ("Federal Legalization of Medical Marijuana is Not on the Horizon", www.massachusettsmarijuanacompliance.com/white-house-response-tofederal-legalization-of-medical-marijuana-petition/) Three petitions for the legalization or rescheduling of marijuana were responded to by the White House, and they put zero effort into drafting the response. It is clear that this administration is not going to spend an ounce of effort in dealing with the conflict between state and federal laws that exists over marijuana. Although many people would argue that there is so much else going on – marijuana policy should not be at the top of the list. But that does not mean it shouldn’t be on the list at all. The White House did nothing more than quote a Barbara Walters interview with the president in responding to these petitions. The president said, “we’re going to need to have is a conversation about how do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it’s legal.” That is code for we aren’t going to do anything. No mention of an executive task force or a date for this discussion that they need to have. Then in a totally irrelevant bit of pandering rhetoric he said, “[w]hen you’re talking about drug kingpins, folks involved with violence, people are who are peddling hard drugs to our kids in our neighborhoods that are devastated, there is no doubt that we need to go after those folks hard….” In a nation with an overburdened criminal justice system, common sense would dictate that removing the marijuana prosecutions would alleviate some of that pressure. But that ignores the money that goes in to keeping marijuana illegal and the political motivations of all the stakeholders, including major pharmaceutical. Further blog posts on this topic will be forthcoming. Unfortunately, the rescheduling of medical marijuana will take an act of Congress. This author’s opinion is that no member of Congress is willing to spend the political capital to begin the process. Law enforcement wants marijuana to remain illegal in all its forms so that they can continue to use marijuana as a basis to search and arrest people, and get them into the system. It is almost impossible to get elected if law enforcement opposes one’s campaign.

TPA key to sustained economic recovery Suominen 14 (Kati, adjunct fellow with the CSIS Europe Program, In 2010–2012, she was a resident fellow in the Economics Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, where she focused on U.S. and global economic, trade, and financial policy, “Out of the Way, Congress,” foreign policy, Jan 14, http://katisuominen.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/out-of-the-way-congress/)

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mega-regional free trade deals with Europe and 11 Asia-Pacific countries -- deals that could generate hundreds of billions in revenue and keep the U.S. economy inching along the path to recovery. But passage of the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill, which would allow the president to fast-track free trade deals, is bound to involve a bitter political fight as several Democrats and members of the Tea Party have already lined up in opposition to the law. On the left, TPA raises the usual concerns for labor and the environment, while on the far right it presents one more opportunity to jam up the president. Across the board, lawmakers have raised concerns about transparency. But without a trade promotion authority, which expired in 2007, the United States will be unable to finalize the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and TransPacific Partnership (TPP), neither of which can be fully negotiated without an authority in place . (Europeans and Asians have indicated Last week, U.S. lawmakers took a critical step toward inking

they are unwilling to negotiate the thorniest trade topics before they know TPA is in place requiring the U.S. Congress to vote up or down on future deals, rather than amending freshly negotiated texts.) So even if Congress is justifiably angry about the unprecedented level of secrecy surrounding recent trade talks, it needs to see the bigger picture:

TPA is critical for American economy,

entrepreneurship, and global leadership . Here are five major reasons why: Growth and jobs. The U.S. economy is recovering, yet headwinds lurk on the horizon -- from the Fed's unwinding to stagnating key export markets. Europe is battling low growth and high unemployment; Japan's Abenomics has yet to deliver promised growth gains, in part due to persistent protectionism that the TPP would undo; and China's economy is set to expand at its slowest pace in 15 years. While serious economic turmoil may have been averted, the trillion-dollar question remains: Where is global growth going to come from in the future? Trade is a key place to look: The TTIP is expected to generate an annual $130 billion in gains for the United States and $162 billion for Europe. The TPP, meanwhile, will boost U.S. annual gains by $77 billion and Japan's by $104 billion. As such, the TTIP will raise U.S. household incomes by $865 annually and create 750,000 new U.S. jobs, while the TPP would generate about $1,230 per household by 2025 -- a significant windfall without a dime of deficit spending, and a strong bonus on the $10,000 in average annual income gains American households have already scored due to post-war trade opening. And by locking in first-rate rules and open markets, the trade deals will give U.S. companies the confidence they need to dip into their $5 trillion in cash holdings -- enabling them buy American inputs and hire U.S. workers. Geocommercial edge. As gatekeepers of markets with two-

China, the world's largest a TPP skeptic, is seriously considering joining the deal, now seen by various domestic interests as a means to counteract the economic slowdown and drive much-needed reforms, especially of state-owned enterprises. Likewise, Brazil, the world's seventh largest economy, is being pushed by its business lobbies to consider the TTIP and TPP -- a 180 degree turn for a country that completely missed the global wave of trade integration. With Brazil opening, the long-awaited U.S.-led Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) idea could eventually become a reality. The bottom line for Congress: Once done, the U.S.-led deals will forever alter the strategic landscape of the global trading system, with even some cantankerous BRICs falling in line. America will have positioned itself to set the tone and tempo of global trade politics for decades to come. Digital economy gains. The old thirds of total global spending power, the TPP and TTIP will amount to giant magnetic docking stations for current outsiders, especially emerging and frontier markets. Most remarkably, trader and

U.S. trade agenda -- immortalized in such deals as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) -- prioritized corporate supply chains: It removed barriers to trade in parts, components, and final products; opened foreign markets for U.S. investors; and sped up customs procedures. These objectives still matter, but physical supply chains will be less critical as 3-D printing and nanotechnology expand. Manufacturers will increasingly be able to print parts and components right off the Web. Meanwhile, the arrival of the industrial Internet, e-commerce, e-invoicing, and online payments all mean that the global economy will increasingly run not on ships but on the cloud. Few nations are as well-placed to profit from this new order as the United States. Yet barriers are sprouting. Countries such as TPP member Vietnam are forcing U.S. companies to locate servers in their nations as a pre-condition for market access, while Europeans, incensed about the Snowden scandal, are bent on limiting the data that U.S. companies serving European customers can access and transfer back to America. Too many developing nations are now cracking down on Web users for political and protectionist reasons. Ensuring a fair and unfettered digital economy requires enlightened rules on cross-border e-commerce and data flows, intellectual property protections, dispute settlement mechanisms, and so on. The TPP and TTIP offer Washington an opportunity to establish such rules. But

small businesses -- the backbone of U.S. economy -- also stand to gain. Giant corporations like Apple and GE still dominate U.S. exports, but small businesses are on an export roll, riding the wave of past U.S. trade deals like NAFTA: Some 300,000 small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) collectively generate one third of U.S. exports. Study after study shows that these export-driven SMEs are the nation's fastest growing and most productive companies. They also happen to be among the most vocal of TPA proponents. Moreover, as eunless Congress passes TPA, there will be no new rules -- at least not ones that are Made in the USA. Boost for Main Street exporters. Big business may be spearheading the TPA lobby, but

commerce, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, and other DIY technologies expand, Americans of all walks of life can become one (wo)man-multinationals -- designers, assemblers, and sellers of goods and services exported

millions of new American jobs can be created and thousands of new businesses launched -- but only if smart trade rules are established that open markets and level playing fields globally. The mega-regionals are a perfect venue to start this process. Restore around the planet. This export opportunity will explode between now and 2025, as 5 billion new Internet users log-on across the developing world. In the process,

American leadership . The United States has for decades been the world's quarterback, brokering differences between nations and providing critical global public goods: a global reserve currency, deep financial markets, vigorous economic growth, and an open trade regime. Today, the devastating financial crisis, disappointing growth, and plain-dumb bickering over the budget risk making "American leadership" an oxymoron. For an administration that campaigned on renegotiating NAFTA and pausing the George W. Bush administration's vibrant trade agenda, the TPP and TTIP represent a stunning about-face -- and the best chance for America to regain its global leadership role . It's time lawmakers stop framing trade agreements as Trojan Horses that ship American jobs abroad, and start advocating for trade deals as instruments to secure an open

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and rules-based global trading system -- and to unshackle and empower U.S. companies, small businesses, and garage entrepreneurs to drive America's economic recovery.

Global war Royal 10 – Director of CTR Jedediah, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction – U.S. Department of Defense, “Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and the Problem of Economic Crises”, Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, Ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-215 economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict

Less intuitive is how periods of . Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defence behaviour of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several

rhythms in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crises could usher in a redistribution of relative power (see also Gilpin. 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalc ulation (Feaver, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompson's (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that

rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner. 1999). Separately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copeland's (1996, 2000)

future expectation of trade' is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behaviour of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations. However, if the expectations of future trade decline, particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crises could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states.4 Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write: The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favour. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflicts self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess, 2002. p. 89) Economic decline has also been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, & Weerapana, 2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government. “Diversionary theory" suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting governments have increased incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a 'rally around the flag' effect. Wang (1996), DeRouen (1995). and Blomberg, Hess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the U nited S tates, and thus weak theory of trade expectations suggests that '

are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlates economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels.5 This implied connection between integration, crises and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economicPresidential popularity,

security debate and deserves more attention.

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China DA The plan Drives a wedge between China and the United States. Godfrey 7/16 Will Godfrey (Editor-in-Chief @ Substance.com). “Will the US Start to Use Its Power Over World Drug Laws for Good?” Huffington Post, 16 July 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/substancecom/will-the-us-start-touse-_b_5588726.html //dtac – Note: Trace = “current chariman of the International Drug Policy Consortium, former deputy UK drug czar” and had “a spell at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna” Still, we shouldn't expect global prohibition just to vanish. A lot of powerful interests are examining the current momentum of the movement for change, Trace said, in order to identify "a stopping point -- the next equilibrium." Blocs of countries with growing diplomatic influence, he added, including China and Russia, "will not allow any liberalization of the drug treaties." In which case, national drug-law changes are more likely to be justified by flexible reinterpretations of the current international treaties -- based on those highly open-to-interpretation constitutional and public health-based opt-outs. Uruguay has taken this path, and other Latin American countries, already engaged in high-level drug policy debates based on their desire to reduce violence, are likely to follow.

US-Sino cooperation key to solve warming Adler 11-12-14 (Ben, “New U.S.-China climate deal is a game changer,” http://grist.org/climate-energy/newu-s-china-climate-deal-is-a-game-changer/, CMR) In what may prove to be a watershed moment in the fight against climate change, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced from Beijing on Wednesday that they are pursuing ambitious new greenhouse gas emission reductions. China and the U.S. are the world’s two largest emitters of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane, and their cooperation is absolutely essential to the success of any global effort to scale back emissions and avert catastrophic climate change. According to a statement from the White House press office, the U.S. will reduce emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, with “best efforts” to hit the higher end of that range. China will have its CO2 emissions peak around 2030, “make best efforts to peak early,” and increase the share of non-fossil fuels in its energy portfolio to “around” 20 percent by 2030. You might notice a lot of wiggle room in that language. There’s more. The White House release refers to these goals as statements of “intent.” They don’t promise or even “agree” to hit these targets, they merely “intend” to. That may sound a little weak, but it’s necessary. Remember, foreign treaties require approval from a two-thirds supermajority of the U.S. Senate before they can be ratified. There’s no way Senate Republicans would vote for an emission-reduction treaty. But by merely jointly announcing with China their intentions, the Obama administration avoids signing an actual treaty. So the Senate can’t formally stop this agreement. Both administrations have their work cut out for them. As The Washington Post observes, “to meet its target, the United States will need to double the pace of carbon pollution reduction from 1.2 percent per year on average from 2005 to 2020 to 2.3 to 2.8 percent per year between 2020 and 2025.” And for China: “It must add 800 to 1,000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero-emission generation capacity by 2030 — more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to the total electricity generation capacity in the United States.” At first glance, it may sound unfair that China does not have to start actually reducing its emissions yet while the U.S. has to reduce emissions even more steeply than it has already planned. That’s certainly what Republicans will say. They will be wrong. Thanks to our longstanding development and wealth, the U.S. has produced 29.3 percent of global cumulative carbon emissions, while China has been responsible for only 7.6 percent. What China is planning — starting on a path of renewable development, so that it can transition from fossil fuels as quickly as

the U.S. is sending a message to those countries, and to the pro-fossil fuel governments in Canada and Australia, that we are serious about putting climate at the center of our international relationships. The U.S. and China have also struck deals to reduce tariffs while Obama has been in Beijing. Other nations should take note that Obama is seeking climate possible without damaging economic growth — lays out a model for emerging economies such as India, Brazil, and Indonesia to follow. Likewise,

cooperation from our trading partners, and they should feel the pressure to step up. The U.S. pledged under the 2009 Copenhagen Accord to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. We’ve already achieved some reductions, and if the EPA’s proposed regulations to cut emissions from power plants go through, we would be just barely on track to meet those goals. Obama now wants to stretch those goals over the following five years, up to 2025. From a scientific standpoint, this might be getting the U.S. close to the trajectory of cuts needed by 2050 to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, the internationally agreed-upon goal. But what we have committed to previously is already under political attack. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has voted to repeal the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. The new Republican Senate will now do so as well. While that will be met with a presidential veto — if it even gets past a Democratic filibuster — it could set up a showdown, and government shutdown, if Republicans tie it to the budget. Congress is also likely to take other unhelpful actions like passing bills to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Speaking of Keystone, this deal is especially interesting in light of the White House recently declining to threaten a veto of Keystone approval if Congress passes it. Environmental leaders like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and the Natural Resources Defense Council immediately released statements lauding the announcement from Beijing. But 350.org Executive Director May Boeve tied the news back to Keystone in her statement, saying, “The real proof will be in the pudding. There’s no way approving the Keystone XL pipeline and additional fossil fuel development is compatible with this pathway.” Reaching the new emission-reduction targets is certainly technologically possible, and allowable under existing law — as long as Congress doesn’t figure out a way to stop to it. Emissions have already declined, we’ve got new rules on tailpipes, and with the proposed power plant rules, we are almost there already. “I think it’s achievable,” says Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “They might have to make some tweaks [to the power-plant targets], but I don’t see it as being a radical rewrite of the goal.” It will be necessary to finalize power-plant rules — the centerpiece of Obama’s Climate Action Plan — that are as strong, if not stronger, than what is already proposed. Other components of the plan, like possible rules to limit methane leakage from fracking, don’t have the potential to achieve such big reductions. Still, moving forward with them will also be necessary. But any tightening of EPA regulations or introduction of new ones would risk inciting even stronger political backlash or being overturned in court. Even Democrats in fossil fuel-producing red states ran away from the rules in this last election. (They still got clobbered.) Republicans are already mulling ways to impede the power-plant rules by defunding the regulatory process. The stronger the rules get, the more childish they’ll act. And they will have the same reaction to anything else Obama tries to do through executive action. The administration is being coy in its statements thus far. Secretary of State John Kerry wrote an op-ed about the announcement in Wednesday’s New York Times. All he says on the feasibility of the goal laid out is, “It is grounded in an extensive analysis of the potential to reduce emissions in all sectors of our economy.” The White House leaked information about this new agreement to a handful of select reporters at elite national publications. The reporters asked how the U.S. can hit the new targets given who’s in control of Congress, but seem not to have gotten much of an answer. Here’s the Post: “U.S. officials said they were confident the president possesses the authority to set the new climate targets without additional authorization from Congress. They acknowledged that the Republican takeover of the Senate makes it unlikely that lawmakers will pass laws furthering carbon reductions and that the GOP might attempt to roll back executive actions Obama already has taken to do so.” But just because they aren’t telling what it is yet doesn’t mean the White House doesn’t have a plan. The administration has apparently been

The U.S. and China are the world’s two biggest economies, and showing that they will play their part in reducing emissions is essential to working in secret on this deal with China for nine months, since Kerry first raised it during a visit to Beijing in February. This much we know:

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getting an international agreement at the next round of big climate negotiations in Paris in December 2015. Now the prospects are looking a lot better.

Extinction – outweighs every impact Avery 14 (John Scales, received a B.Sc. in theoretical physics from MIT and an M.Sc. from the University of Chicago, He later studied theoretical chemistry at the University of London, and was awarded a Ph.D. there in 1965, He is now Lektor Emeritus, Associate Professor, at the Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen, “Preventing A Human-Initiated Sixth Geological Extinction Event,” May 2, http://www.countercurrents.org/avery020514.htm) Geologists studying the strata of rocks have observed 5 major extinction events. These are moments in geological time when most of the organisms then living suddenly become extinct. The largest of these was the PermianTriassic extinction event, which occurred 252 million years ago. In this event, 96 percent of all marine species were wiped out, as well as 70 percent of all terrestrial vertebrates. In 2012, the World Bank issued a report

without quick action to curb CO2 emissions, global warming is likely to reach 4 degrees C during the 21st century. This is dangerously close to the temperature which initiated the Permian-Triassic extinction event: 6 degrees C above normal. Here is a link to the World Bank report: warning that

http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2012/11/18/Climate-change-report-warns-dramatically-warmer-world-this-century The Permian-Triasic thermal maximum seems to have been triggered by global warming and CO2 release from massive volcanic eruptions in a region of northern Russia known as the Siberian Traps. The amount of greenhouse gases produced by these eruptions is comparable to the amount emitted by human

once the temperature passed 6 degrees C above normal, a feedback loop was initiated in which methane hydrate crystals on the ocean floors melted, releasing methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The more methane released the more methane hydrate crystals were destabilized, raising the temperature still further, releasing more methane gas, and so on in a vicious circle. This feedback loop raised the global temperature to 15 degrees C above normal, causing the Permian-Triassic mass extinction . Here is a link to a short, important and activities today. Scientists believe that

clear video discussing the danger that a 6th mass extinction event could be caused by human activities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRGVTK-AAvw Other videos discussing this very grave danger can be found on the following links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVwmi7HCmSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjZaFjXfLec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_aMbM20mbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6pFDu7lLV4 No reputable doctor who diagnoses cancer would keep this knowledge from the patient. The reaction of the patient may be to reject the diagnosis and get another doctor,

the scientific community, when aware of a grave danger to our species and the biosphere, has a duty to bring this knowledge to the attention of as broad a public as possible, even at the risk of unpopularity. The size of the threatened catastrophe is so immense as to dwarf all other considerations . but no matter. It is very important that the threatened person should hear the diagnosis, because, with treatment, there is hope of a cure. Similarly,

All possible efforts must be made to avoid it. Consider what may be lost if a 6th mass extinction event occurs, caused by our own actions: It is possible that a few humans may survive in mountainous regions such as the

the family trees of virtually all of the people, animals will end in nothing. The great and complex edifice of human civilization is a treasure whose value is almost above expression; and this may be lost unless we give up many of our present enjoyments. Each living organism, each animal or plant, is product of three billion years of evolution, and a miracle of harmony and complexity; and most of these will perish if we persist in our folly and greed. Let us, for once, look beyond present pleasures, and acknowledge our duty to preserve a future world in which all forms of life can survive. Himalayas, but this will be a population of millions rather than billions. If an event comparable to the Permian-Triassic thermal maximum occurs, and plants alive today

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CP The United States Congress should discontinue expanding federal criminal law and direct the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal agencies to focus on the investigation and prosecution of espionage and terrorism. The United States Judiciary should deepen and expand exchanges with judiciaries around the world, emphasizing the importance of judicial independence. The United States Judiciary should enforce the principle of federalism enshrined in the United States v. Lopez decision, distinguishing the precedent in Gonzales v. Raich to its facts. The United States should not legalize marijuana.

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Treaty Regionalism coming now – best model, no big war – locally activates the aff warrants for cooperation solving the aff impact-list better Krishnan Srinivasan, "International Conflict and Cooperation in the 21st Century," THE ROUND TABLE v. 98 n. 400, 2--09, pp. 37-47. The new world order of the first half of the present century will be one of peaceful mutual accommodation between the big powers located in the East and West, North and South. The priority for these powers will be for economic progress and regional order , with defence expenditure being used to build technological capacity for deterrence against the other big powers and as an enabler for their self-appointed but globally recognized role as regional enforcers. In this neo-Hobbesian world system, the lesser states will come to their own bilateral arrangements with the local regional hegemon upon whom they will be dependent not only for their security but for economic, technical and trading facilitation. Some of these lesser entities will enjoy economic prosperity, depending on their ability to maintain internal cohesion, to turn globalization to their advantage, and to control the socio-economic consequences of climate change, but they will not be able to mount a challenge to the hierarchical nature of international society. They will have far greater recourse to the United Nations than the major powers, who will prefer to apply unilateral methods with the connivance and consent of their peers. The debate between Westphalian national sovereignty and the right to intervene to breach the sovereignty of other states on the grounds of preventing threats to international peace and security will not be resolved. Political and economic inequality between nations will be drawn in ever sharper focus. Regional institutions will be dominated by the local big power. Reform of the United Nations will be incomplete and unappealing to the vast majority of member states. The world’s hegemonic powers will lose faith in the Security Council as an effective mechanism to deliberate issues of peace and security. World bodies will be used for discussion of global issues such as the environment and climate change, pandemic disease, energy and food supplies, and development, but resulting action will primarily devolve on the big powers in the affected regions . This will particularly be the case in the realm of peace and security in which only the regional hegemon will have the means, the will and the obligation, for the sake of its own status and security, to ensure resolution or retribution as each case may demand. Even in a globalized world, regional and local action will be the prime necessity and such action will be left to the power best equipped to understand the particular circumstances, select the appropriate remedy and execute the action required to administer it. Conflict will be contained and localized . There will be no menace of war on a world-wide scale and little fear of international terrorism. Private-enterprise terrorist actions will continue to manifest political, social and economic frustrations, but they will be parochial, ineffective and not statesponsored. There will be far less invocation of human rights in international politics, since these will be identified with a western agenda and western civilization: there will be an equal recognition of community rights and societal values associated with Eastern and other traditions. Chinese artists, Indian entrepreneurs, Russian actors, Iranian chefs, South African song-writers and Brazilian designers will be household names; models on the fashion cat-walk and sporting teams from all major countries will be distinctly multi-racial, reflecting the immigration to, but also the purchasing power of, the new major powers. National populations will show evidence of mixed race more than ever before in history. Climate change will be an acknowledged

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global challenge and all countries, led by the regional hegemons , will undertake binding restraints on carbon emissions. The world will become acutely conscious of the essentiality of access to fresh water. The pace of technological innovation will accelerate at dizzying speed, further accentuating inequalities. There will be very rapid steps taken to develop alternative sources of energy in the face of dwindling and costly oil supplies. Western industrialized nations, to remain competitive, will vacate vast areas of traditional manufacturing in favour of new technologies and green engineering. The world will be a safer and stable place until one of the hegemons eventually develops an obvious ascendancy first regionally, then continentally and finally globally over all the others.

The Multilateral order emboldens rogue states and causes extinction. Therese Depeche, author and senior French government official, “Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century, CATO, 2012. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2012/RAND_MG1103.pdf In sharp contrast with the 20th century, the 21st century started as the age of small powers. This is partly because the post–Cold War world encompasses approximately 184 states—a record—and partly because some small states appear to be dangerously empowered : North Korea, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Syria fell or still fall into this category. This does not mean that the century will end with the same denomination, since great powers may make a comeback after an interlude. But it is striking to witness the time, energy, and effort devoted in the 1990s to the Balkans or today to nations like Iran, Syria, and North Korea. It is also astonishing to consider the challenges those nations can inflict on regional and international security with their ballistic missile WMD programs—as well as, increasingly and more discreetly, with their cyber capabilities.2 Equally, the attention given in the media to any statement issued in Tehran or in Pyongyang looks disproportionate. Obviously, small states can achieve a high level of international involvement and a high potential for global disturbance . Their smallness is somehow compensated for with international linkages, illicit trafficking, clandestine nuclear programs, and repeated challenges to the current world order . Even leaving aside the tricky problems posed by nonstate actors,3 which have demonstrated since September 2001 their ability to pose more than minor tactical threats to big powers (this would become far clearer in a case of nuclear terrorism), analysts acknowledge that the extraordinary situation originated in what is now called asymmetric strategies from small states. The leverage provided to states—otherwise unremarkable for their achievements—by their acquisition of antiaccess technologies and WMD programs is already a major regional problem in the Middle East and in East Asia, where neighbors anticipate the advent of new nuclear powers. Such acquisition could also complicate Western power projection whenever needed . And finally, the fear of clandestine programs in additional nations may trigger an unwelcome chain reaction . The two regions mentioned above are not easy to manage under current circumstances and risk becoming completely unmanageable with multiple nuclear centers.

Effective diplomacy and legitimacy are PARALLEL – failure of U.S.-led order preserves the trend toward regionalism – aff can’t reverse this, America just gets soft-balanced within a hollow global framework Michael J. Mazarr, Professor, National Security Strategy, U.S. National War College, "The Risks of Ignoring Strategic Insolvency," WASHINGTON QUARTERLY v. 35 n. 4, Fall 2012, p. 14-15.

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Diplomacy increasingly fails . A parallel risk has to do with the ebbing force of U.S. diplomacy and influence. International power is grounded in legitimacy , and in many ways it is precisely the legitimacy of the leading power’s global posture that is under assault as its posture comes into question. Historically, rising challengers gradually stop respecting the hegemon’s right to lead, and they begin to make choices on behalf of the international community , in part due to strategies consciously designed to frustrate the leading power’s designs . Germany, under Bismarck and after, is one example: It aspired to unification and to its ‘‘rightful place’’ as a leading European power as its power and influence accumulated, its willingness to accept the inherent legitimacy of the existing order as defined by other states, and the validity and force of their security paradigms, declined proportionately. At nearly all points in this trajectory, German leaders did not seek to depose the international system, but to crowd into its leadership ranks, to mute the voices of others relative to its own influence, and to modify rather than abolish rules.¶ We begin to see this pattern today with regard to many emerging powers, but especially of course, China ’s posture toward the United States.31 As was predicted and expected in the post-Cold War context of growing regional power centers, the legitimacy of a system dominated by the United States is coming under increasing challenge. More states (and, increasingly, non-state actors) want to share in setting rules and norms and dictating outcomes.¶ The obvious and inevitable result has been to reduce the effectiveness of U.S. diplomacy. While measuring the relative success of a major power’s diplomacy over time is a chancy business (and while Washington continues to have success on many fronts), the current trajectory is producing a global system much less subject to the power of U.S. diplomacy and other forms of influence. Harvard’s Stephen Walt catalogues the enormous strengths of the U.S. position during and after the Cold War, and compares that to recent evidence of the emerging limits of U.S. power. Such evidence includes Turkey’s unwillingness to support U.S. deployments in Iraq, the failure to impose U.S. will or order in Iraq or Afghanistan, failures of nonproliferation in North Korea and Iran, the Arab Spring’s challenges to long-standing U.S. client rulers, and more.32 As emerging powers become more focused on their own interests and goals, their domestic dynamics will become ever more self-directed and less subject to manipulation from Washington, a trend evident in a number of major recent elections.¶ Washington will still enjoy substantial influence, and many states will welcome (openly or grudgingly) a U.S. leadership role. But without revising the U.S. posture, the gap between U.S. ambitions and capabilities will only grow. Continually trying to do too much will create more risk of demands unmet, requests unfulfilled, and a growing sense of the absurdity of the U.S. posture . Such a course risks crisis and conflict . Similarly, doubt in the threats and promises underpinning an unviable U.S. security posture risks conflict: U.S. officials will press into situations assuming that their diplomacy will be capable of achieving certain outcomes and will make demands and lay out ultimatums on that basis only to find that their influence cannot achieve the desired goals, and they must escalate to harsher measures. The alternative is to shift to a lesser role with more limited ambitions and more sustainable legitimacy.

Do not grant them a risk of solvency – causal effects of norms are impossible to determine Daniel Abebe, "The Global Determinants of U.S. Foreign Affairs Law," 49 Stanford Journal of International Law 1 (2013). http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1890&context=journal_articles

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Similarly, shared norms are difficult to define and instrumentalize to show a causal effect in constraining state behavior. Of course, it is true that shared norms¶ change over time and that such norms shape the background in which individuals and states act. 1 For example, the emergence of international human rights¶ norms,' the rise of international organizations and courts,'39 and the prominence of¶ democratic governance 40 are surely reflective of both shared norms among states¶ and the interests of the states capable of effecting the change. But it is difficult to predict the content of newly shared norms, the likelihood of their emergence, and their causal effect on state behavior. The United States and the EU have used these¶ norms, courts, and organizations as tools to pursue their interests, but it is unclear if the norms are antecedent to or epiphenomenal of great power interests. These problems make shared norms difficult to evaluate and even less helpful as a metric ¶ to measure the level of ECs on great powers.

International law does not respond to rising pluralism – no shared interest or enforcement, misuse of consent Acharya 13 – Associate Professor of Law, Gonzaga University School of Law (Upendra D., May, “GLOBALIZATION, DEREGULATION, POWER, AND AGENCY: GLOBALIZATION AND HEGEMONY SHIFT: ARE STATES MERELY AGENTS OF CORPORATE CAPITALISM?” 36 B.C. Int'l & Comp. L. Rev. 937, Lexis) I. PROCESS OF HEGEMONY: INTERNATIONAL LAW, POWER, AND DETERRITORIALIZATION ¶ ¶ Discussions of hegemonic international law posit that international law is relatively weak , that it is nothing more than epiphenomenal, [*940] merely a production of normative standards that mirror the interests of powerful states. n14 The hegemonic international law theory also posits that hegemons (powerful nations among the many sovereign states) define the course of states' behavior by creating and influencing international law to give effect to the hegemons' interests and condone actions that support those interests. n15 This Part critically observes hegemons' techniques and methods of consolidating power, n16 leading to the next Part's discussion addressing an emerging corporate-centric hegemonic international law, a new form of international law contrasted to Vagts's state-centric hegemonic international law. n17¶ ¶ Because international law is based on the mutual consent of sovereign states, each participating state must have common values and interests for international law to be effective. n18 Political, cultural, religious, [*941] and economic traditions were naturally varied among states before the implementation of international law. n19 Because of this variation, the powerful Western states superimposed self-styled Western values such as democracy, a definitive structure of rule of law, industrial development, perception of peace, and eventually capitalism on less-influential or less-powerful states. n20 Western hegemons present these values as though they are prerequisites for stability. n21 In reality, however, formal consent to these values allows (in the creation of international law) the hegemon to disrupt existing value structures--an inherently destabilizing action --and take advantage of the less-powerful states' resources. n22 This process of obtaining consent is so sophisticated that it frequently requires engaging lawyers and legal scholars to guide less-powerful states. n23 These scholars typically represent Western education and ideologies within the scope of the broader interests of hegemons, imposing Western legal traditions on non-Western states. n24¶ ¶ Despite maintaining consent to superimposed Western norms, international law lacks a formal enforcement and compliance authority. n25 Nevertheless, fragmented informal or non-legal authority has been institutionalized through means controlled by hegemons that can make others comply with the norms. n26 In this scattered and pseudo-legal compliance mechanism , hegemons may comply with international law when faced with

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worldwide pressure and opposition from competing [*942] hegemons. n27 For non-hegemons, a hint of pressure, economic or otherwise, is sometimes sufficient to force compliance with the regime. n28¶ ¶ According to Antonio Gramsci:¶ ¶ [H]egemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed--in other words, that the leading group [hegemons] should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But . . . such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential . . . [they] must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity. n29 ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ B.S. Chimni also noted the current influence of what he terms the "transnational capitalist class," that produces a culture in which "the third world counterparts essentially act as 'transmission belts and filtering devices for the imposition of the transnational agenda.'" n30¶ ¶ [*943] International law, in its creation and application, has been a victim of the hegemonic power consolidation process. n31 Rather than recognizing and respecting the common goals and values of a pluralistic world , international law deems hegemons' values those of "true" civilization, held in esteem and aspired to by all others at the expense of unique and insightful non-Western thought. n32 Now in the era of globalization, evolving hegemonic international law theory warrants questioning whether states are really the hegemons in today's world. In order to address this question, it is important to analyze the processes of hegemony in the development of international law and to identify when the course of the hegemonic process departed from state-centric to corporate-centric hegemony.

U.S. defaults to smooth transition – won’t fight to maintain hegemony during decline. Charles A. Kupchan Fall 1999 World Policy Journal "Life after pax Americana" The bad news is that the global stability that unipolarity has engendered will be jeopardized as power becomes more equally distributed in the international system. The good news is that this structural change will occur through different mechanisms than in the past, and therefore may be easier to manage peacefully. The rising challenger is Europe, not a unitary state with hegemonic ambitions. Europe's aspirations will be moderated by the self-checking mechanisms inherent in the EU and by cultural and linguistic barriers to centralization. In addition, the United Statesis likely to react to a more independent Europe by stepping back and making room for an EU that appears ready to be more self-reliant and more muscular. Unlike reigning hegemons in the past, the United States will not fight to the finish to maintain its primacy and prevent its eclipse by a rising challenger. On the contrary, the United States will cede leadership willingly as its economy slows and it grows weary of being the security guarantor of last resort. The prospect is thus not one of clashing titans, but of no titans at all. Regions long accustomed to relying on American resources and leadership to preserve the peace may well be left to fend for themselves. These are the main reasons that the challenge for American grand strategy as the next century opens will be to wean Europe and East Asia of their dependence on the United States and put in place arrangements that will prevent the return of competitive balancing and regional rivalries in the wake of an American retrenchment.

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Rico Regulation Their ev is shit - no ev that says prosecution solves for terrorism Also - lone wolf not solved by state enforcement, only offers post-hoc remedies, no sollution. Lone wolves can't get the tech and have no expertise. Noah ‘9 /Timothy, senior writer at Slate, “The Burden-of-Success Theory,” Slate.com, 2-28 http://www.slate.com/id/2211997/?from=rss

In fact, the likelihood of nuclear terrorism isn't that great. Mueller points out that Russian "suitcase bombs," which figure prominently in discussions about "loose nukes," were all built before 1991 and ceased being operable after three years. Enriched uranium is extremely difficult to acquire; over the past decade, Mueller argues, there were only 10 known thefts. The material stolen weighed a combined 16 pounds, which was nowhere near the amount needed to build a bomb. Once the uranium is acquired, building the weapon is simple in theory (anti-nuclear activist Howard Morland published a famous 1979 article about this in the Progressive ) but quite difficult in practice, which is why entire countries have had to work decades to acquire the bomb, only sometimes meeting with success. (Plutonium, another fissile material, is sufficiently dangerous and difficult to transport that nonproliferation experts seldom discuss it.) Gathering material for a biological weapon may be somewhat easier, but actually fashioning that weapon would be harder, as witnessed by the fact that such weapons have scarcely ever been deployed, even by nations. On the rare occasions when they have been,they'vefailed to live up to their billing as weapons of mass destruction. "Perhaps the greatest disincentive to using biological weapons," John Parachini of the RAND Corporation testified before Congress in 2001, "is that terrorists can inflict (and have inflicted) many more fatalities and casualties with conventional explosives than with unconventional weapons." The same argument applies to chemical weapons. In theory, journalist Gregg Easterbrook has noted (citing a congressional report), under perfect conditions,one ton of sarin could kill up to 8,000 people. But it's "reasonably unlikely" that a terrorist group could acquire that much sarin, and perfect conditions mean no wind and no sun. Even light winds would reduce casualties to 800. You'd be better off detonating a conventional bomb in a city square.

Judicial Independence Aff isn't key to JI - no ev they make a lasting shift in precedent. No internal link – democratic rollback will not result from the loss of judicial independence alone – this claim is empirically denied John Shattuck, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and J. Brian Atwood, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, March/April 1998 Foreign Affairs

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Equally fallacious is the claim that democracy develops from some preconceived formula, with one ingredient preceding another. Zakaria's view that the development of constitutional liberalism must come before electoral democracy simply ignores the facts. There are many countries in which representative government predated the protection of civil and political liberties. South Korea and Taiwan are recent examples. The related argument that economic development must precede democracy ignores the fact that many countries, from Costa Rica and Poland to the Philippines and Botswana, have found that the road to democracy also leads to economic prosperity. The successful democratic transitions in African nations such as Benin, Mali, South Africa, and Namibia further demonstrate that neither a tradition of equal opportunity nor widely distributed wealth must come before political freedom. In short, political liberalization, economic development, and the protection of human rights are all tied together. For this reason, U.S. policy addresses them simultaneously, not in sequence. Finally, Zakaria and others have contended that without constitutional liberalism, electoral democracy invariably leads to ethnic strife. This argument is belied by the effects of electoral pluralism in providing a safety valve for ethnic differences in many central and east European states and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. By the same token, some degree of pluralism and more moderate leadership have resulted from the series of elections in Bosnia over the last two years. In fact, in January 1998, Milorad Dodik, an avowed moderate with Western sympathies, was elected prime minister of the Bosnian Serb Republic. Elections have also allowed Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsi,c to stake out more moderate positions, breaking with the Pale leadership. Opposition parties have won as much as 30 percent of the vote in municipal elections, a sign that the extreme hard-line nationalists loyal to wartime Serb leader Radovan Karadzic are losing ground.

Its anti-thetical to democracy. Re 99 (Edward, Chief Judge Emeritus of the United States Court of International Trade and Distinguished Professor of Law, St. John's University School of Law, Summer, 14 St. John's J.L. Comm. 79, lexis) Judicial independence was meticulously established by the framers of the Constitution and jealously guarded by all concerned with the administration of justice. 2 Past mechanisms designed to protect that independence, however, may have created the appearance of an insulated, privileged branch of government. Quite apart from legal considerations, the presence of such a class of persons, however small or exceptional, is an anachronism in a modern democracy. Comparatively recent congressional efforts to provide accountability for Federal judges, without infringing on the bounds of necessary judicial independence, culminated in the enactment of the Judicial Councils Reform and Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980. 3

Democracies are not more prone to peaceful cooperation – statistical manipulation Rosato 11 PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago The Handbook on the Political Economy of War By Christopher J. Coyne, Rachel L. Mathers The claim that democracies rarely if ever go to war with one another is either incorrect or unsurprising. A careful review of the evidence suggests that contrary to the assertions of democratic peace proponents, there have been a handful of wars between democracies and these can only be excluded by imposing a highly restrictive definition of democracy . This would not pose a problem were it not for the fact that by raising the requirements for a state to be judged democratic, the theory's defenders reduce the number of democracies in the analysis to such an extent that the finding of no war between them is wholly to be expected.

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Federalism US legal modeling fails- can’t shape norms Law and Versteeg ’12 [David S. Law, Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis. B.A., M.A., Ph.D., Stanford University; J.D., Harvard Law School; B.C.L. in European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford, Mila Versteeg, Associate Professor, University of Virginia School of Law. B.A., LL.M., Tilburg University; LL.M., Harvard Law School; D.Phil., University of Oxford, “The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution,” New York University Law Review, Vol. 87, No. 3, pp. 762-858, June 2012, online] The appeal of American constitutionalism as a model for other countries appears to be waning in more ways than one. Scholarly¶ attention has thus far focused on global judicial practice: There is a¶ growing sense, backed by more than purely anecdotal observation,¶ that foreign courts cite the constitutional jurisprudence of the U.S.¶ Supreme Court less frequently than before.247 But the behavior of¶ those who draft and revise actual constitutions exhibits a similar pattern.¶ Our empirical analysis shows that the content of the U.S.¶ Constitution is becoming increasingly atypical by global standards.¶ Over the last three decades, other countries have become less likely to¶ model the rights-related provisions of their own constitutions upon¶ those found in the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, global adoption of key structural features of the Constitution, such as federalism, presidentialism, and a decentralized model of judicial review, is at best¶ stable and at worst declining. In sum, rather than leading the way for¶ global constitutionalism, the U.S. Constitution appears instead to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere. The¶ idea of adopting a constitution may still trace its inspiration to the¶ United States, but the manner in which constitutions are written¶ increasingly does not.¶ If the U.S. Constitution is indeed losing popularity as a model for¶ other countries, what—or who—is to blame? At this point, one can¶ only speculate as to the actual causes of this decline, but five possible hypotheses suggest themselves: (1) the advent of a superior or more¶ attractive competitor; (2) a general decline in American hegemony;¶ (3) judicial parochialism; (4) constitutional obsolescence; and (5) a creed of American exceptionalism.¶ With respect to the first hypothesis, there is little indication that¶ the U.S. Constitution has been displaced by any specific competitor.¶ Instead, the notion that a particular constitution can serve as a dominant¶ model for other countries may itself be obsolete. There is an¶ increasingly clear and broad consensus on the types of rights that a¶ constitution should include, to the point that one can articulate the¶ content of a generic bill of rights with considerable precision.248 Yet it is difficult to pinpoint a specific constitution—or regional or international¶ human rights instrument—that is clearly the driving force¶ behind this emerging paradigm. We find only limited evidence that global constitutionalism is following the lead of either newer national¶ constitutions that are often cited as influential, such as those of¶ Canada and South Africa, or leading international and regional¶ human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of¶ Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.¶ Although Canada in particular does appear to exercise a quantifiable¶ degree of constitutional influence or leadership, that influence is not¶ uniform and global, but more likely reflects the emergence and evolution¶ of a shared practice of constitutionalism among common law¶ countries.249 Our findings suggest, instead, that the development of¶ global constitutionalism is a polycentric and multipolar process that is¶ not dominated by any particular country.250 The result might be likened¶ to a global language of constitutional rights, but one that has¶ been collectively forged rather than modeled upon a specific¶ constitution.¶ Another possibility is that America’s capacity for constitutional¶ leadership is at least partly a function of American “soft power” more¶ generally.251 It is reasonable to suspect that the overall influence and appeal of the United States and its institutions have a

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powerful spillover¶ effect into the constitutional arena. The popularity of American¶ culture, the prestige of American universities, and the efficacy of¶ American diplomacy can all be expected to affect the appeal of¶ American constitutionalism, and vice versa. All are elements of an¶ overall American brand, and the strength of that brand helps to determine¶ the strength of each of its elements. Thus, any erosion of the¶ American brand may also diminish the appeal of the Constitution for¶ reasons that have little or nothing to do with the Constitution itself.¶ Likewise, a decline in American constitutional influence of the type¶ documented in this Article is potentially indicative of a broader decline in American soft power.¶ There are also factors specific to American constitutionalism that¶ may be reducing its appeal to foreign audiences. Critics suggest that¶ the Supreme Court has undermined the global appeal of its own jurisprudence¶ by failing to acknowledge the relevant intellectual contributions of foreign courts on questions of common concern252 and by¶ pursuing interpretive approaches that lack acceptance elsewhere.253¶ On this view, the Court may bear some responsibility for the declining¶ influence of not only its own jurisprudence, but also the actual U.S.¶ Constitution: One might argue that the Court’s approach to constitutional¶ issues has undermined the appeal of American constitutionalism¶ more generally, to the point that other countries have become¶ unwilling to look either to American constitutional jurisprudence or¶ to the U.S. Constitution itself for inspiration.254¶ It is equally plausible, however, that responsibility for the¶ declining appeal of American constitutionalism lies with the idiosyncrasies¶ of the Constitution itself rather than the proclivities of the¶ Supreme Court. As the oldest formal constitution still in force and one of the most rarely amended constitutions in the world,255 the U.S.¶ Constitution contains relatively few of the rights that have become¶ popular in recent decades.256 At the same time, some of the provisions¶ that it does contain may appear increasingly problematic, unnecessary,¶ or even undesirable with the benefit of two hundred years of¶ hindsight.257 It should therefore come as little surprise if the U.S.¶ Constitution strikes those in other countries—or, indeed, members of¶ the U.S. Supreme Court258—as out of date and out of line with global¶ practice.259 Moreover, even if the Court were committed to interpreting¶ the Constitution in tune with global approaches, it would still¶ lack the power to update the actual text of the document. Indeed,¶ efforts by the Court to update the Constitution via interpretation may¶ actually reduce the likelihood of formal amendment by rendering such¶ amendment unnecessary as a practical matter.260 As a result, there is¶ only so much that the U.S. Supreme Court can do to make the U.S.¶ Constitution an attractive formal template for other countries. The¶ obsolescence of the Constitution, in turn, may undermine the appeal¶ of American constitutional jurisprudence. Foreign courts have little¶ reason to follow the Supreme Court’s lead on constitutional issues if¶ the Supreme Court is saddled with the interpretation of an unusual¶ and obsolete constitution.261 No amount of ingenuity or solicitude for¶ foreign law on the part of the Court can entirely divert attention from¶ the fact that the Constitution itself is an increasingly atypical¶ document. One way to put a more positive spin on the U.S. Constitution’s¶ status as a global outlier is to emphasize its role in articulating and¶ defining what is unique about American national identity. Many¶ scholars have opined that formal constitutions serve an expressive¶ function as statements of national identity.262 This view finds little¶ support in our own empirical findings, which suggest instead that constitutions¶ tend to contain relatively standardized packages of rights.263¶ Nevertheless, to the extent that constitutions do serve such a function,¶ the distinctiveness of the U.S. Constitution may reflect the uniqueness¶ of America’s national identity. In this vein, various scholars have¶ argued that the U.S. Constitution lies at the very heart of an¶ “American creed of exceptionalism,” which combines a belief that the¶ United States occupies a unique position in the world with a commitment¶ to the qualities that set the United States apart from other countries.¶ 264 From this perspective, the Supreme Court’s reluctance to¶ make use of foreign and international law in constitutional cases¶ amounts not to parochialism, but rather to respect for the exceptional¶ character of the nation and its constitution.265¶ Unfortunately, it is clear that the reasons for the declining influence¶ of American constitutionalism cannot be reduced to anything as¶ simple or attractive as a longstanding American creed of exceptionalism.¶ Historically, American exceptionalism has not prevented other¶ countries from following the example set by American

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constitutionalism.¶ The global turn away from the American model is a relatively recent development that postdates the Cold War. If the U.S.¶ Constitution does in fact capture something profoundly unique about¶ the United States, it has surely been doing so for longer than the last¶ thirty years.¶ A complete explanation of the declining influence of American¶ constitutionalism in other countries must instead be sought in more¶ recent history, such as the wave of constitution making that followed¶ the end of the Cold War.266 During this period, America’s newfound¶ position as lone superpower might have been expected to create¶ opportunities for the spread of American constitutionalism. But this¶ did not come to pass.¶ Once global constitutionalism is understood as the product of a¶ polycentric evolutionary process, it is not difficult to see why the U.S.¶ Constitution is playing an increasingly peripheral role in that process. ¶ No evolutionary process favors a species that is frozen in time. At¶ least some of the responsibility for the declining global appeal of¶ American constitutionalism lies not with the Supreme Court, or with a¶ broader penchant for exceptionalism, but rather with the static character¶ of the Constitution itself. If the United States were to revise the¶ Bill of Rights today—with the benefit of over two centuries of experience,¶ and in a manner that addresses contemporary challenges while¶ remaining faithful to the nation’s best traditions—there is no guarantee¶ that other countries would follow its lead. But the world would¶ surely pay close attention.

EU model and training solve Iraqi institution-building EUJUST 10 - designed to address critical needs of the Iraqi criminal justice system by providing training and professional development opportunities to senior Iraqi judiciary, police and penitentiary officials (EU Justice, “Subject: EUJUST LEX – Iraq, more than 3.400 officials trained,” The E uropean U nion’s rule of law mission for Iraq, EUJUST LEX‐Iraq is ¶ mandated to provide support and training for officials for high and mid level ¶ officials in the senior management and criminal investigation. The support ¶ and training aim at improving the Iraqi criminal justice system, as well as the ¶ co‐ordination and collaboration between its different components: police, ¶ judiciary and penitentiary. ¶ ¶ The Mission has built up an impressive record since its launch in 2005. To ¶ date, July 2010, more than 3,400 Iraqi judges, investigating magistrates, ¶ senior police and penitentiary officers in mid‐ and senior management ¶ positions have participated in over 140 integrated and specialist courses and ¶ practical work experience secondments. ¶ ¶ Until recently most of its training activities were held in Europe and has been ¶ carried out on the basis of curricula developed to meet the specific needs of ¶ the ICJS, while maintaining a focus on human rights. In addition, since the ¶ summer of 2009, the Mission has organized twenty trainings and provided ¶ support to rule of law activities throughout Iraq. These in‐country activities ¶ are supposed to be continued and expanded. ¶ d and mentored: ¶ ¶ More specifically, the Mission has trained, advise¶ ¶ imately 4 % of senior Iraqi police officers)¶ 805 judges (or over 60% of the Iraqi judiciary) ¶ 1702 senior police officers (approx ¶ 03 prison officers (nearly 80% of the Iraqi Correctional Service senior ¶ taff). ¶ 9¶ s¶ ¶ 122he proposed activities for the mission over the next 2 years will increase its ¶ presence and visibility in Iraq, as well as more specialized and alumni follow ¶ up training in country, building upon the success of recent pilot activities. In ¶ the near future, EU JUST LEX‐ Iraq will expand the number of Mission staff ¶ permanently stationed in the region in order to facilitate and improve the ¶ coordination of Mission’s activities . This includes establishing a new office in ¶ Erbil, Kurdistan Region, strengthening the Baghdad Office and setting up an ¶ extension of the Baghdad Office in Basra, Southern Iraq. Currently, EUJUST ¶ LEX‐Iraq has a Coordination Office in Brussels, Belgium.

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No Iraq impact Maloney 7 –Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Suzanne 2007. “Why the Iraq War Won’t Engulf the Mideast”. http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2007/0628iraq_maloney.aspx Long before the Bush administration began selling "the surge" in Iraq as a way to avert a general war in the Middle East, observers both inside and outside the government were growing concerned about the potential for armed conflict among the regional powers. Underlying this anxiety was a scenario in which Iraq's sectarian and ethnic violence spills over into neighboring countries, producing conflicts between the major Arab states and Iran as well as Turkey and the Kurdistan Regional Government. These wars then destabilize the entire region well beyond the current conflict zone, involving heavyweights like Egypt. This is scary stuff indeed, but with the exception of the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds, the scenario is far from an accurate reflection of the way Middle Eastern leaders view the situation in Iraq and calculate their interests there. It is abundantly clear that major outside powers like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey are heavily involved in Iraq. These countries have so much at stake in the future of Iraq that it is natural they would seek to influence political developments in the country. Yet, the Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians, Syrians, and others are very unlikely to go to war either to protect their own sect or ethnic group or to prevent one country from gaining the upper hand in Iraq. The reasons are fairly straightforward. First, Middle Eastern leaders, like politicians everywhere, are primarily interested in one thing: self-preservation. Committing forces to Iraq is an inherently risky proposition, which, if the conflict went badly, could threaten domestic

political stability. Moreover, most Arab armies are geared toward regime protection rather than projecting power and thus have little capability for sending troops to Iraq. Second, there is cause for concern about the so-called blowback scenario in which jihadis returning from Iraq destabilize their home countries, plunging the region into conflict. Middle Eastern leaders are preparing for this possibility. Unlike in the

1990s, when Arab fighters in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union returned to Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and became a source of instability, Arab security services are being vigilant about who is coming in and going from their countries. In the last month, the Saudi government has arrested approximately 200 people suspected of ties with militants. Riyadh is also building a 700 kilometer wall along part of its frontier with Iraq in order to keep militants out of the kingdom. Finally, there is no precedent for Arab leaders to commit forces to conflicts in which they are not directly involved. The Iraqis and the Saudis did send small contingents to fight the Israelis in 1948 and 1967, but they were either ineffective or never made it. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arab countries other than Syria, which had a compelling interest in establishing its hegemony over Lebanon, never committed forces either to protect the Lebanese from the Israelis or from other Lebanese. The civil war in Lebanon was regarded as someone else's fight. Indeed, this is the way many leaders view the current situation in Iraq. To Cairo, Amman and Riyadh, the situation in Iraq is worrisome, but in the end it is an Iraqi and American fight. As far as Iranian mullahs are concerned, they have long preferred to press their interests through proxies as opposed to direct engagement. At a time when Tehran has access and influence over powerful Shiite militias, a massive cross-border incursion is both unlikely and unnecessary. So Iraqis will remain locked in a sectarian and ethnic struggle that outside powers may abet, but will remain within the borders of Iraq. The Middle East is a region both prone and accustomed to civil wars. But given its experience with ambiguous conflicts, the region has also developed an intuitive ability to contain its civil strife and prevent local conflicts from enveloping the entire Middle East. Iraq's civil war is the latest tragedy of this hapless region,

but still a tragedy whose consequences are likely to be less severe than both supporters and opponents of Bush's war profess.

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2nc Cyberattacks nearly impossible – empirics and defenses solve

Rid 12 (Thomas Rid, reader in war studies at King's College London, is author of "Cyber War Will Not Take Place" and co-author of "Cyber-Weapons.", March/April 2012, “Think Again: Cyberwar”, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/cyberwar?page=full) "Cyberwar Is Already Upon Us." No way. "Cyberwar

is coming!" John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt predicted in a celebrated Rand paper back in 1993.

Since then, it seems to have arrived -- at least by the account of the U.S. military establishment, which is busy competing over who should get what share of the fight. Cyberspace is "a domain in which the Air Force flies and fights," Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne claimed in 2006. By 2012, William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary at the time, was writing that cyberwar

is "just as critical to military operations as land, sea, air, and space." In January, the Defense Department vowed to equip the U.S. armed forces for "conducting a combined arms campaign across all domains -- land, air, maritime, space, and cyberspace." Meanwhile, growing piles of books and articles explore the threats of cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, and how to survive them. Time

for a reality check: Cyberwar is still more hype than hazard. Consider the definition of an act of war: It has

to be potentially violent, it has to be purposeful, and it has to be political. The cyberattacks we've seen so far, from Estonia to the Stuxnet virus, simply don't meet these criteria. Take the dubious story of a Soviet pipeline explosion back in 1982, much cited by cyberwar's true believers as the most destructive cyberattack ever. The account goes like this: In June 1982, a Siberian pipeline that the CIA had virtually booby-trapped with a socalled "logic bomb" exploded in a monumental fireball that could be seen from space. The U.S. Air Force estimated the explosion at 3 kilotons, equivalent to a small nuclear device. Targeting a Soviet pipeline linking gas fields in Siberia to European markets, the operation sabotaged the pipeline's control systems with software from a Canadian firm that the CIA had doctored with malicious code. No

one died, according to Thomas Reed, a U.S. National Security Council aide at the time who only harm came to the Soviet economy. But did it really happen? After Reed's account came out, Vasily Pchelintsev, a former KGB head of the Tyumen region, where the alleged explosion supposedly took place, denied the story. There are also no media reports from 1982 that confirm such an explosion, though accidents and pipeline explosions in the Soviet Union were regularly reported in the early 1980s. revealed the incident in his 2004 book, At the Abyss; the

Something likely did happen, but Reed's

book is the only public mention of the incident and his account relied on a single document .

Even after the CIA declassified a redacted version of Reed's source, a

note on the so-called Farewell Dossier that describes the effort to provide the Soviet Union with defective technology, the agency did not confirm that such an explosion occurred. The available evidence on the Siberian pipeline blast is so thin that it shouldn't be counted as a proven case of a successful cyberattack. Most other commonly cited cases of cyberwar are even less remarkable. Take the attacks on

Estonia in April 2007, which came in response to the controversial relocation of a Soviet war memorial , the Bronze Soldier. The well-wired country found itself at the receiving end of a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that emanated from up to 85,000 hijacked computers and lasted three weeks. The attacks reached a peak on May 9, when 58 Estonian websites were attacked at once and the online services of Estonia's largest bank were taken down. "What's the difference between a blockade of harbors or airports of sovereign states and the blockade of government institutions and newspaper websites?" asked Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip. Despite his analogies, the

attack was no act of war. It was certainly a nuisance and an emotional strike on the country, but the bank's actual network was not even penetrated; it went down for 90 minutes one day and two hours the next. The attack was not violent, it wasn't purposefully aimed at changing Estonia's behavior, and no political entity took credit for it. The same is true for the vast majority of cyberattacks on record. Indeed, there is no known cyberattack that has caused the loss of human life . No cyberoffense has ever injured a person or damaged a building. And if an act is not at least potentially violent, it's not an act of war. Separating war from physical violence makes it a metaphorical notion; it would mean that there is no way to distinguish between World War II, say, and the "wars" on obesity and cancer. Yet those ailments, unlike past examples of cyber "war," actually do kill people. "A Digital Pearl Harbor Is Only a Matter of Time." Keep waiting. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta delivered a stark warning last summer: "We could face a cyberattack that could be the equivalent of Pearl Harbor." Such alarmist predictions have been ricocheting inside the Beltway for the past two decades, and some scaremongers have even upped the ante by raising the alarm about a cyber 9/11. In his 2010 book, Cyber War, former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke invokes the specter of nationwide power blackouts, planes falling out of the sky, trains derailing, refineries burning, pipelines exploding, poisonous gas clouds wafting, and satellites spinning out of orbit -- events that would make the 2001 attacks pale in comparison. But the

empirical record is less hair-raising, even by the standards of the most drastic example available. Gen. Keith Alexander, head of U.S. Cyber Command (established in 2010 and now boasting a budget of more than $3 billion), shared his worst fears in an April 2011 speech at the University of Rhode Island: "What I'm concerned about are destructive attacks," Alexander said, "those that are coming." He then invoked a remarkable accident at Russia's Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric plant to highlight the kind of damage a cyberattack might be able to cause. Shortly after midnight on Aug. 17, 2009, a 900-ton turbine was ripped out of its seat by a so-called "water hammer," a sudden surge in water pressure that then caused a transformer explosion.

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The turbine's unusually high vibrations had worn down the bolts that kept its cover in place, and an offline sensor failed to detect the malfunction. Seventy-five people died in the accident, energy prices in Russia rose, and rebuilding the plant is slated to cost $1.3 billion. Tough luck for the Russians, but here's what the head of Cyber Command didn't say: The ill-fated turbine had been malfunctioning for some time, and the plant's management was notoriously poor. On top of that, the key event that ultimately triggered the catastrophe seems to have been a fire at Bratsk power station, about 500 miles away. Because the energy supply from Bratsk dropped, authorities remotely increased the burden on the Sayano-Shushenskaya plant. The sudden spike overwhelmed the turbine, which was two months shy of reaching the end of its 30-year life cycle, sparking the catastrophe. If anything, the

Sayano-Shushenskaya incident highlights how difficult a devastating attack would be to mount. The plant's washout was an accident at the end of a complicated and unique chain of events. Anticipating such vulnerabilities in advance is extraordinarily difficult even for insiders; creating comparable coincidences from cyberspace would be a daunting challenge at best for outsiders. If this is the most drastic incident Cyber Command can conjure up, perhaps it's time for everyone to take a deep breath. " Cyberattacks Are Becoming Easier." Just the opposite. U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper warned last year that the volume of malicious software on American networks had more than tripled since 2009 and that more than 60,000 pieces of malware are now discovered every day. The United States, he said, is undergoing "a phenomenon known as 'convergence,' which amplifies the opportunity for disruptive cyberattacks, including against physical infrastructures." ("Digital convergence" is a snazzy term for a simple thing: more and more devices able to talk to each other, and formerly separate industries and activities able to work together.) Just because there's more malware, however, doesn't mean that attacks are becoming easier. In fact, potentially damaging or life-threatening cyberattacks should be more difficult to pull off. Why? Sensitive systems generally have built-in redundancy and safety systems, meaning an attacker's likely objective will not be to shut down a system, since merely forcing the shutdown of one control system, say a power plant, could trigger a backup and cause operators to start looking for the bug. To work as an effective weapon, malware would have to influence an active process -- but not bring it to a screeching halt. If the malicious activity extends over a lengthy period, it has to remain stealthy. That's a more difficult trick than hitting the virtual off-button. Take Stuxnet, the worm that sabotaged Iran's nuclear program in 2010. It didn't just crudely shut down the centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility; rather, the worm subtly manipulated the system. Stuxnet stealthily infiltrated the plant's networks, then hopped onto the protected control systems, intercepted input values from sensors, recorded these data, and then provided the legitimate controller code with pre-recorded fake input signals, according to researchers who have studied the worm. Its objective was not just to fool operators in a control room, but also to circumvent digital safety and monitoring systems so it could secretly manipulate the actual processes. Building

and deploying Stuxnet required extremely detailed intelligence about the systems it was supposed to compromise, and the same will be true for other dangerous cyberweapons. Yes, "convergence," standardization, and sloppy defense of control-systems software could increase the risk of generic attacks, but the same trend has also caused defenses against the most coveted targets to improve steadily and has made reprogramming highly specific installations on legacy systems more complex, not less.

Precedent means nothing because 2 decisions are never alike, precedents always conflict, and precedents must be interpreted – judges inevitably decide on their own Schanck, Professor of Law at Kansas University, 1992 Peter, Southern California Law Review, 65 S. Cal. L. Rev. 2505 The early CLS theorists resembled legal realists in rejecting legal formalism. 286 Legal realists maintained that judicial decisions are not logically deduced from precedent, legal rules, or legal doctrine, but are the result of any number of other factors: judges' political orientations, their class, their psychological makeup, what they had for breakfast that [*2579] day, etc. They argued that decisions cannot be deduced from precedent for a number of reasons, including (1) that no two cases are identical, and thus the question whether a decision is bound by the holding of an earlier precedent always involves discretion; (2) that precedents always conflict; and (3) that precedents and their legal rules must themselves be interpreted. 287 Furthermore, legal doctrines, reasoned the legal realists, cannot serve as a source of logically deduced decisions because they lack concrete meaning and substance. Concepts like equal protection, proximate cause, consideration, and corporate personality appear to

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have definite meaning, but when examined more closely, they can be seen to be essentially vacuous and therefore manipulable by the conscious or unconscious designs of lawyers and judges. 288

A wide variety of precedents and interpretations allow judges to “pick and choose” what they want to follow Kairys, Professor of Sociology at U. Penn, 1982 David, The Politics of Law, p. 14 Thus, stare decisis neither leads to nor requires any particular results or rationales in specific cases. A wide variety of precedents and a still wider variety of interpretations and distinctions are available from which to pick and choose. Social and political judgments about the substance, parties, and context of the case guide such choices, even when they are not the explicit or conscious bases of decision.

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Kritik 1.) Our critique is the only relevant education we get from debate - it illuminates our position in a swirling soup of ideology. Dean 6 - Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York (Jodi, Zizek's Politics, © 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1, p.XVIII-XIX ) NAR Žižek emphasizes that Lacan conceptualized this excessive place, this place without guarantees, in his formula for “the discourse of the analyst” (which I set out in Chapter Two). In

psychoanalysis, the analyst just sits there, asking questions from time to time. She is some kind of object or cipher onto which the analysand transfers love, desire, aggression, and knowledge. The analysand, in other words, proceeds through analysis by positing the analyst as someone who knows exactly what is wrong with him and exactly what he should do to get rid of his symptom and get better. But, really, the analyst does not know . Moreover, the analyst steadfastly refuses to provide the analysand with any answers whatsoever. No ideals, no moral certainty, no goals, no choices. Nothing. This is what makes the analyst so traumatic, Žižek explains, the fact that she refuses to establish a law or set a limit, that she does not function as some kind of new master .7 Analysis is over when the analysand accepts that the analyst does not know, that there is not any secret meaning or explanation, and then takes responsibility for getting on with his life. The challenge for the analysand, then, is freedom, autonomously determining his own limits, directly assuming his own enjoyment. So, again, the position of the analyst is in this excessive place as an object through which the analysand works through the analytical process.Why is the analyst necessary in the first place? If

she is not going to tell the analysand what to do, how he should be living, then why does he not save his money, skip the whole process, and figure out things for himself? There are two basic answers. First, the analysand is not self-transparent. He is a stranger to himself , a decentered agent “struggling with a foreign kernel.”8 What is more likely than self-understanding, is self-misunderstanding, that is, one’s fundamental misperception of one’s own condition. Becoming aware of this misperception, grappling with it, is the work of analysis. Accordingly, second, the analyst is that external agent or position that gives a new form to our activity. Saying things out loud, presenting them to another, and confronting them in front of this external position concretizes and arranges our thoughts and activities in a different way, a way that is more difficult to escape or avoid. The analyst then provides a form through which we acquire a perspective on and a relation to our selves. Paul’s Christian collectives and Lenin’s revolutionary Party are, for Žižek, similarly formal arrangements, forms “for a new type of knowledge linked to a collective political subject.”9 Each provides an external perspective on our activities, a way to concretize and organize our spontaneous experiences. More strongly put, a political Party is necessary precisely because politics is not given; it does not arise naturally or organically out of the multiplicity of immanent flows and affects but has to be produced, arranged, and constructed out of these flows in light of something larger. In my view, when Žižek draws on popular culture and inserts himself into this culture, he is

This excessive position is that of the analyst as well as that of the Party. Reading Žižek as occupying the position of the analyst tells us that it is wrong to expect Žižek to tell us what to do, to provide an ultimate solution or direction through which to solve all the world’s problems. The analyst does not provide the analysand with ideals and goals; instead, he occupies the place of an object in relation to which we work these out for ourselves. In adopting the position of the analyst, Žižek is also practicing what he refers to as “ Bartleby politics ,” a politics rooted in a kind of refusal wherein the subject turns itself into a disruptive (of our peace of mind!) violently passive object who says, “ I would prefer not to.”10 Thus, to my mind, becoming preoccupied with Žižek’s style is like becoming preoccupied with what one’s analyst is wearing. Why such a preoccupation? How is this preoccupation enabling us to avoid confronting the truth of our desire, our own investments in enjoyment? How is complaining that Žižek (or the analyst) will not tell us what to do a way that we avoid trying to figure this out for ourselves?11 Reading Žižek in terms of an excessive object also means see ing his position as analogous to the formal position of the Party. Here it tells us that rather than a set of answers or dictates, Žižek is providing an intervention that cuts through the multiplicity of affects and experiences in which we find ourselves and organizes them from a specific perspective. As we shall see, for Žižek, this perspective is anchored in class struggle as the fundamental antagonism rupturing and constituting the social. So again, he does not give us an answer; he does not know what we taking the position of an object of enjoyment, an excessive object that cannot easily be recuperated or assimilated.

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should do, but his thought provides an external point in relation to which we can organize, consider, and formalize our experiences as ideological subjects.

2.) The role of the analyst creates politically engaged subjects, we are a pre-requisite to policy education. Hajer & Wagenaar 3 - Professor of Political Science at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (Maarten & Hendrik, “Editors’ Introduction,” Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society,, p. 32-33) NAR The third section, Methods and Foundations of Deliberative Policy Analysis, contains three papers addressing the philosophical assumptions and professional implications of a post- empiricist, deliberative policy analysis. Their common theme is that one cannot understand the practical failings of traditional policy professionalism, nor formulate a viable alternative, without a firm grasp of the philosophical underpinnings of both approaches. Fischer’s contribution is a case in point. He begins his paper with the familiar observation that traditional policy science has failed to live up to its ambition: to contribute to an understanding, let alone amelioration, of the kind of wicked problems that confronts modern society. He argues that the cause of this failure resides in the misconceived epistemological and methodological nature of traditional policy science.

Locked inside a positivist image of science, traditional policy analysis, he failed to understand the socially constructed, pragmatically driven nature of scientific knowledge production, a point that is picked up and extended by Gottweis in his chapter. The facts and concepts of policy analysis, both authors argue, are ‘inscribed’ upon the social and natural world through practices of scientific representation. Our grasp of the objects of policy analysis, these authors conclude, rests on contextually situated, normatively-driven, practical reasoning. As Yanow puts it succinctly in her chapter, the understanding of public policy “requires local knowledge – the very mundane, but still expert understanding of, and practical reasoning about, local conditions derived from lived experience”. Policy objects, as these authors argue, are essentially contested. The representation of an issue (unemployment, global warming, genetic engineering, airport noise) is the argues, has

issue. The object of post-empiricist policy analysis (as Fischer calls it) is therefore not only fundamentally dispersed (No longer self-evidently located in the halls of government, but instead spread out over the communities of citizens, administrators, and executive agencies. As Gottweis calls it, governing is the resultant of a “ regime of practices”.), but also recast (Policy analysis is, above all, concerned with the communicative, deliberative nature of political activity.). All three authors in this section, sketch the implications of these insights for the object and role of policy analysis. The

objects of analysis, far from being unproblematic entities in seen as the outcome of complex, socially patterned, processes of articulation by, and contestation between, shifting groups of actors. Policy analysis is in this sense fundamentally interpretative and the political landscape, are

reflexive . Yanow draws out what an interpretative approach implies for the role of the analyst. She demonstrates that interpretative analysis is just as systematic and methodical as traditional methods (‘interpretative is not impressionistic’, as she formulates it), and discusses at length the various methods that are available to the interpretative analyst. Gottweis explores the reflexive implications of post-empiricist policy analysis. Instead of assuming governability and policy making, the complex appreciations and political judgments that constitute it must itself be posed as a problem. Second, as both Fischer and Yanow explain, in the essentially discursive and fragmented field of policymaking, the

role of the analyst is not to suggest effective or efficient solutions that bring political discussions to an end. Instead his role should be to facilitate the citizen’s and client’s capacity for democratic deliberation and collective learning: about value and preferences, about assumptions of self and others, about mutual dependencies and power differentials, about opportunities and constraints, about the desirability of solutions and outcomes, in sum, about what it means to be an engaged citizen . In this way, these three authors, in conjunction with the other contributors to this book, give new meaning to Harold Lasswell’s ideal of a ‘policy science of democracy’

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Perm The permutation is premised on transfiguring psychoanalysis into one more signifier in the 1AC's signifying chain - reject the perm to maintain the theory. Stavrakakis 99 - Teaching fellow at the department of Government at the University of Essex and Acting Director of the MA program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis. (Yannis, 1999, LACAN AND THE POLITICAL, ISBN 0-203-22426-4, p. 112-121) NAR A crucial problem which still remains open is the hegemonic efficacy of a political project based on this anti-utopian recognition of the very impossibility of society. It

The idea of the impossibility of society, for example, as Sean Homer argues, ‘may make for good theory but…does it make for good politics?’ (Homer, 1996:101). In other words, Homer’s fear is that Lacanian political theory, although successful as a theoretical enterprise, leads to a dangerous no-way-out in terms of political praxis (Homer, 1996:102). This is because, in Homer’s view, the recognition of the is necessary to tackle this problem before engaging in a detailed way with our Lacanian account of democracy.

impossibility of society leads to the impossibility of politics: ‘what is occluded in the elision between object a and the social as an impossible object is the possibility of politics itself’ (Homer, 1996:102). Psychoanalytic political theory is presented by Homer as politically impotent since it does not articulate itself as an ideological discourse. And, of course, although psychoanalysis and theorists such as Laclau criticise and even unmask the gap between our symbolic fictions and the real, this gap will always be filled by new ideological discourses, and so on and so forth: Marx recognized this in what I have termed his prophetic discourse, a discourse that is, according to Laclau, radically inconsistent with both Marxism’s and psychoanalysis’s critical impulse but is, I suggest politically necessary. For i f

psychoanalysis cannot articulate or envisage a move beyond the impasse I have delineated, that is to say, if it cannot function as an ideological discourse, then there are plenty of other, more often than not stridently antipsychoanalytic, theories and ideologies waiting to fill the vacuum. (Homer, 1996:108, my emphasis) This becomes all the more necessary because ‘to dwell on the impossibility of the subject or society is also to facilitate the possibility of potentially more conservative and reactionary positions’ (ibid.: 109). For Žižek, lack and antagonism are constitutive and thus all utopian constructions, including Marx’s prophetic discourse in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, that is to say his utopian impulse, are missing the point. Nevertheless, Homer is determined to ‘repeat that error today’ (Homer, 1996:107). Not that he is in a position to fully envisage utopia. This, as he recognises, is, in Lacanian terms, ‘structurally impossible’ (ibid.)—it is well known that Lacan considered Aufhebung as a sweet dream of philosophy. But it seems to him as the only way ‘to go beyond the impasse of the impossible, and to link theory back to practice’ (ibid.). Homer’s position seems extremely interesting in its simplifying clarity. Let me extract the basic moments in his argumentation as I understand them: 1 Psychoanalytic political theory, by concentrating on the irreducible lack in the Other, on the impossibility of society, does not permit itself to engage in an ideological—utopian is the correct word here—attempt to cover over that lack. 2 If psychoanalytic political theory does not engage in ideological construction, in trying to fill the gap in the social, other ideologies and discourses do and will continue to do so. 3 Thus, by

being politically impotent, since politics is identified with constructing ideological utopias or quasi-utopian ‘heuristic devices’, Lacanian political theory leaves the road open for other (conservative) political ideologies. 4 What becomes necessary is the articulation of a psychoanalytic ideology or maybe a Lacanian quasi-utopia. This is the only way, according to Homer, to move beyond the current impasse of psychoanalytic political theory and to articulate a truly psychoanalytic politics. In other words ‘utopia strikes back’. Needless to say, Homer’s

argument is only the most recent in a long series of voices on the left that resist abandoning the legacy of the 1960s— epitomised by Marcuse—and want ‘to insist very strongly on the necessity of the reinvention of the utopian vision in any contemporary politics’ (Jameson, 1991:159). Now it is possible to examine the plausibility of these points one by one. First of all it is of course true that Lacanian political theory is a discourse on impossibility. But it could be also argued that impossibility constitutes the nodal point of the most interesting part of Lacanian theory in general, insofar as the real is understood as the impossible par excellence, that is to say, impossible to represent in the imaginary or the symbolic plane. The examples are countless. Does not the phrase ‘there is no sexual relationship’ mean that every relationship between the sexes only takes place against the background of a fundamental real impossibility? (Žižek, 1994a:155). It is clearly no accident that this recognition is something denied in utopian writing. In Campanella’s utopia for example, fat girls are matched with thin men in order for a harmony between the sexes to be restored. To provide a more contemporary illustration, this close relation between the political promise of utopia and the relationship between the sexes is clearly shown in the grandiose sculpture of V.Mukhina installed in the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition; a sculpture representing the harmonious union between an industrial worker (the male stereotype according to socialist realism, depicted holding the hammer) and a collective farm girl (the female equivalent, depicted holding the sickle and thus supplementing a kind of harmonious yin and yang representation of the sexual relationship) in their march towards Stalin’s utopia. Against this utopian fantasy of the sexual relationship Lacanian theory stresses the constitutive impossibility of a harmonious sexual relationship. In the film Sesso Matto by the Italian director Dino Risi, Giancarlo Gianini falls in love with a married transvestite prostitute who is revealed to be his long lost brother. His position is perhaps the only reflection on sexual harmony that can be accepted within a Lacanian perspective: Except for the fact that you’re married; except for the fact that you are a whore and not a nice girl; and except for the fact that you’re my brother and not…for example…my cousin…we’re perfect for each other, and our love would be ideal. (Benvenuto, 1996:126) We can also approach this constitutive play between possibility and impossibility through the example of communication. What Lacan argues, and here his difference from Habermas is most forcefully demonstrated, is that it is exactly because total communication is impossible, because it is exposed as an impossible fantasy, that communication itself becomes possible. Lacan starts from the assumption that communication is always a failure: moreover, that it has to be a failure, and that’s the reason we keep on talking. If we understood each other, we would all remain silent. Luckily enough, we don’t understand each other, so we keep on talking. (Verhaeghe, 1995:81) The utopian fantasy of a perfect universal language, a language common to all humanity, was designed to remedy this lack in communication insofar as it is caused by the different idioms and languages in use (Eco, 1995:19). The perfect language was conceived as the final solution to this linguistic confusion, the confusio linguarum, which inscribed an irreducible lack at the heart of our symbolic universe, showing its inability to represent the real. It entailed a fantasmatic return to a pre-confusion state in which a perfect language existed between Adam and God. This was a language that mirrored reality, an isomorphic language which

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had direct and unmediated access to the essence of things: ‘In its original form…language was an absolutely certain and transparent sign for things, because it resembled them. The names of things were lodged in the things they designated…. This transparency was destroyed at Babel as a punishment for men’ (Foucault, 1989:36). Human imagination never stopped longing for that lost/impossible state when language, instead of the agency of castration, was the field of a perfect harmony; hence all the attempts to construct a perfect language, to realise fantasy: Umberto Eco in his Search for the Perfect Language recounts the history of all these attempts within European culture, from St. Augustine’s fantasy, in which the distance between object and symbol is annulled,17 up to Dante, a priori philosophical languages and Esperanto. This history is, of course, a genealogy of failures, the history of the insistence on the realisation of an impossible dream, a dream, however, that was designed as a perfect solution to the inherent division of the social. As Eco points out, linguistic confusion is conceived as standing at the root of religious and political division, even of difficulties in economic exchange (Eco, 1995:42–3). In that sense, the achievement of perfect communication is articulated as the perfect solution to all these problems. This is clearly a utopian problematic. Alas, as Antonio Gramsci points out in his text ‘Universal Language and Esperanto’, no advent of a universal language can be planned in advance: the present attempts at such a language belong only in the realm of Utopia: they are the product of the same mentality that wanted Falangists and happy colonies. In history and social life nothing is fixed, rigid and final. There never will be…this flow of molten volcanic matter, burns and annihilates the Utopias built on arbitrary acts and vain delusions such as those of a universal language and of Esperanto. (Gramsci, 1975:33) The main point here is that society and history are all the time constituted and reconstituted through this unending play between possibility and impossibility, order and disorder: ‘society is nothing but a web of social relations that is constantly being spun, broken, and spun again, invariably (unlike a spider’s web) in slightly different form’ (Wrong, 1994:45). As we have already seen in Chapter 2, our encounters with the real, the moments of failure and dislocation of our discursive constructions, have both a destructive and a productive dimension. Baudrillard even argues that catastrophes, crises and dislocations might be a certain strategy of our species. By bringing to the fore the possibility or the idea of a total catastrophe they stimulate a series of processes—in the economy as well as in politics, art and history—that attempt to patch things up (Baudrillard, 1996:81). Homer

is correct and consistent with his psychoanalytic framework when he argues that the filling of the gap in the social field will always be the aim of numerous discourses and ideologies; this is the way things generally work. It is also true that if no psychoanalytic ideology emerges to (try to) suture that gap, other discourses and ideologies will. Since, however, Lacanian political theory aims at bringing to the fore, again and again, the lack in the Other, the same lack that utopian fantasy attempts to mask, it would be self-defeating, if not absurd, to engage itself in utopian or quasi-utopian fantasy construction. Is it really possible and consistent to point to the lack in the Other and, at the same time, to attempt to fill it in a quasi-utopian move? Such a question can also be posed in ethical or even strategic terms. It could be argued of course that Homer’s vision of a psychoanalytic politics does not foreclose the recognition of the impossibility of the social but that in his schema this recognition, and the promise to eliminate it (as part of a quasi-utopian regulative principle) go side by side; that in fact this political promise is legitimised by the conclusions of psychoanalytic political theory. But this coexistence is nothing new. This recognition of the ‘impossibility of society’, of an antagonism that cross-cuts the social field, constitutes the starting point for almost every political ideology. Only if presented against the background of this ‘disorder’ the final harmonious ‘order’ promised by a utopian fantasy acquires hegemonic force. The problem is that all

this schema is based on the elimination of the first moment, of the recognition of impossibility. The centrality of political dislocation is always repressed in favour of the second moment, the utopian promise. Utopian fantasy can sound appealing only if presented as the final solution to the problem that constitutes its starting point. In that sense, the moment of impossibility is only acknowledged in order to be eliminated. In Marx, for instance, the constitutivity of class struggle is recognised only to be eliminated in the future communist society. Thus, when Homer says that he wants to repeat Marx’s error today he is simply acknowledging that his psychoanalytic politics is nothing but traditional fantasmatic politics articulated with the use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary.

Homer’s psychoanalytic politics are nothing but ‘politics as such’—this is his own phrase—and what is ‘politics as such’ if not the return of something very old, the ‘reoccupation’ of traditional radical politics. I use here the term ‘reoccupation’ as it is introduced by Hans Blumenberg in his book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Blumenberg, 1983). The term is introduced in connection with the relation between pre-modernity and modernity and has to do with the way modernity reproduces the mistakes or problems of pre-modernity.18 As the translator of Blumemberg’s book argues: Christianity, he [Blumenberg] says, through its claim to be able to account for the overall pattern of world history in terms of the poles of creation and eschatology, had put in place a new question, one that had been (as Löwith so forcefully insists) unknown to the Greeks: the question of the meaning and pattern of world history as a whole. When modern thinkers abandoned the Christian ‘answers’ they still felt an obligation to answer the questions that went with them—to show that modern thought was equal to any challenge, as it were. It was this compulsion to ‘reoccupy’ the ‘position’ of the medieval Christian schema of creation and eschatology—rather than leave it empty, as a rationality that was aware of its own limits might have done—that led to the grandiose constructions of the philosophy of history. (Wallace, 1985:xx–xxi) As Ernesto Laclau has put it, by ‘reoccupation’ we mean a process by which certain notions, linked to the advent of a new vision and new problems, ‘have the function of replacing ancient notions that had been formed on the ground of a different set of issues, with the result that the latter end up imposing their demands on the new notions and inevitably deforming them’ (Laclau, 1990:74). What I want to suggest is that in Homer’s schema psychoanalytic

politics ‘reoccupies’ the ground of traditional fantasmatic politics. The result is that this fantasmatic conception of politics ends up imposing its demands on the psychoanalytic part of the argumentation . Thus, this latter part is necessarily deformed: if it is not recognised in its radical constitutivity, the impossibility of society, the irreducibility of the real within the social, loses all its power. In that sense, the ultimate consequence of Homer’s argumentation is the following: the absorption of Lacanian political theory by radical quasi-utopianism will offer left-wing radicalism the hegemonic appeal entailed in the articulation of one more signifier (‘psychoanalysis’) in its signifying chain, but psychoanalytic political theory has nothing to gain beyond its own deformation. Well, it doesn’t sound like a very good deal. In fact, articulating Lacanian theory with fantasmatic politics is equivalent to affirming the irrelevance of Lacanian theory for radical politics since this articulation presupposes the repression of all the political insights implicit in Lacan’s reading and highlighted in this book. The alleged irrelevance of Lacan for radical

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politics is also the argument put forward by Collier in a recent article in Radical Philosophy. Collier’s argument is that since it is capitalism that shatters our wholeness and disempowers us (as if without capitalism we would be on the road to utopia; obviously, capitalism occupies the structural position of the antichrist in this sort of leftist preaching), then Lacan’s theory is, in fact, normalising capitalist damage, precisely because alienation is so deep for Lacan that nothing can be done to eliminate it (‘Lacan is deeply pessimistic, rejecting cure or happiness as possible goals’, my emphasis).19 Thus Lacan has nothing to offer radical politics. Something not entirely surprising since, according to Collier, psychological theory in general has no political implications whatsoever. The conclusion is predictable: ‘Let us go to Freud and Klein for our psychotherapy [Lacan is of course excluded] and to Marx and the environmental sciences for our politics, and not get our lines crossed’ (Collier, 1998:41– 3). Surprisingly enough this is almost identical with Homer’s conclusion :

Lacanian theory is OK as an analytical tool but let us go back to Marx for our ideological seminar and our utopian catechism! It is clear that from a Lacanian point of view it is necessary to resist all such ‘reoccupations’ of traditional fantasmatic politics. At least this is the strategy that Lacan follows on similar occasions. Faced with the alienating dimension of every identification, Lacan locates the end of analysis beyond identification. Since utopian or quasi-utopian constructions function through identification it is legitimate, I think, to draw the analogies with the social field. If analysis resists the ‘reoccupation’ of the traditional strategy of identification—although it recognises its crucial, but alienating, role in the formation of subjectivity—why should psychoanalytic politics, after unmasking the crucial but alienating character of traditional, fantasmatic, identificatory politics, ‘reoccupy’ their ground? This rationale underlying the

Lacanian position is not far away from what Beardsworth articulates as a political reading of Derrida. For Beardsworth, deconstruction also refuses to implicate itself in traditional politics, in the ‘local sense of politics’ in Beardsworth’s terminology: In its affirmative refusal to advocate a politics, deconstruction forms, firstly, an account of why all political projects fail. Since the projection of any decision has ethical implications, deconstruction in fact generalizes what is meant by the political well beyond the local sense of politics. In this sense it becomes a radical ‘critique’ of institutions. (Beardsworth, 1996:19) Similarly, the

radicality and political importance of the Lacanian critique depends on its ability to keep its distance from fantasmatic politics, from politics in the traditional sense; which is not the same as saying that psychoanalysis is apolitical : in fact, it becomes political precisely by being critical of traditional politics, exactly because, as argued in the previous chapter, the political is located beyond the utopian or quasi-utopian sedimentations of political reality. One final point before concluding our argumentation in this chapter. There is a question which seems to remains open. It is the following: if we resist the ‘reoccupation’ put forward by Homer and others does that mean that we accept the supposed political impotence of psychoanalytic political theory? Assuming that psychoanalytically inspired political theory is based on the recognition of the political as an encounter with the real (although he doesn’t formulate it in exactly these terms), Rustin argues that ‘it seems likely that a politics constructed largely on this principle will generate paranoid-schizoid states of mind as its normal psychic condition’. If we prioritise the ‘negative’ ‘what kind of progressive political or social project can be built if the “positive”—that is concepts, theories, norms and consistent techniques—is to be refused as innately inauthentic?’ (Rustin, 1995:241–3). Political impotence seems to be the logical outcome. Homer’s argument seems finally vindicated. Yet this conclusion is accurate only if we identify progressive political action with traditional fantasmatic utopian politics. This is, however, a reductionist move par excellence. This idea, and Homer’s whole argumentative construction, is based on the foreclosure of another political possibility which is clearly situated beyond any ‘reoccupations’ and is consistent with psychoanalytic theory instead of deforming it. This is the possibility of a post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics. The best example is democratic politics. It is true that democracy is an essentially contested term and that the struggle for a ‘final’ decontestation of its meaning constitutes a fundamental characteristic of modern societies. It is also true that in the past these attempts at decontestation were articulated within an essentialist, foundationalist framework, that is to say, democracy was conceived as a natural law, a natural right, or even as something guaranteed by divine providence. Today, in our postmodern terrain, these foundations are no longer valid. Yet democracy did not share the fate of its various foundations. This is because democracy cannot be reduced to any of these fantasmatic positive contents. As John Keane, among others, has put it, democracy is not based on or guided by a certain positive, foundational, normative principle (Keane, 1995:167). On the contrary, democracy is based on the recognition of the fact that no such principle can claim to be truly universal, on the fact that no symbolic social construct can ever claim to master the impossible real. Democracy entails the acceptance of antagonism, in other words, the recognition of the fact that the social will always be structured around a real impossibility which cannot be sutured. Instead

of attempting this impossible suture of the social entailed in every utopian or quasi-utopian discourse, democracy envisages a social field which is unified by the recognition of its own constitutive impossibility. As Chaitin points out, democracy provides a concrete example of what we would call a post-fantasmatic or less-fantasmatic politics: most significant [in terms of Lacan’s importance for literary, ethical and cultural theory and political praxis], perhaps, is the new light his analysis of the interaction of the universal and the particular has begun to shed on the question of maintaining a democratic social order which can safeguard universal human rights while protecting the difference of competing political and ethnic groups. (Chaitin, 1996:11) Thus, a whole political project,

the project of radical democracy, is based not on the futile fantasmatic suture of the lack in the Other but on the recognition of its own irreducibility .20 And this is a political possibility totally neglected by Homer.21 Today, it seems that we have the chance to overcome or limit the consequences of traditional fantasmatic politics. In that sense, the collapse of utopian politics should not be the source of resentment, disappointment or even nostalgia for a supposedly lost harmony. On the contrary, it is a development that enhances the prospects for radicalising modern democracy. But this

cannot be done for as long as the ethics of harmony are still hegemonic. What we need is a new ethical framework . This cannot be an ethics of harmony aspiring to realise a fantasy construction; it can only be an ethics that is articulated around the recognition of the ultimate impossibility of such an idea and follows this recognition up to its political—and, in fact, democratic—consequences. In the next chapter I will try to show that Lacanian theory is absolutely crucial in such an undertaking. Not only because some Lacanian societies tend to be more democratic than other psychoanalytic institutions (the École Freudienne de Paris was, in certain of its aspects, an extremely democratic society) nor because psychoanalysis is stigmatised or banned in almost all anti-democratic regimes. Beyond these superfluous approaches,

can offer a non-fantasmatic grounding for radical democracy

Lacanian ethics

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Their federalism advantage reproduces the drama of Oedipal relationships on a national scale - they place states within the position of the child - the impact is resentment and an increase in Federal Power which turns the whole aff this card is amazing. Schoenfeld 73 - BA, LL.B, LL.M (C.G, 1973, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE LAW, ISBN-13: 9780398026561 Publisher: Thomas, Charles C. Publisher, Ltd. Publication date: 2/28/1973, Hard Copy, p. 2014) NAR To return, however, to the problem of securing a proper balance between the powers of the Federal Government and those of the states, it will be recalled that symbolization (the use of a person, idea or object to represent some other person, idea or object) is a salient characteristic of unconscious mentation. 205 It will also be recalled that nations and their leaders: often serve as unconscious parent symbols and as such tend to have parent-oriented desires and feelings displaced onto them.206 Indeed, psychoanalysts believe that the relationship between a nation (or its leaders) and its citizens is frequently equated unconsciously with the relationship between parents and their children; and psychoanalysts believe that as a result, the attitudes, emotions and behavior of a people are likely to reflect the influence of this unconscious identification of the nation citizen relationship with the parent-child relationship.207 These facts bring to mind the possibility that, like the relationship between a nation and its citizens, the

relationship in the United States between the Federal Government and the various state governments may be unconsciously regarded at times as though it were a parent-child relationship.208 If so, then attempts to find a proper balance

between federal and state powers may

symbolize on an unconscious level attempts to find a proper balance

between the powers of parents and their children . Consequently, adjustments of the federal-state power balance, especially if accomplished at the expense of the states, may well stir up in the unconscious vestiges of the intense feelings of childhood regarding the relative powers of parents and children. For example, decisions of the Supreme Court limiting the freedom of action of the states by forcing them to conform to certain federal standards (as in Mapp v. Ohio) 209 may be unconsciously equated with demands during childhood that children renounce their freedom regarding certain matters and, instead, obey parental rules of conduct. As a result, such decisions by the Court may stir up in the unconscious vestiges of the outraged feelings and accompanying rage and fury that parents so frequently engender in a child when they try to train him too early or, indeed, when they may simply restrict his freedom and demand (often quite rightly) that he obey the rules they formulate. In like manner, decisions of the Supreme Court enlarging federal powers in certain areas and effecting a reduction of the powers of the states in these areas (as in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka) 210 may well be unconsciously interpreted as an expansion of parental powers at the expense of the powers of their children. If so, then unconscious remnants of the great parent-child power struggle of early childhood-the Oedipal conflictmay be revived , including remnants of the intense wishes and powerful emotions that originally accompanied this struggle. The old anger, hostility and rage of childhood may be aroused once again as the enlargement of federal powers and the corresponding reduction of state powers is unconsciously reacted to as though it were a replay of the Oedipal struggle in which the child was ultimately forced (in large measure because of overwhelming parental power) to renounce his fervently desired Oedipal goals. 211 It will be recalled, however, that children tend to identify

themselves with a parent-in a sense, to "become" this parent unconsciously212 ; and as a result, children may unconsciously tend to regard accretions in parental power as accretions in their own power . If so, then an expansion in the powers of the Federal Government may (as indicated above) not only be equated unconsciously with an expansion of parental powers but may also be unconsciously interpreted, especially by a person who had identified himself strongly with a parent during childhood, as an expansion of the person's own powers . Indeed, herein may be found a major unconscious reason why a man may not only fail to oppose but may actually champion increases in federal powers-as, for example, John Marshall championed increases in federal powers during his thirty-five years as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.213 To the extent that a man (because of a strong self-identification with a parent or for some other reason) unconsciously equates the enlargement of the powers of the Federal Government with the enlargement of his own powers, he would probably fail to such extent to regard unconsciously any increase in the powers of the states as an increase in his own powers. Nevertheless, insofar as the relationship between the Federal Government and the various state governments continues to symbolize for him on an unconscious level the relationship between parents and their children, he would presumably still tend unconsciously to interpret any emphasis upon or addition to the rights and powers of the states as an emphasis upon or an addition to the rights and powers of the other children in the family of childhood-his brothers and sisters, especially. Hence,

situations in which the Supreme Court emphasizes or expands the rights and privileges of the states (as in Erie R.R. Co. v. Tompkins) 214 may be identified unconsciously with childhood situations in which parents emphasized or expanded the rights

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and privileges of siblings. Consequently, Supreme Court rulings stressing the rights and privileges of the states may stir up unconscious vestiges of the furious jealousy, hostility and rage that parental stress upon the rights and privileges of siblings once evoked-vestiges that, when aroused, are all too capable of producing intense emotional storms.To suggest further ways in which the balancing of federal and state powers may stir up unconscious remnants of the ideas and emotions of early childhood requires little perspicacity, for unconscious reactions to adjustments in the federalstate power balance are, certainly in an individual sense, at least as numerous as there are people who react unconsciously to these adjustments. Detailing such further possible unconscious reactions to the balancing of federal and state powers would appear to be unnecessary, however, to reveal that insofar as the federal-state relationship is unconsciously equated with the parent-child relationship, attempts to balance federal and state powers are likely to stir up vestiges of the desires and feelings of early childhood regarding the relative powers of parents and children-vestiges of desires and feelings

so primitive, irrational and emotion-laden that their arousal would seem almost inevitably to lead to emotional outbursts of great intensity.

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alt Refusing an existing symbolic order is crucial. Butler 2010 Rex, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland International Journal of Zizek Studies 4.1 http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/228/321 What is common to these four situations? It is the idea that, like Bartleby, we have an “I prefer not to”, without the reasons for this being given or even able to be given. It is a feeling or affect that in a way precedes reasons, that is unable to be justified, that has no place within the existing symbolic order. It is the feeling of an injustice or of something that is missing, without necessarily having the language to express it. And certainly it proposes no immediate solution, no way of making things better within the existing order. It is in fact a dissatisfaction with the currently existing order as such. This grievance, indeed, might be compared to the “melancholy” that Zizek sees in Fellini’s Satyricon, in which the revellers are haunted by the sense that something is missing without being able to say what it is, and in fact without anything “objectively” being missing. There is a kind of “withdrawal” or distancing at stake here even at the height of the characters’ immersion in the world (indeed, even allowing their immersion in the world). As Zizek writes: Melancholy is not primarily directed at the paradisiacal past of organic balanced Wholeness which was lost due to some catastrophe, it is not a sadness caused by this loss; melancholy proper, rather, designates the attitude of those who are still in Paradise but are already longing to break out of it; of those who, although still in a closed universe, already possess a vague premonition of another dimension which is just out of their reach (Zizek 2000: 88-89). And yet, as Zizek goes onto argue in Parallax View, the symbolic order precisely stands in for the possibility of this withdrawal. That is – and this is to go back to our earlier point as to how thought is not simply an exception within a pre-existing order of things, but also brings this order about – the symbolic order arises as the effect of a positing that could also not have happened. In other words, what is being experienced at the moment of grievance is the repetition of the forced choice. It is the possibility of experiencing – necessarily within the symbolic – what must be excluded, foreclosed, in order to found the symbolic order. It is a way of remarking, as though from the outside, the symbolic order as such, although this is obviously impossible. And it is a way of resisting it, in speaking of, or better feeling, what is lost by it. Grievance is first of all not a grievance concerning any particular wrong, but the very inability to speak of any particular wrong, the fact that any attempt to articulate it within the symbolic is necessarily to lose it. In a parallactic way, we might say that it is grievance that arises at the lack of any grievance, grievance that gives rise both to itself and to the circumstances at which it is aggrieved.

Zizek 93 Slavoj Zizek, philosopher, 1993. [Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 1-2] The most sublime image that emerged in the political upheavals of the last years-- and the term "sublime" is to be conceived here in the strictest Kantian sense-- was undoubtedly the unique picture from the time of the violent overthrow of Ceauşsescu in Romania: the

rebels waving the national flag with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole in its center. It is difficult to imagine a more salient index of the "open" character of a historical situation"in its becoming," as Kierkegaard would have put it, of that intermediate phase when the former Master-Signifier, although it has already lost the hegemonical power, has not yet been replaced by the new one . The sublime enthusiasm this picture bears witness to is in no way affected by the fact that we now know how the events were actually manipulated (ultimately it had to do with a coup of Securitate, the Communist secret police, against itself, against its own signifier; that is, the old apparatus survived by casting off its symbolic clothing): for us as well as for most of the participants themselves, all this became visible in retrospect, and what really matters is that the

masses who poured into the streets of Bucharest "experienced" the situation as "open," that they participated in the unique intermediate state of passage from one discourse (social link) to another, when, for a brief, passing moment, the hole in the big Other, the symbolic order, became visible. The enthusiasm which carried them was literally the enthusiasm over this hole, not yet hegemonized by any positive ideological project; all ideological appropriations (from the

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nationalistic to the liberal-democratic) entered

the stage afterwards and endeavored to"kidnap" the process which originally was not their own. At this point, perhaps, the enthusiasm of the masses and the attitude of a critical intellectual overlap for a brief moment. And the duty of the critical intellectual-- if, in today's"postmodern" universe, this syntagm has any meaning left-- is precisely to occupy all the time, even when the new order (the"new harmony") stabilizes itself and again renders invisible the hole as such, the place of this hole, i.e., to maintain a distance toward every reigning Master-Signifier. In this precise sense, Lacan points out that, in the passage from one discourse (social link) to another , the"discourse of the analyst" always emerges for a brief moment: the aim of this discourse is precisely to"produce" the Master-Signifier, that is to say, to render visible its "produced," artificial, contingent character. 1 This maintaining of a distance with regard to the Master-Signifier characterizes the basic attitude of philosophy. It is no accident that Lacan, in his Seminar on Transference, refers to Socrates,"the first philosopher," as the paradigm of the analyst: in Plato's Symposium, Socrates refuses to be identified with agalma, the hidden treasure in himself, with the unknown ingredient responsible for the Master's charisma, and persists in the void filled out by agalma. 2 It is against this background that we have to locate the "amazement" that marks the origins of philosophy: philosophy

begins the moment we do not simply accept what exists as given ("It's like that!", "Law is law!", etc.), but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible. What characterizes philosophy is this"step back" from actuality into possibility-- the attitude best rendered by Adorno's and Horkheimer's motto quoted by Fredric Jameson:"Not Italy itself is given here, but the proof that it exists." 3 Nothing is more antiphilosophical than the well-known anecdote about Diogenes the cynic who, when confronted with the Eleatic proofs of the nonexistence and inherent impossibility of movement, answered by simply standing up and taking a walk. (As Hegel points out, the standard version of this anecdote passes over in silence its denouement: Diogenes soundly thrashed his pupil who applauded the Master's gesture, punishing him for accepting the reference to a pretheoretical factum brutum as a proof.) Theory involves

the power to abstract from our starting point in order to reconstruct it subsequently on the basis of its presuppositions, its transcendental "conditions of possibility"-- theory as such, by definition, requires the suspension of the Master-Signifier.

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case No risk of Middle East war Maloney and Takeyh, 7 – *senior fellow for Middle East Policy at the Saban Center for Middle East Studies at the Brookings Institution AND **senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (Susan and Ray, International Herald Tribune, 6/28, “Why the Iraq War Won't Engulf the Mideast”, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2007/0628iraq_maloney.aspx) Yet, the Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians, Syrians, and others are very unlikely to go to war either to protect their own sect or ethnic group or to prevent one country from gaining the upper hand in Iraq. The reasons are fairly straightforward. First, Middle Eastern leaders, like politicians everywhere, are primarily interested in one thing: self-preservation. Committing forces to Iraq is an inherently risky proposition, which, if the conflict went badly, could threaten domestic political stability. Moreover, most Arab armies are geared toward regime protection rather than projecting power and thus have little capability for sending troops to Iraq. Second, there is cause for concern about the so-called blowback scenario in which jihadis returning from Iraq destabilize their home countries, plunging the region into conflict. Middle Eastern leaders are preparing for this possibility. Unlike in the 1990s, when Arab fighters in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union returned to Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and became a source of instability, Arab security services are being vigilant

about who is coming in and going from their countries. In the last month, the Saudi government has arrested approximately 200 people suspected of ties with militants. Riyadh is also building a 700 kilometer wall along part of its frontier with Iraq in order to keep militants out of the kingdom. Finally, there is no precedent for Arab leaders to commit forces to conflicts in which they are not directly involved. The Iraqis and the Saudis did send small contingents to fight the Israelis in 1948 and 1967, but they were either ineffective or never made it. In the 1970s and 1980s, Arab countries other than Syria, which had a compelling interest in establishing its hegemony over Lebanon, never committed forces either to protect the Lebanese from the Israelis or from other Lebanese. The civil war in Lebanon was regarded as someone else's fight. Indeed, this is the way many leaders view the current situation in Iraq. To Cairo, Amman and Riyadh, the situation in Iraq is worrisome, but in the end it is an Iraqi and American fight. As far as Iranian mullahs are concerned, they have long preferred to press their interests through proxies as opposed to direct engagement. At a time when Tehran has access and influence over powerful Shiite militias, a massive cross-border incursion is both unlikely and unnecessary. So Iraqis will remain locked in a sectarian and ethnic struggle that outside powers may abet, but will remain within the borders of Iraq. The Middle East is a region both prone and accustomed to civil wars. But given its experience with ambiguous conflicts, the region has also developed an intuitive ability to contain its civil strife and prevent local conflicts from enveloping the entire Middle East.

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1nr No risk of conflict escalation in Latin America – regional organizations check Miami Herald ‘13 (“UN, Latin American leaders stress regional cooperation for global peace” August 6) UNITED NATIONS Hoping to improve peace and security around the world, Argentine President Cristina Fernández led a day-long Security Council meeting Tuesday where she and other leaders said regions in turmoil could learn from how Latin American and the Caribbean have settled internal conflicts.¶ “The lessons that we have learned, in terms of our regional and sub-regional organizations, (suggest) collaborating with the Security Council, with the United Nations, is a very useful way of finding solutions,” said Fernández, citing a number of resolved conflicts in South America, including the trade dispute between neighbors Colombia and Venezuela.¶ Fernandez chaired the meeting as the representative of Argentina, which has taken over the rotating chairmanship of the Security Council for August.¶ Representatives from regional organizations — the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Mercosur trading bloc, and the Organization of American States — boasted of benefits to working within the U.N. system.¶ “South America is a region in which we can say there is no risk of interstate conflicts involving threats to peace and security and extreme violence,” said Eda Rivas, Peru’s foreign minister. “However, UNASUR member states recognize that peace and security must be preserved permanently and all South Americans are convinced that the best way to do this is to strive for an integration based on respect for the fundamental principles of international law.”¶ U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon praised CELAC and UNASUR and said he was pleased with last month’s U.N.-Caribbean Community meeting, which included discussions of how to tackle transnational organized crime and security.¶ But the U.N. chief stressed how cooperation with regional organizations could improve, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, where conflicts in Syria and Sudan continue to strain U.N. peacekeeping and mediation efforts.¶ “There is always room for improvement,” Ban said. “We are better at sharing information and analysis on brewing crises, but we have to work harder on swift response and long-term prevention” of regional conflict.¶ Several Latin American ministers pointed to participation in the U.N. stabilization mission in Haiti as an examples of their commitment to cooperation.¶ Haitian Foreign Minister Pierre Richard Casimir lauded the U.N. peacekeeping activities in his country.¶ “Haiti will continue to work with all those who believe the involvement of regional organizations are essential to continuing to grow the future,” Casimir said. “I trust this debate will give us food for thought in the U.N. and in regional organizations.”¶ U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, who attended her first Security Council meeting since her confirmation last week, said the Obama administration was pleased with the coalition in Haiti.¶ “The United States applauds states around the region, including many represented in this room, for the essential support they give to Haiti through contributing troops to MINUSTAH, providing development assistance and helping build Haitian capacity,” she said.

More link ev – collapse of American-centered order encourages regionalism Leon T. Hadar, Cato Institute, "Welcome to the Post-Unipolar World: Great for the U.S. and for the Rest," HUFFINGTON POST, 7--8--10, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11967

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In a way, the collapse of the American-controlled unipolar system — and before that, the end of the bipolar system of the Cold War — should help us recognize that international relations have ceased to be a zero-sum-game under which gains of other global powers become by definition a loss for America, and vice versa. It was inevitable that former members of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc like Ukraine, Poland, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia will try to stabilize their diplomatic and economic ties with Russia, while at the same time deterring powerful Russia by expanding cooperation with other players: Poland with Ukraine with Germany; Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia with Turkey and Iran, and all of these countries with the U.S and the European Union (EU).¶ Similarly, Washington should welcome — not discourage — the growing diplomatic and economic role that Turkey is playing in the Middle East, which could help bring stability to Iraq (and allow for American military to start withdrawing from there), moderate the policies of Iran (and prevent a military conflict with the U.S.), encourage negotiations between Israel and Syria, and lead eventually to the creation of a more stable Middle East where Turkey, Iran, the Arabs states and Israel will be more secure and prosperous.¶ It is not surprising those representatives of economic and bureaucratic interests in Washington, and some of America’s client states that draw benefits from American interventionist policy, operate under the axiom that the U.S. should always be prepared to “do something” to “resolve” this or that conflict, here, there, and everywhere. That kind of never-ending American interventionism only discourages regional powers , counting on Washington to come to their aid, from actually taking steps to resolve those conflicts that end-up drawing-in other regional and global players, ensuring that America will never leave Japan and Korea (to help contain China), Iraq (to deter Iran), Afghanistan (to deal with Pakistan). And that is exactly what the prointerventionists in Washington want when they suggested that America is the “indispensable power.”¶ In any case, the notion that American hegemony is a precondition for global peace and security and that Washington needs therefore to extend its military commitments in Europe, the Middle East, Caucus, East Asia and elsewhere is not very practical — America does not have the resources in order to play that ambitious role — and is not very helpful, considering the most recent U.S. experience in the Middle East. The U.S. should not retreat from the world. But by embracing a policy of “constructive disengagement” from some parts of the world, America could help itself and the rest of the world Further, American involvement hinders development of regionalism but doesn’t stabilize the transition to globalism Michael J. Mazarr, Professor, National Security Strategy, U.S. National War College, "The Risks of Ignoring Strategic Insolvency," WASHINGTON QUARTERLY v. 35 n. 4, Fall 2012, p. 12-13. Global strategies and specific military plans lose credibility. As the leading power is overtaken by others, if it refuses to prioritize and attempts instead to uphold all its commitments equally, the credibility of its regional plans, postures, and threats is destined to erode. Recent literature on credibility argues that it is not based merely on past actions, but from an adversary’s calculations of the current power capabilities

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at a state’s disposal. When Hitler’s Germany was considering whether to take seriously the pledges and commitments of the Western allies, for example, he paid much more attention to their existing capabilities, their current national will, and the perceived feasibility of their strategic posture than to reputations formed over years or decades of actions. Indeed, such judgments seem to derive not from a checklist of a rival’s defense programs or military actions, but from a much more diffuse and visceral sense of the trajectory of a state’s power relative to its current posture.¶ What is now clear is that the consensus of such perceptions is shifting decisively against the tenability of the existing U.S. paradigm of global power projection. It is, in fact, natural for rising challengers to see weakness in the leading power’s capacities as a by-product of the growing self-confidence and faith in their own abilities. There is already abundant evidence of such perceptual shifts in the assertive leaders and elites of rising powers today, who while respecting continuing U.S. strengths and expecting the United States to remain the primus inter pares for decades to come, perhaps indefinitely nonetheless see current U.S. global commitments as excessive for a debt-ridden and ‘‘declining’’ power.¶ In China, as a leading example, senior officials and influential analysts view the United States as troubled, overextended, and increasingly unable to fulfill its defense paradigm. They believe that the United States will continue as a global power, but expect it to be in a different guise . Conversations with business, government, and military officials from burgeoning powers such as India, Turkey, Brazil, and Indonesia produce the same broad theme: Structural trends in economics, politics, and military affairs are undermining the degree of American predominance and the sustainability of the existing paradigm of U.S. influence. A leading theme is a growing belief in the social and economic decay of the U.S. model and the inability of U.S. political system to address major issues. Recent polls and studies of opinion in emerging powers come to many of the same conclusions.¶ These perceptions will be fed and nurtured by parallel actions and trends which will undercut the viability of the existing paradigm. Critics at home are already suggesting that the United States will be unable to sustain the demands of its ‘‘strategic tilt to Asia’’ given planned budget cuts, or meet the requirements of both Middle East and Asian contingencies. As the United States is forced to pursue cost-saving measures, such as cancellations of major weapons systems or troop reductions from key regions, the sense of a paradigm in free-fall will accelerate . We see this already in the recommendations in many reports, even those arguing for a general promotion of forward deployment, for a reduction if not elimination of the U.S. force presence in Europe.¶ In addition to a loss of global credibility, a paradigm in crisis also threatens the credibility of specific U.S. military and foreign policy doctrines. When concepts and doctrines flow from stressed conventional-wisdom worldviews, those concepts and doctrines begin to take on the air of empty rhetoric. A good parallel was the British ‘‘two-power’’ doctrine (the notion that the Royal Navy should match the world’s next two best fleets combined), which eventually became a form of self-reassurance without strategic significance. After a certain point, Aaron Friedberg explains, ‘‘official analyses of Britain’s position took on an air of incompleteness and unreality.’’ One can begin to sense this tendency in some recent U.S. conceptual statements, such as AirSea Battle: from all the public evidence, this concept appears to respond to growing challenges to U.S.

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Link Debate The plan is an instances of US reforming the international institution in order to fit themproves that regionalism is better than 1 size fits all Vezirgiannidou, 13 - Lecturer in International Organizations, University of Birmingham (SEVASTIELENI, “The United States and rising powers in a post-hegemonic global order,” International Affairs, May, Wiley Online) The current US approach to rising powers, which engages them as equals in informal forums with little ‘hard’ law capabilities, while being passive or hesitant in reforming international institutions where it has a primary role (and a veto), exemplifies its own commitment to sovereignty and freedom of action in international politics. The US is just as reluctant as the BRICS to be bound by hard law commitments. It also indicates a lukewarm commitment to sharing its power with rising powers in hard law institutions. Some of this reluctance may be attributable to the constraints of congressional politics (and American exemptionalism); its strength can also depend on who sits in the White House and who his advisers are.118 Irrespective of the cause, this reluctance to share power formally while promoting multilateralism in informal settings is likely to have transformative implications on global order if it continues.¶ Specifically, the resulting order will become more plurilateral than multilateral , with the exclusion of minor powers and most decision-making moving into forums like the G20. It will also shift to more ‘soft law’ policy­making, as informal institutions will be less intrusive on sovereignty but also less able to move far beyond political declarations followed up on a voluntary basis. Finally, it is also likely to be more fragmented , as each power establishes a ‘sphere of influence’ in its region. This kind of order will not necessarily be more unstable, but even in such an order the US will have to accept some limits to its exercise of power abroad; it will not, though, be limited in its domestic policies, thus satisfying the exemptionalists in Congress. However, US policy-makers should be aware of the direction in which their current choices are moving global order; if they do not desire such an order, they should question their strategy towards both rising and minor powers and should show more leadership in the reform of formal institutions.

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