THE RETURN OF THE WARLORDS
and other political structures within the large group and its social context
Felix de Mendelssohn (Vienna)
Email: felix.de.mendelssohn@inode.at
Paper given at the 15th International Congress of IAGP (International Association of Group Psychotherapy)
Istanbul, Turkey, August 2003
 

This paper will look at some recurring phenomena in large group process that have to do with the distribution of power.  What kind of ‚power‘ is it possible to have, to seize, or to be given, as a conductor or as a participant in the large analytic group ?  How do power struggles and cyclically recurring processes of power distribution in the group mirror current events and structures in society at large ?

       A heuristic model of psychosocial development based on Containment <-> Confrontation is suggested as an approach to dealing with these phenomena. 

       At the 5^th IAGP Pacific Rim Conference in Melbourne I gave a paper on the idea of “Tyrannophobia” – a term coined by Th. Hobbes in Leviathan – which addressed group leadership and the crisis inherent in democracy.       Here I want to pursue this theme further in the context of recent world developments, which suggest to me that Western democracy is in an even greater crisis than I had thought, due perhaps to its often wilful confusion with military imperialism and with the globalization of a neo-liberal market economy. In order to clarify these issues it has to be underlined that democracy is not just about freedom, as some would have it, but also about justice, which imposes limits on freedom. Freedom and justice are in fact intrinsically conflicted, at loggerheads with one another, and democracy, in its various imperfect forms, is about managing this conflict.

       In the first part of this presentation I’m going to look a little at the social economics and politics of the “Warlord-Syndrome”, in the second part I’ll suggest some aspects of group analytic work which seem to mirror these perverse conditions. Most of my material for this first part comes from findings of a workshop in the Dept. of Anthropology at the University of Cologne on “War as the Norm, as a Component of the Market System”.

       After the wars in Ethiopia many of the warlords involved became very successful commercial entrepreneurs who got along with each other quite well. They moved from violence against each other to commerce with each other without difficulty, as both were in their own self-interest. I myself had a shocking experience of such a phenomenon when I found myself in jail in Belfast in Northern Ireland for 3 months in 1972. I had been working there as a journalist and was imprisoned under charges of terrorist activities, from which I was later acquitted.  This was a unique opportunity to experience the warlord-syndrome, since with me in prison were two top leaders of both the Catholic IRA and the Protestant UDF terrorist militias.  The alarming cynicism of the situation was revealed to me when I saw these men, who outside of jail had seemed intent on destroying each other’s forces, walking together around the prison yard making gun-running deals - actually selling each other weapons.

       The Cologne workshop informed me that one of the first strategies of warlords during wartime is to destroy alternative sources of income such as fields and factories, in order to create a work force that can only subsist via war.  Afterwards, the population can only survive via the projects of the warlords.  Thus war and violence can be seen as good for business, in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Congo, Sierra Leone and in the Balkans - where the shift is now from Kosovo to Albania and to parts of Macedonia - but also in Colombia (where it is not just about drugs, but also emeralds).

       The Cologne studies confirm how effectively terrorist organisations are operated by warlords of the IRA in Ireland and ETA in the Basque Provinces.  Here profitable businesses are run on the basis of protection rackets, arms smuggling and (note this!) in training such groups in other countries.  A great deal of money has flowed from the USA to the IRA in the form of donations, but these funds get thin when there are no victims, so it can be important to create new victims, especially among one’s own women and children.  Marketing and the media are important in order to keep the issues in the public eye

       In Africa, particularly in Somalia and Uganda, northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia, where gun-running is the chief commodity, the following patterns are observed.  In order for them to buy guns, the fathers must obtain cattle for their sons, often from the mother as an advance on their inheritance.  These guns can be used by the sons as a means of increased income through robbery and pillage. Semi-automatic weapons are especially prized.  The young men become more independent and self-sufficient in this way, the gerontocracy (rule by the aged) is weakened, the elders are no longer able to regulate conflict as they used to.  They may say “But we have never attacked our neighbours, the Samburu tribe”, but the young men are no longer listening to them.

       Killing has now become a productive activity whereas previously, killing an enemy made one unclean, as Freud describes it in Totem and Taboo.  After a purification ceremony, such killers usually became healers, especially of pregnant women with sicknesses. Among the Yanomami, successful warriors achieved honour and respect, but only in this capacity and not in any other, since their survival and ageing rate, and therefore their wisdom, were the lowest in the adult population.

       Now the problem is how to reintegrate and re-socialize these young warriors.  In South Africa 22.000 people die each year from internal violence, in the Palestinian territories 6000.  The war goes on within the society, re-socializing becomes nearly impossible. Even harder is the situation in Liberia or northern Uganda where young children are kidnapped and brought up to be warriors and killers.

       In African societies both AIDS and war contribute to internal violence via the resurgence of the belief in witchcraft.  If one is struck by Aids or a wartime bullet, the first question is of course: Why me?  The explanation in our societies tends to be that one was not careful enough or simply unlucky, but in these African countries the cause is generally attributed to witchcraft.  Everyone and anyone can be a bewitcher, i.e. a potential enemy.  Thus there is no community solidarity in the face of the common threat, but rather the opposite, internal terror, everyone against everyone else.  Anti-witchcraft campaigners, often in the Catholic Church, search out the guilty parties.  The Uganda Martyrs Guild hunts down witches and supposed cannibals who are then made to confess. Enormous anxiety is generated: opportunities for denunciation are rife (reminding one of the Inquisition during the European Counter-Reformation).  The question is, whom did the suspect cannibal eat and who helped him? The threatened suspects are forced to give out the names of supposed “helpers”.

       John Darby of the US Institute of Peace has studied how in Israel and the Occupied Territories, the Basque Provinces and in Sri Lanka, violence became contagious between governments, militias and splinter groups.  Even in S. Africa after a successful peace process and the work of Truth and Reconciliation Commission there has been an enormous increase in criminal acts of violence, the guns are still in circulation and the mentality too.  As Darby puts it: “The societies get used to it, as they are no longer able to control the violence which they had themselves engendered.”

       Such protracted violence means that traditionally established language groups or ethnic “belonging” no longer function as builders of identity.  When people kill off each other, differences are invented, new identities are created. In parts of former Yugoslavia among much of the poorer peasantry, religion had been for a long time more or less syncretistic, it was not so important whether one was Moslem, Catholic or Orthodox. There were Catholic saints who could cure some ills, Moslem sages or holy places could cure others, Orthodox priests were good at blessing new-born children etc.  Communism was here often well accepted, not only because of a certain economic stability it offered, but also because it encouraged these syncretistic tendencies through intermarriage.  During and after the war however, genealogies and ancestors became fixed or faked, suddenly everyone seemed to know where they came from, although this was mostly quite impossible to determine.

       There is of course a reverse side to this phenomenon.  When the Kurdish PKK stepped up their activities in Turkey after 1988, an estimated total of 3 million people fled as refugees to Western Turkey, especially when in the mid-1990s whole areas were depopulated by the military seeking to suppress the guerrilla movement. These refugees lived for a long time in tent camps, with high sickness rates and no opportunities for education and medical care. They then gravitated to the edges of the large cities where their social bonds collapsed, creating perhaps generations of hopelessness.

       In Kashmir suicide and divorce rates, drug use and prostitution increased with the war. But many of the guerrilla leaders became very rich through land speculation, ecological devastation, illegal trafficking and booms in construction work. In Afghanistan, perhaps the best-known modern case, war became not just a means to an end but an end in itself, a commodity or currency within the market system, with arms production a major factor in the success of the warlords before the Russians had been driven out.  But ultimately the influx of foreign weaponry had made the whole population increasingly dependent on these outside sources. It was of course the Taliban government which, in its fundamentalist, authoritarian fashion, tried to stop the rot, via a state monopoly on violence and repression.  As we are witnessing today, with the overthrow of the Taliban regime the warlords have returned, with their local economies based on the production of and traffic in arms and drugs.

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       Now let us return to group analytic work. I only have time to point briefly to some fields of comparison, in training programmes, in clinical technique and in certain recent theorizing.

       I was first alerted to these concerns in my training work in the Ukraine, and later and to a lesser extent in Israel.  In the Ukraine I became aware of how the ‘social unconscious’, using Earl Hopper’s terminology, can not only become conscious through acting-out, but also how this acting-out does not necessarily disappear by being worked through, it stays there on an organisational level. We know that among the post-Soviet countries Ukraine is one of the most affected by the emergence of mafias, which to a large extent have taken over the political and economic vacuum and stand in the way of democratic progress.  In the large analytic groups in the Ukraine one could already observe the jockeying for power and the marking out of territories in a typical warlord fashion. There were new markets being created here, not for guns, jewels or drugs, but for the institution and establishment of local training institutes for psychotherapy.

       Within the large group process, leading psychiatrists and university professors were staking their claims and ideologically or economically rallying their followers as to who would take power when the foreigners had gone. Since we analysts often understand so little about the use of real political power – we tend to concentrate only on the underlying issues of narcissistic psychopathology  –  it was often hard to tell which such institutes were going to be benign forces for good, and which would be scams, rip-offs or authoritarian clan structures. I think, following Volkan’s ideas, that it is the lack of adequate mourning which enhances this confusion and it is the lack of a civil society which makes such mourning difficult.

       It is of course a great problem when aggressive rage and mourning become indistinguishable. When we watch the funerals of “martyrs” of the IRA or of the Palestinian Hamas on television, with guns fired by masked participants and women screaming out of hate more than grief, it is hard not to be deeply shocked, perhaps especially by the behaviour of these women.  But we need to understand how such often desperately oppressed, one might say “burnt-out” women, by giving vent to their rage also stand to gain significant benefits in social acceptance and prestige by their behaviour.

       But we also have examples of how a shift from rage to genuine mourning can be instigated as a female issue, specifically around motherhood, when we see the inspiring work of the Argentinean Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, or the Mothers for Peace in Ireland and the Women in Black in Israel..

   In the Ukrainian case I was fortunate to witness an instance of this gender issue, significantly in a small analytic group rather than a large one. In one session two male psychiatrists began a political debate that escalated into a frightening shouting match. One of them was a nostalgic supporter of the old Soviet system, the other a fervently radical nationalist reactionary. Their yelling silenced all the others and I thought they might start a physical fight in the group.  After a while I ventured the opinion that some conflicts just don’t go away through therapy, they may be too deep for that.  At this some of the women in the group began to talk of relatives who had been killed in nationalist pogroms or who had been denounced to the KGB and died in Stalinist prison camps.  Almost everyone, it turned out, had had a relative who had been deported to Siberia and died there, for one reason or another, or perhaps for no good reason at all.  The deeply moving awareness of group mourning and reconciliation which followed, showed nevertheless how necessary the previous ideological outburst had been.

In another example we had to deal in a group with three psychiatrists who worked in the same provincial hospital.  (Of course they should never have been in the same group, but as anyone knows who has worked in building new institutes in such places, this is sometimes hard to avoid. The few interested professionals all know each other and also often know how to “rig the setting” somewhat.  This is of a great pity, because we try to train them in working with so-called “stranger groups” where no-one knows anyone else, without them having really experienced this setting.)

       Now one of this Ukrainian “trio infernal” was the boss, I’ll call him Sergei, a rather sullen and extremely silent man who seemed to have the other two, Natasha and Ivan, under control. They hardly contributed anything to the group except provocations, jokes and cynical remarks.  They seemed to be plotting how to survive the whole experience without putting their cards on the table, in order just to gain their credentials and then get down to business. It was a kind of mafia “omertà” or vow of silence.  When heavily confronted by one group member over this behaviour, they all three drove off home without a word before the last block session.

       In the next training block some months later all three reappeared.  The group talked a little about what had happened last time, without much interest, occasionally someone had a small outburst, since the trio was still not much more forthcoming than usual. But it was somewhat more restrained and less dominant.  The group seemed to acquiesce fairly peaceably to a remark made by Sasha, the man who had confronted ‘the boss’ the last time: “We are used to the mafia here, we are not even particularly angry with them, as long as they leave us in peace.  Perhaps it is better we are not too involved in their business.”

       As a result much good work was done by the group over the whole training, even within this trio: Igor the ‘boss’ seemed to gain in empathy and sense of humour over the sessions, while Natasha, very seductive and the most intelligent of the trio, who originally had come provocatively dressed like a call-girl, seemed to make great personal progress, perhaps just by silently and vicariously working through some problems of other female members.  Ivan, who had seemed the most disturbed in his patently perverse structure, could only adapt superficially to the group without really profiting from it.

       I suggest that the mechanisms of used by the group and its conductor in this impasse were grouped around a reciprocal dynamic of ‘containment<->confrontation’ - something that politicians could learn from -  but unfortunately I don’t have time to discuss this further here (see my previous papers).

*

       Now Israel is a very different case.  Not only is there an established and highly sophisticated civil society in place, there is also a deep understanding of mourning as an individual and collective process with a long history.  But there is also a strong tradition of self-reliance and a deep mistrust of outside interference, having to do with the history of the British Mandate over the territory and of the subsequent unhappy experience with the UN contingents there before independence. So we outsiders as training conductors do have to contend with feelings of powerlessness vis-à-vis much of the in-fighting and lobbying for territory and power, which setting up new training institutes necessarily involves. The competences for doing therapeutic work and for political decision-making have had to be divided, perhaps even the stricter the better, though this is only a partial solution, since it works better in theory than in practice.  But the questions of uncertain boundaries and dividing walls affect the whole country, so we are dealing with the intractability of the foundation matrix here.

       I’ll close with a brief word on current theorizing over some of these themes. I’m referring to a highly-praised recently published book by Cohen, Ettin and Fidler in the USA entitled Group Psychotherapy and Political Reality - A Two-Way Mirror, which I think is more of a distorting mirror and seriously confuses some salient issues. The authors seem to think that group analysis and democracy are more or less the same thing, that analytic process groups build democracy in terms of participation, power-sharing and what they term the “synergy between cooperation (or affiliation) and competition (or autonomy)”, as suggested by the socio-biologist E.O.Wilson. In this model there is absolutely no conflict between individuals being essentially rivalrous, envious or power-oriented and them also working together in constructive and harmonious fashion.

       This Utopian vision is what you get when you more or less throw out Freud and his ideas about the Unconscious and about Eros, Thanatos and the Drive Theory. I think our work is something very different from building democracy, especially such a flawed idea of democracy which takes no concern for the basic conflict between freedom and justice that I mentioned at the beginning.  Our work is to analyze the problem, not to think we have the solution.

       It comes as no surprise to see that these authors take as their guidelines Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. I would say, with some reference to Afghanistan and more so to the current Iraq situation, if we are going to insist on exporting democracy, let’s at least realize how hard it is to get it right.  And if this seems like simple Eurocentric Bush-bashing and disparagement of the US administration, I’ll temper it with an admittedly rather radical quote from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of Earth:

       “Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardour, cynicism and violence.  Look at how the shadow of her palaces stretches out ever further! Every one of her movements has burst the bounds of space and thought.  Europe has declined all humility and all modesty; but she has also set her face against all solicitude and tenderness…When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.”

       Edward Said, from whose essay Freud and the Non-European I have lifted this quote, goes on to comment: “Fanon rejects the European model entirely, and demands instead that all human beings collaborate together in the invention of new ways to create what he calls “the new man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.”

       This too, I must admit, seems in the light of Freud’s cultural pessimism to be just another Utopia, although of course we must never give up hope.  But in the meantime we could recognize the modesty of Wilfred Bion’s idea of “making the best of a bad job” and be more circumspect about our own self-idealization and imperialistic basic assumptions when it comes to exporting a particular form of Political Democracy or Psychoanalytic Group Therapy       Perhaps in both fields, when the flame wars and the actual violence are over, or at least somewhat contained, the warlords may be not only part of the problem but also part of the solution. At any rate they may contribute to avoiding anarchy and provide some basic structure and stability.  There is a kind of genuine power-sharing involved here, which we in the West usually aren’t so willing to do. We still have a lot to learn.