The EU and armed drones – epilogue
The countries of the European Union are moving into the era of weaponized drones. While the United Kingdom remains the only EU country to deploy armed drones, several other EU member states are seeking to acquire weapons-equipped unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or are debating their acquisition. Many European countries are also now involved in projects to develop weapons-capable drones themselves, though it is expected that European-made drones will not be ready for deployment for at least 10 years. Nevertheless, despite these developments and despite the extensive use of armed drones by the United States, the EU has not yet adopted any collective public position on some of the most hotly debated issues associated with the use of UAVs. Even individual member states have been slow to expound clear positions on the legal parameters for drone strikes. From one perspective, it might be thought odd that the development of a new weapons platform should give rise to demands for a defined European position. Admittedly, the acquisition of armed UAVs raises some questions for military forces that are different from those associated with other weapons systems: their combination of targeting precision, ability to remain over the battlespace for an extended period and elimination of any physical risk to the forces operating them are qualitatively different from other available military technologies and change the nature of the military engagement with the enemy. However the most striking feature of the global debate about drones has been the degree to which it has come to revolve around the way the United States has used UAVs to target suspected terrorists outside of battlefield conditions as part of its global campaign against al-Qaeda and associated groups. Calls for the EU to adopt a position on drones can most often be reduced to a request for clarification of the European view on the legality and morality of targeted killing conducted against individuals who do not pose an immediate threat to the forces attacking them. US practice in this area has gone beyond the boundaries that most western countries previously regarded as defining the limits of legitimate use of force. There are several reasons why it would be desirable for the EU to adopt a clearer line on this question. Bruno Oliveira Martins and Benedikt Backhaus (2015) highlight what is perhaps the most important one: given Europe’s long-standing role in helping define international norms, it would be regrettable for the EU not to participate in establishing the correct standards for a practice that could, under the legal regime asserted by the United States, cause significant damage to the international rule of law. As Elisabeth Schweiger (2015) argues, European silence should not necessarily be read as consent, but the
Drone warfare and morality in riskless war
In this article, we examine the more or less instinctive uneasiness felt towards the use of armed drones by many scholars, policy-makers and military personnel. How is it, we ask, that many people – including members of the armed forces – acknowledge that armed drones offer an expedient and legally defensible solution to pressing security challenges and yet feel uncomfortable about them? The article's main argument is that much of the criticism of drone warfare is associated with an underlying ethically conditioned discomfort with so-called “riskless warfare”. The very feature that makes drones so attractive to policy-makers and military commanders – their risk free deployment – is, paradoxically, also one of the primary causes why many feel fundamentally uncomfortable with them. To make this argument, we build on the works of Martin van Creveld and Paul W. Kahn. While van Creveld argues that war should first and foremost be perceived of as a social activity governed more by the soldiers conducting the war than by the rationalty of states, Kahn identifies a ‘paradox of riskless warfare’ because our pursuit of asymmetry undermines reciprocity and thereby also the moral justification for killing the opponent's combatants.
The fight against the ‘anti-nation’ as a historical mission: the delegitimization of the enemy in Italian Fascism and Spanish Fascism
For the Italian Partito Nazionale Fascista (Pnf) and the Falange Española (Fe), the political community coincided with the nation, conceived not as an undifferentiated conglomeration of citizens but as a community of believers in a ‘religion of the Fatherland’. The common goal of the Italian and the Spanish fascists, since their appearance on the political scene of their respective countries, was the defence of national values. But the claim to being the only and exclusive representatives of those values denied any effective freedom of dissent, even to those who respected national values but intended them in a different way. This article will analyse how the ideologues of the Pnf and the Fe articulated their respective campaigns against the anti-national enemies in order to legitimise their own parties and pave the way to the effective realization of their own nations: nations that had to be clearly and totally fascist.