The Making of the Enemy, by Pierre CONESA

“We are going to do you the worst service, we are going to deprive you of an enemy! “, predicted in 1989 Alexander Arbatov, diplomatic adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet enemy had all the qualities of a "good" enemy: solid, constant, coherent. Its disappearance has in fact undermined the cohesion of the West and made its power more futile.
To counter technical unemployment which followed the fall of the Wall, States (democratic or not), strategic think tanks, intelligence services and other opinion makers have conscientiously "fabricated the enemy" and described a world constituted of threats, risks and challenges.
Is the enemy a necessity? It is very useful in any case to weld a nation, establish its power and occupy its military-industrial sector. We can draw up a typology of the enemies of the last twenty years: close enemy (border conflicts: India-Pakistan, Greece-Turkey, Peru-Ecuador), planetary rival (China), intimate enemy (civil wars: Yugoslavia, Rwanda), enemy hidden (conspiracy theory: Jews, communists), absolute evil (religious extremism), conceptual enemy, media...
How does this “abnormal” moment come about when the man kills in good conscience? With an uncommon finesse of analysis and strength of conviction, Pierre Conesa explains how the relationship of hostility is created, how belligerence finds its roots in realities, but also in ideological constructions, perceptions or misunderstandings. . Because if some enemies are very real, others, analyzed with hindsight, turn out to be surprisingly artificial.
What conclusion can be drawn from all this? If the enemy is a construction, to defeat it, it is not necessary to beat it, but to deconstruct it. In the end, it is less a military matter than a political cause. Less a matter of caliber than a matter of men.

About the Author: Pierre Conesa

Pierre Conesa, a history graduate and former student of the ENA, was a member of the Strategic Thinking Committee of the Ministry of Defence. A teacher at Sciences-Po, he writes regularly for Le Monde diplomatique and various international relations journals. He is notably the author of Guide du Paradis: comparative advertising of the beyond (L'Aube, 2004 and 2006), of The Mechanics of chaos: bushism, proliferation and terrorism (L'Aube, 2007) and of The Making of the enemy (Robert Laffont, collection “Le Monde comme il va”, 2011).