that the flexibility simply makes more credible, and therefore more likely, an
outbreak of nuclear war. Though the period ofsuperpowernuclear stalemate
has ended, the doctrine itself may become even more important, because of
the need of major powers to maintain the widest possible array of military
capacities in order to respond appropriately to any level of crisis, such as the
need to intervene in contexts such as theGulf War. This idea returned to
importance early in the 21st century when the US publicly refused to promise
that it would never use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear armed states. This
was in the context of the ‘war against terrorism’ which followed the attacks on
the US of 11 September 2001; the entire notion of such a war underlines the
need for maximum flexibility and sophistication in armed response to all forms
of threat.
Force Majeure
Force majeureis a phrase which indicates that a given political outcome is
dependent on the exercise of irresistible force rather than on consent, agree-
ment or legal process. Thus a strike could be settled byforce majeureif a
government sent troops into a factory to stop it rather than attempting to
negotiate with the strikers. A government which had no claim to legitimacy or
popular support, but simply depended on repression, would be said to rule by
force majeure. Such a situation may be deemed to have existed in Poland
following the suppression of the independent trade union Solidarity in
December 1981 and the subsequent imposition of martial law. The annexation
of Kuwait as the 19th Iraqi province, had it succeeded, would have been a
classic example offorce majeure. One implication is that those affected are
absolved from any responsibility to oppose the new arrangements because of
the sheer impossibility of so doing.
Foucault
Michel Foucault (1926–84) is, of all the post-modernist intellectuals, the one
who has had most impact on political science and sociology. (Labels here are
always difficult, and it is entirely possible that Foucault would himself have
denied that he was a post-modernist, just as he denied while alive various other
labels; none the less, if one inspected the reading list of any university course in
the politics ofpost-modernism, his work would be the most cited.) Though
his work had a very broad range, and his educational formation was very wide,
Foucault was essentially a psychologist by training, and indeed his original
stance was amongst those teaching what was known as ‘antipsychiatry’. As such
Force Majeure