Showtime’s hit show Homeland understands a key political dynamic that pundits and international relations scholars often fail to get. Global politics is less and less about conflicts between states and more and more about actors who work across state boundaries to build alliances and fight battles, often using these alliances to circumvent rules that would prevent them from doing things that they really want to do.
The current season of Homeland (SPOILER ALERT) starts with the revelation that German intelligence agencies are in cahoots with the CIA. The CIA uses a secret program to tap into German social media and other Internet data, so as to target Islamic extremism. It then shares the information it gathers with the BND (the German equivalent of the CIA). Importantly, German privacy laws prevent the BND from collecting the data themselves. Thus, the CIA/BND relationship offers a transnational workaround that allows German intelligence officers to make an end run around Germany’s constitution.
This plot is revealed by an awkward alliance between a libertarian German hacker, who moonlights in an Internet porn shop, and a journalist in self-imposed exile from the United States, who is depicted (at least in the first two episodes) as a civil liberties zealot. When the program is revealed, shock waves reverberate through the transatlantic partners. The problem for the German chancellor is not that the program existed but that it was made public.
Melodramatics (and controversial depictions of Islam) aside, Homeland’s version of transatlantic counter-terrorism politics gets a lot of things right. There are journalists and civil liberties activists who have left the United States for Berlin, which has become a hub of dissidence like London in the 19th-century era of Karl Marx. Wikileaks data makes it clear that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was far more tolerant of U.S. incursions on privacy in private than she was in public, and her right hand man, Wolfgang Schäuble, was privately enthusiastic about U.S. proposals to limit privacy in favor of homeland security.
Homeland’s account of the relationship between Europe and the U.S. also does better than the standard arguments of pundits such as Robert Kagan. In his well-known and influential book, Of Paradise and Power, Kagan caricatures the United States as coming from Mars and Europe as coming from Venus. In other words, the U.S. relies on unilateral, coercive tools to fight the global war on terror, while the EU cares more about rules and legal structures. This suggests that EU-US arguments over spying and privacy are straightforward battles between big states and jurisdictions, over whose rules win.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:10/19/2015