The enemy of everyone

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The enemy of all: The pirate and the right (in the English original The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations ) is a historical work by Daniel Heller-Roazen . First published by Zone Books on August 28, 2009 , it covers the legal history of piracy .

title

The title of the work refers to a well-known quote from Cicero , in which the pirate is referred to as the common enemy of all.

“Nam pirata non est ex perduellium numero definitus, sed communis hostis omnium; cum hoc nec fides debet nec ius iurandum esse commune. "

“Because the pirate is not added to the number of enemies of the state, but is the common enemy of all; because with this there must be no binding promise and no binding oath. "

- Cicero : De officiis ("About the duties")

content

Popular pirate symbol: The Jolly Roger

History

The book tells the legal history of piracy chronologically. It begins in antiquity , then covers the Middle Ages and the early modern period, and finally the present (2009). In the introduction, the author states that he wants to pursue the various legal, political and philosophical conditions that were decisive for the development of the term pirate.

It deals with the issues of privateers , corsairs and sea ​​camels and the Paris Declaration of the Law of the Sea . Finally, the book also explains the effects of submarines on the law of the sea.

The relationship between political power and pirates was often ambiguous. For a long time there was the institution of the letter of piracy - an official permit for piracy. However, this practice has been abolished over time.

Legal terms

The author deals with the legal boundary between sea and land as a kind of threshold from one area of ​​law to another. In addition, controversial legal questions regarding sovereignty over the sea and the resulting consequences are pointed out. Depending on what is being transported by a ship (people or objects), there are again separate distinctions.

Heller-Roazen deals particularly intensively with the question of who describes whom as a “ pirate ” and what the consequences are. The book is about the dark sides of the partly political, partly legal definitions and who is marginalized by them. Usually the pirate was an outlaw against whom everyone should unite and as such was stateless and without rights.

Four elements work together in the concept of the pirate:

  • A legal area with a special status, such as the sea
  • An actor who is not seen as a regular opponent, but as an enemy of everyone
  • The dissolution of the distinction between politics and criminal law
  • And the change in the meaning of the war due to the measures taken against pirates

Pirate is no longer defined by his activity at sea, but that an area with special legal status in which he acts is declared to be an area of ​​piracy through his actions. He cites air pirates as an example .

Heller-Roazen also developed a theory about piracy. In his opinion, the exclusion of pirates from the legal system and the resulting self-empowerment of the state to be faithless and to break their word against pirates causes them to act like pirates themselves. As an example, he cites the legal concept of the “ illegal combatant ”, with which the US government authorized itself to break the law and to use torture against the “ excluded from any legal community ” .

criticism

In his review for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Miloš Vec writes that the work is a “ compilation ” in which there is nothing new in terms of history or law, and the existing “ sometimes even a bit wooden, in the genre of a non-fiction book with essayistic features ”.

Andreas Lotz from the Humboldt University in Berlin can get much more out of the " learned and material-rich book " in his review for H-Soz-u-Kult . It “is particularly convincing when it comes to demonstrating the trick of sovereign power, which excludes the addressees of one's own violation of the law in order to legitimize potential, extra-legal violations. “Nonetheless, he criticizes the“ one-sidedness of the leading thesis ”and above all the lack of the essay“ The Dread Pirate Bin Laden ”(2005) by Douglas R. Burgess Jr. in the literature list, which was partly devoted to the same topics.

expenditure

  • Daniel Heller-Roazen: The enemy of everyone . The pirate and the law. 1st edition. S. Fischer Verlag , 2010, ISBN 3-10-031410-7 , pp. 352 (English: The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations . Translated by Horst Brühmann).
  • Daniel Heller-Roazen: The Enemy of All . Piracy and the Law of Nations. Zone Books, 2009, ISBN 1-890951-94-3 , pp. 274 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Miloš Vec: Unlawful on the oceans. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. May 20, 2010, accessed May 21, 2014 .
  2. ^ De Officiis - Liber tertius. In: romanum.de. Retrieved May 21, 2014 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Andreas Lotz: D. Heller-Roazen: The enemy of all. In: H-Soz-u-Kult. March 11, 2011, accessed May 26, 2014 .
  4. ↑ a b c d Robin Celikates : Homo sacer of the oceans. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . May 20, 2010, accessed May 26, 2014 .