Coalition.

A piece on the evening news last night referred to the nations in favour of military intervention in Libya as the Coalition. This struck me as an interesting and potentially dangerous fuzziness. I mean, the original coalition of 2003 consisted of the Americans, the British, the Australians and the Poles. In 2011, the Coalition means America, Britain, France, Canada and Italy. So, in short, what started as a euphemism intended to legitimise an illegal war is now, we must assume, an umbrella term for whichever nations feel desperate enough to join the US and UK in bombing the shit out of whoever upsets them. In our recent history, nation groupings of this sort were called stuff like the Allies, a term which denoted unequivocal solidarity and commitment to a cause. It was a black and white term for a black and white era.

Coalition, however, is a term for a more hazy world. It tentatively evokes thoughts of collaboration and moderation. It also, critically, implies evanescence; the word coalition derives from the Latin coalitus (fellowship) and coalescere meaning to join or grow together, which is the meaning it had when we received it from the French. Therefore the implicit understanding of coalition is that sympathetic factions coalesce and form a union for as long as their needs converge and then – critically – disperse when the purpose for the alliance ceases. There is no question that the purpose of the current action in Libya is not the same as the war in Iraq (unless these various and shifting nation groupings have all signed some secret memo about expeditiously toppling nuisance regimes in the name of democracy), which means that this isn’t by definition the same Coalition as the one in 2003.

Questions of definition and meaning are critical in the current climate because obfuscating meaning – via the recycling and scattershot application of inexact terminology – reveals the underlying and insidious power dynamic of such friendly little euphemisms. Everyone outside the West, everyone who looks down the barrel of the Coalition, can surely see the real meaning which this word is bringing into their lives. It is not, as it purports to be, the democracy and freedom, but rather a declaration of intent to preserve self-interest and the status quo at any price. And this surely will play a decisive role in radicalising both individuals and political groups in opposition to Western hegemonies, thereby prolonging these tragic conflicts at the cost of many lives.

Finally, let us also remember that in the arena of domestic politics here in the UK, coalition is now a byword for fecklessness, a wholesale betrayal of political principle and the permanent discrediting of the third party alternative. So coalition is also a word that will one day hold such negative associations that it will cause a reflexive (and regressive) cringe back towards the tired certainties of oppositional, two-party politics in which both parties are the same. Long live the Coalition.