The Parapolitical Tendency

Social competition and conflict between different elite groups and opposed factions is a significant part of social life. One struggles to find a time period in which this was not the case. Because political systems – even dictatorships – often impose constraints on the manner in which social competition between vying factional elements can occur, this conflict can sometimes be displaced to other areas. The conflict goes on, but perhaps under the guise of something else entirely. Observing many of these competitions play outl, I have often wondered if the term ‘parapolitics’ could be usefully applied to them. With, however, some significant modifications.

When discussing the former Soviet Union and modern Russian politics, the terms ‘parapolitics’ and ‘virtual politics’ are often used. Parapolitics refers to a kind of style of politics in which organizational and situational capital is mobilized for intra-elite disputes. Parapolitics concerns the largely sub rosa doings of factions, in contrast to more ‘normal’ and open forms of political and social activism. Virtual politics refers to the way in which parapolitical mechanisms can manage or structure political competition. These definitions should be prefaced with the observation that these ideas principally are meant to principally explain particular and specialized forms of political intercourse. They are distinct from garden variety political manipulation, agenda shaping, coalition strategies, and persuasion/perception management. Still, much of the classical studies of politics had an implicitly parapolitical dimension.

During the Cold War, Edward Luttwak produced an landmark work of parapolitics on the nature of military coups. A large body of work on the psychological and societal dimensions of parapolitics was also produced as a result of Cold War obsessions with covert and clandestine operations, power elites, insurgency, the sources of societal power, terrorism, political propaganda, political subversion, denial and deception, strategic surprise, and other related topics. Still, I think that the idea of parapolitics can only really be useful if it is decoupled from its popular and academic connotations of self-dealing, manipulation, or conspiratorial power. Popular connotations of parapolitics are essentially defined by Fox Mulder and The X-Files. Academic analyses of the components of parapolitics often fixate on particular asymmetric strategies and tactics, forgetting that the creation of asymmetry is simply common sense in any real adversarial context.

The heart of parapolitics is simply the way in which social competition and conflict between varying factions can occur in ways other than officially sanctioned modes of competitive interaction. The most obvious mechanism of parapolitics is the use of agents and/or components of the state to create outcomes favorable to you and unfavorable to your opponents. This is what Luttwak discussed in his book on coups; the creation of an condition in which one group of elites gains power over the other by co-opting security forces and directing them to seize the presidential palace, the army barracks, and the state television broadcoasting station. But this can occur in more subtle ways well; perhaps you directly or indirectly capture the regulatory agency and use them to preserve your company’s incumbency. Nor is it necessarily exclusive to manipulating state mechanisms either. Exploiting various forms of media is also an option, especially if you can predict the likely response of various information networks to the inputs you supply.

The dangerous aspect of parapolitics is that it, like its “paranoid style” populist cousin, tends to breed paranoia. Limiting the avenues of social conflict and constraining its severity serves a stabilizing function. One does not have to, like the Capulets and Montagues, always need to be prepared for an duel with an rival. By heightening the stakes of competition and removing the possibility of even semi-neutral arbitrating institutions, parapolitical behavior can lower social trust and heighten societal instability. At worst, one finds themselves in the position of the notional Luttwakian coup plotter. The coup plotter often believes that the only way to be completely safe from one’s enemies is to control the government and use it as a tool against them. Meanwhile the counter-coup plotters may believe the same thing, and thus are unwilling to relinquish power without a fight. It’s likely that all political systems – from dictatorship to democracy – have some form of parapolitics going on beneath the surface. The critical variables are simply how severe it is, and how the specific mechanisms of parapolitical struggle work in any particular polity.