This debate has clearly animated the zombie studies community—but, again, it is largely irrelevant to questions about international relations. The reason is that, regardless of whether flesh-devouring ghouls move slowly or quickly, the plague of the undead is extremely likely to cross borders. If zombies were able to move and infect humans at high speeds, it would be virtually impossible to contain their spread to a single country or region.14 However, even if zombies are slow, they are unlikely to stay confined to a single country. A slow-moving zombie outbreak would translate into an equally slow-moving policy response—and, as we shall see in the chapter “Bureaucratic Politics: The ‘Pulling and Hauling' of Zombies,” the initial responses are likely to be riddled with error.
Furthermore, if the zombie canon is any guide, slow zombies are positively correlated with a slower incubation period. The infected in 28 Days Later are fast zombies; when they are exposed to the rage virus, they “turn” in less than thirty seconds. The zombies in Romero's movies or Brooks's World War Z are slow moving; if they are bitten, it takes them hours or days to become part of the living dead. The effect of zombiism corresponds with the speed of transmission. Fast-acting viruses lead to fast zombies, and slow-acting viruses lead to “old school” zombies.
If it takes a longer time for human beings to die and turn into flesh-eating ghouls, then it is also possible for them to travel a farther distance from the original point of infection while still human. With a modern transport infrastructure, an infected individual can get from one major population center to another within twenty-four hours. Even a single outbreak of corpse reanimation can go global. In addition, although the zombie plague is only spread through biting or other fluidic transfers, the infection rate is 100 percent. Even powerful disease vectors like smallpox or influenza have infection rates that are considerably lower.15 Because the zombie contagion is so powerful, its cross-border spread is a near certainty.
It should be stressed that the fast-versus-slow debate is of significant importance for other policy dimensions. The military tactics, evacuation logistics, refugee policies, and homeland security measures needed to cope with a fast zombie outbreak would look dramatically different from a slow one. We are concerned with global responses in this book, however. As figure 4 demonstrates, both the fast and slow zombie possibilities lead to the same outcome—the globalization of ghouldom. Because either variety of zombie leads to an international relations problem, we can dismiss the causal importance of speed as a determining factor in global policy responses. Indeed, as the two-by-two diagram in table 1 demonstrates, neither the origins nor the speed of zombies is of much causal significance.
Figure 4. Why speed does not causally affect
the spread of zombies.
TABLE 1
A 2×2 Table, as Required in all Political Science Research
The starting point of our analysis is that the living dead are a transnational phenomenon. Either corpses reanimate across the globe, or they spread outward from a single source. Either way, they are a threat that all countries must consider in crafting their foreign and national security policies.
And so we arrive at our central question: What would different theories of international relations predict would happen if the zombies started to roam the earth?
* * *
*In Jake West's Doghouse (2009), the toxin that creates zombies only affects women. Jay Lee's Zombie Strippers (2008) offers the intriguing premise of a virus that turns men into garden-variety ghouls but empowers women into developing a better appreciation of both the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the complexities of pole dancing.
*It is interesting to note that Romero's explanations have trended in the opposite direction from the rest of the zombie literature. In general, the genre has moved toward scientific and pseudoscientific explanations involving viruses, prions, and toxins. In his films, however, Romero has drifted from the radiation backstory of Night of the Living Dead (1968) to a more supernatural explanation. In the later Day of the Dead (1985), the character John scoffs at the idea of a scientific explanation, concluding simply, “We've been punished by the Creator. He visited a curse on us, so we might get a look at what Hell was like.”
THE REALPOLITIK OF THE
LIVING DEAD
There are many varieties of realism,1 but all realists start with a common assumption—that anarchy is the overarching constraint of world politics. Anarchy does not mean chaos or disorder but instead the absence of a centralized, legitimate authority. No matter what ardent cosmopolitans or conspiracy theorists believe, there is no world government. With no monopoly on the use of force in world politics, every actor must adopt “self-help” measures to ensure continued existence. For realists, the primary actors are those that can guarantee their own survival—namely, states. Because force is the ne plus ultra of power, the actors that count are those with the greatest ability to use force—states with sizable armed forces.
Most realists argue that the combination of anarchy and the need for self-help creates recurrent and persistent patterns in international affairs. In a world of anarchy, the only currency that matters is power—the material capability to ward off pressure or coercion while being able to influence others. If one state amasses more and more power, other states will have an incentive to balance against that state, so as to prevent it from dominating everyone.2 The anarchic global structure makes it impossible for governments to fully trust each other, forcing all states to be guided solely by their own national interests.
Since all states can only count on their own resources and capabilities, realists are very skeptical about the ability of international institutions to regulate world politics. States will consider the distribution of gains when thinking about cooperating with another actor. The question, for realists like Kenneth Waltz, is not “will both of us gain?” but “who will gain more?”3 Cooperation in the form of balancing coalitions will always be transient and unstable. Just as zombies will always crave human flesh, realpolitik states will always crave a more favorable distribution of capabilities. When relative gains concerns are paramount, cooperation is always ephemeral.4
Because anarchy is such a powerful constraint on state actions, realists are not particularly interested in the domestic politics of other countries. Whether a country has a democratic, autocratic, or revolutionary form of government has only a marginal effect on that country's foreign policy trajectory. The structure of anarchy is so powerful that it eventually forces all states into roughly similar policy preferences—maximizing security. This does not necessarily translate into power maximization. States that become too powerful risk triggering what is called a security dilemma—that is, acquiring so much power that other countries choose form a balancing coalition against the rising power.5 Even scholars who believe in power maximization allow that the “stopping power of water” will likely deter any state from global overreach.6 Realists acknowledge that, on occasion, states deviate from these predictions because of domestic interests.7 When this happens, however, the competitive rigors of the system will force these actors to either change their behavior—or they will wither away faster than a rotting corpse.8
Realists focus like a laser beam on the international distribution of power. The waxing and waning of states corresponds to their influence over outcomes in world politics. Most realists posit that balance of power politics acts as a natural regulating mechanism. Power transition theorists, however, care about the relationship between the most powerful state—the hegemon—and potential challengers to its primacy in world politics. If a hegemon is supplanted by a rising power, the likelihood of a great power war spikes.9 When this situation occurred in the past—from Sparta and Athens in ancient Greece to Great Britain and Germany prior to World War I—the world becomes fraught with uncertainty. In the past, the prospect of such a power transition has often triggered great power wars. If the rising power signals that it has revisionist aims—in other words, it wants to rewrite the ru
les of world order—then such a conflict will be inexorable.
As this summary might suggest, realism has a rather dystopic and jaundiced view of the world. In other words, realism is perfectly comfortable in the zombie universe—particularly the world of George Romero's films. In the original Night of the Living Dead (1968), seven people are trapped in a farmhouse surrounded by flesh-eating ghouls. Despite the common external threat posed by zombies, the individuals inside the house are barely able to cooperate. Ties of kinship mean little. Two separate sovereign entities (the basement and the first floor) are quickly created and ruled by separate individuals (Harry and Ben).* Resources—food, access to information, firearms—are the object of fierce distributional conflict. Temporary accords designed to create a public good—escape and rescue—quickly break down when there are shifts in the distribution of power.
A similar dynamic plays itself out in Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978). This time a band of survivors fortifies itself inside a shopping mall. Despite possessing an abundance of resources, the main characters do their utmost to prevent another cluster of humans from entering the mall.* When a biker gang breaches their defenses, they respond by opening the docking bays to let in more zombies—to occupy the attention of the bikers. Cooperation breaks down in Romero's Day of the Dead (1985) as well—indeed, the character of Sarah complains early on in that film that “we're all pulling in different directions.” The failure of humans to cooperate in the presence of reanimated corpses is a common theme that permeates the zombie canon—just as the futility of international cooperation recurs throughout the realist interpretation of history.
How would the introduction of flesh-eating ghouls affect world politics? The realist answer is simple if surprising—international relations would be largely unaffected. This paradigm would be unimpressed with the claim that a new existential threat to the human condition leads to any radical change in human behavior. To them, a plague of the undead would merely echo older plagues and disasters. Disease has affected world politics from the Black Death of the fourteenth century to the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. In the past, most of these plagues simply reified existing power relationships. Because more dynamic and powerful societies developed stronger immunities to plague, they gained a greater share of relative power during pandemics.10 Similarly, modern research shows that wealthier and more powerful societies can weather natural disasters better than weaker, poorer states.11 Realists would see no reason to expect an epidemic of zombies to be any different in its effects. To paraphrase Thucydides, the realpolitik of zombies is that the strong will do what they can, and the weak must suffer devouring by reanimated, ravenous corpses.
To be sure, even realists would acknowledge some shifts in the global distribution of power from the re-animation of the dead. Some governments will be better placed to repulse the zombies than others. Those with greater security and communications infrastructures should be able to put down any internal zombie insurrections and reestablish domestic order, or block cross-border zombie incursions. States with low population densities would have more time to adapt to the presence of the undead. Geographic isolation would be no guarantee of zombie prevention. As Romero demonstrated in Land of the Dead (2005) and Max Brooks showed in his novel World War Z (2006), there is no stopping power of water for the undead because they have no need to breathe. Nevertheless, geography still matters. Some geographic features alter the offense-defense balance vis-à-vis an external attack—in other words, defense is easier than offense on certain kinds of terrain, such as coastlines or mountain ranges.12 Realists would expect countries with mountainous borders to be more likely to thwart hordes of foreign flesh-eating ghouls. Some states would undoubtedly be completely overrun by the living dead.
Would the character of world politics change, however? Not necessarily. The best tactics and strategies for defeating zombies would spread quickly throughout the international system, regardless of the ethical or moral implications of such plans. In World War Z, for example, the national security strategy that diffuses throughout the globe has its origins in an apartheid South African government's doomsday scenario of an all-out uprising by the black population.13 This strategy calls for the intentional sacrifice of some population centers. Given the exigencies of the situation, however, it is quickly adopted worldwide.
Realists also predict balance of power politics, so wouldn't the specter of the undead create a balancing coalition against all ghouls? This possibility cannot be ruled out, particularly for power transition theorists. If zombies emerged from central Eurasia, for example, their capacity to spread quickly could trigger a natural balancing coalition designed to prevent zombie hordes from spreading across the continent. If ghouls overran a significant cluster of states and created a sufficient number of fresh ghouls, a power transition dynamic could present itself. The zombies would be seen as the rapidly rising power—and no one would deny that their preference for human flesh would represent radically revisionist war aims. A containment strategy would no doubt be proposed as a means of limiting the territorial expansion of the undead.14
Most realists would be very skeptical about the robustness of a universal “anti-zombie alliance,” however. First, buckpassing would be an equally likely outcome.15 In a buckpassing situation, states would refrain from taking an active stance against the zombie hordes in the hopes that other countries would do the dirty work of balancing in their stead. So even if a powerful state tried to amass an anti-zombie coalition, other governments might commit to such an alliance in name only.
Second, small supporter states would fear that powerful countries would use a global quest against zombies as a subterfuge to augment their own capabilities and interests. Past history offers some support for this prediction. The Soviet Union installed puppet governments in its military theater of operations at the end of World War II to develop a buffer zone between itself and the Western alliance. Even during the peak period of the Cold War, NATO members repeatedly clashed over the scope and nature of the strategic embargo placed on the communist bloc, because some members of the Western alliance benefited disproportionately from trade with the Soviet Union.16 A similar dynamic has played itself out during the American-led “global war on terror.” The United States tried to coordinate global efforts against all nonstate actors that employed this tactic. Other countries responded by adding groups that were considered national threats but did not quite fit the definition of terrorist.17
Realists would predict a similar dynamic at work in any kind of anti-zombie crusade, except on an even grander scope. In the past, natural disasters have exacerbated preexisting conflicts among humans.18 States could therefore exploit the threat from the living dead to acquire new territory, squelch irredentist movements, settle old scores, or subdue enduring rivals. The People's Republic of China could use the zombie threat to justify an occupation of Taiwan. Russia could use the same excuse to justify intervention into its near abroad; in World War Z, the conflict allows Moscow to reabsorb Belarus. India and Pakistan would likely accuse each other of failing to control the zombie problem in Kashmir.* The United States would not be immune from the temptation to exploit the zombie threat as a strategic opportunity. How large would the army of the Cuban undead need to be to justify the deployment of the Eighty-second Airborne? In the end, realists—particularly American realists—would no doubt evoke the cautionary words of former president John Quincy Adams and warn against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.”
Some realists would go further, arguing that, in the end, human-zombie alliances of convenience would be just as likely to emerge as human-human alliances. As previously noted, many zombies in the canon start out possessing strategic intelligence, making them more than capable of recognizing the virtues of tactical agreements with some humans. Some zombie studies scholars might object at this point, arguing that flesh-eating ghouls can neither talk nor develop strategic thought. Even if they did not, though, realists would point to Romero's zomb
ies for empirical support. Even in Night of the Living Dead, Romero's ghouls demonstrated the capacity for using tools.* In each of his subsequent films, the undead grew more cognitively complex. The zombie characters of Bub in Day of the Dead and Big Daddy in Land of the Dead were painted with a more sympathetic brush than most of the human characters. Both Bub and Big Daddy learned how to use firearms. Bub was able to speak, perform simple tasks, and engage in impulse control—that is, to refrain from eating a human he liked. Big Daddy and his undead cohort developed a hierarchical authority structure with the ability to engage in tactical and strategic learning. In doing so they overran a well-fortified human redoubt and killed its most powerful leader. It would take only the mildest of cognitive leaps to envision a zombie-articulated defense of these actions at the United Nations.
By the end of Land of the Dead the lead zombie character and the lead human character acknowledge a tacit bargain to leave each other alone. This is perfectly consistent with the realist paradigm. For zombies to survive and thrive, they must avoid losing their brains; and, like humans, they also must adapt to the rigors of anarchy in world politics. While some emerging zombie governments might pursue radical antihuman policies at first, the anarchical system would eventually discipline a moderation of views.19
Theories of International Politics and Zombies Page 3