Description
The term mercenary invokes an eternal phenomenon. Deriving etymologically from the Latin mercenarius, it has been translated across ages in almost the same fashion, contributing to the transhistorical categorisation of its signified. This paper contests this view, claiming that the word and concept ‘mercenary’ acquired its contemporary meaning and eternal character at the turn of the 18th century. By investigating discourses within this time frame, I show how the term ‘mercenary’ was constituted as a noun to construct the hierarchical dichotomy between the ‘soldier’ as the normative ideal and the ‘mercenary’ as its deviant conceptual opposite. This dichotomy served an important function in the constitution of the international, as it created a clear dividing line between the spaces of peace and development inside, patrolled by the soldier, and the unruly and warlike outside from which the mercenary originates. Furthermore, by turning the ‘mercenary’ into an eternal phenomenon that can be found always and everywhere, a trans-historical nature is simultaneously ascribed to the state. Historiography on mercenaries is thus poetic as it produces a fictive past in which contemporary phenomena and orders are superimposed upon past structures, whereby the past’s otherness is erased in favor of universal truths.
