Editor’s Comments
J. PETER BURGESS
THE DECEMBER ISSUE of Security
Dialogue was prepared in the long shadow of 11 September. Nearly every
article carries traces of the attacks on New York and
Washington, and of the subsequent developments in Afghanistan and the Middle
East. The habitual models for understanding the world
and the relations among its peoples collapsed and disintegrated in the rubble
of the World Trade Center. Henceforth, the classical conception of security is
obsolete, and the late-modern model of threat perception and management no
longer explains the calamity nor prognosticates any sensible response.
Terrorism is foreign to the Enlightenment
constellation of political ideas on which the modern nation-state is built. The
logic of terrorism cannot be understood in terms of the principles of person , state
and society in which the individual is sovereign and morally responsible, as
well as equipped with reason, the faculty of
judgement, self-consciousness and the ability to act in conformity with reason. The
categories of individuality, rationality and social cohesion also form the foundation of the concept of
security. Traditional Euro-American security understands the individual
as an agent fighting in defence of the universally recognized virtues of some
collective principle, be it equality, freedom or justice.
The victim of a terrorist attack is never identical
with the victim of terrorism. The thousands of people killed in New York and
Washington are the victims of indescribable violence, but paradoxically it is
we survivors who feel the effects of terrorism. In contrast to the terror of
conventional warfare, terrorism has no physical target. Its relation to particular
things or particular individuals is only in terms of the value of the
images produced in the moment of death and destruction. By the same token, it
cannot be the simple object of a counter-attack. Terrorism is pure
performativity, the public performance of the fragility of our world. It is a
set of techniques, a methodology of effects. Many have commented
that the World Trade Center was targeted because it was the nucleus of the
global economy. Yet, despite the obvious fact that central representatives of
US finance (among others) perished in the suicide attack, they were not as such
the targets. Nor did the attack on the Pentagon aim to weaken in any real sense
US military forces by killing members of the military administration. Terrorism
is not the same as a terrorist attack. Terrorism is the enforcing of a virtual
state of fear that frames the actual terrorist attack. It is both the
anticipation of violence – the ever-looming next attack – and the shuddering
recollection of death and destruction in the aftermath of the attack. Though
terrorism strategically targets people and property, these are only cynical
means to another end. Its true target is the imagination. It assaults
symbolically, not because it has no concrete effects (for it obviously does),
but because the terror it seeks to sow follows from the violence done to
symbols of power, to the images of liberty that organize the collective
unconscious, to the dream of justice, equality and righteousness on which the
Western self-understanding is constructed.
Terrorism is indifferent to the individual; it knows
no individuality. The contradiction we see
unfolding in the standard Western mode of military response in the
campaign in Afghanistan is that the West is forced to respond to the depersonalization
of the victims of violent action in terrorism by personalizing not only the
acts but also the spirit of evil itself. The US–British reaction seeks to
connect individuals and acts, ascribing the terrorist attacks to individuals
according to the liberal principle of individuality, under which individuals are
responsible for the rationality of their acts and the consequences of those
acts. This approach is inadequate for two
reasons. First, the individuals with immediate responsibility for the 11
September attacks perished with their victims, in the firm conviction that the
acts they carried out were not constrained by their individuality, but rather
eternally transcended their own lives. Second, the fundamentalist Islamic
conception of justice that is alleged to have motivated the attacks is
incommensurate with the Western conception of justice defined in terms of
individual responsibility and the rule of law. In contrast to the Euro-American
model of procedural justice, fundamentalist Islamic justice is a higher – even
transcendental – one, which understands itself in opposition to what
fundamentalists see as ‘decadent’ Western individuality.
The potential for terror lies at the heart of
Western society, in its belief in – but also need for – rights, freedom and
individual responsibility. Western liberal society is extremely fragile. But
this fragility is not accidental; it is necessary. The transparency and
flexibility of US-style democracy is both the key to its dominance in the world
system and its Achilles heel. Terror is not produced by introducing new danger
from the outside, but by revealing how deeply the menace is already within the
system, in an imaginary form, in a tacit understanding of the precariousness of
domestic security. The authors of the attacks in New York and Washington
organized and trained for their exploits within the US and European systems of
freedom of movement and the presumption of innocence. For the time being,
Americans seem to be responding favourably to suppression of these civil liberties
in the name of security. Time will tell whether this situation will last.
In the extraordinary chaos of the first days after
11 September, President George W. Bush chose to revert to the logic of war in
his characterization of the attacks. Among other things, this cleared the way
for the NATO Council to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, thereby
binding all NATO members to collaborate in any eventual ‘war’ actions. It also
permitted the Bush administration to develop a rhetoric of ‘long-term
conflict’, requiring the ‘resolve’ and ‘patience’ of all Americans. The
prospect of an open-ended state of war, with its attendant emergency rights and
powers, provides a political weapon for managing collateral political damage,
economic recession and resentment over curtailed civil rights. Because of the
benefits conferred by this, the campaign against terrorism is being executed as
a classical state-to-state engagement of war. Though no one has claimed that
the Taliban regime is directly responsible for the attacks, a genealogy of
power and influence has been reconstructed to adequately justify the attack on
Afghan institutions and facilities in the normal mode of interstate war.
Yet, as Reichberg & Syse suggest in a
Viewpoint article in this issue, terrorism resists the conceptualization of war.
It provides for no state-to-state action, no incursions in violation of
national sovereignty in the ordinary sense, no diplomatic recognition, no
officially designated soldiers or agents of war. There are no fronts, no
borders. Neither the perpetrators nor the victims of a terrorist act are
sovereign political subjects in the Hobbesian sense. No possible conditions for
capitulation are declared or implied. There are no finite limits to such a war,
and no objective criteria available for determining whether or when the war has
been won or lost.
The complex ‘war on terrorism’ is a war without
nations (in which the most-likely ‘enemies’ of the ‘Free World’ are in all
probability already on US and European territory) being fought as the ‘war in
Afghanistan’. The public relations risk is that people will lose sight of the
connection between the spectacular collapse of the WTC towers and the
bombed-out camps and villages or the potholed airstrips of scrappy Afghan
airfields. Through the eyes of Western media, an Afghan village looks more or
less the same before and after it is bombed.
By militarizing the language of terrorism instead of
criminalizing it (the ultimate individualizing reaction), we risk dignifying
both the methods of terrorism and its perpetrators, glorifying the latter as
soldiers and martyrs in a global battle . As
sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer recently noted, the greatest humiliation for
Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants would be to find themselves arrested as
simple crooks and thugs, and left to the procedures and protocols of the
international legal system. Granting the fundamentalist Islamic struggle the
status of war simultaneously exalts a kind of fundamentalist Islamic
sovereignty , a
notion with unacceptable connotations for the secularized political West.
While the fight
against terrorism is prosecuted with the tools and presuppositions of an
international war, the ‘justice’ being sought is of a different order. As Ulfstein
points out in another Viewpoint in this issue, terrorism is a violation of
international law. Institutional facilities are available to bring the perpetrators
of terrorist acts to ’justice’, to try them according to the juridical norms
and rules that have become universally valid on the international plane. And
yet this is not the ‘justice’ the West seeks in executing its campaign against
Afghanistan. Americans thirst for a higher-order ‘justice’, the
re-establishment or reconstruction of a state of mind, a peace and tranquillity
that mostly likely will never again be possible, and they feel that this
‘justice’ is attainable through the present military campaign. Still, no number
of prisoners taken and no number of terrorists eliminated can bestow new innocence
upon the imagination. Thus, while the battle is fought in terms of
international war, the international principles of procedural justice and the
rule of law will most likely never see the light of day. By the same token,
even though Osama bin Laden is the clear target of a ‘war’, it is safe to say
that he will never be tried for ‘war crimes’.
As Security Dialogue went to press, many of
the articles were re-edited to reflect changes in the general security environment. In addition to repeated
references to the ensuing crisis, this issue carries four Viewpoint articles
dedicated to analysis of the parameters and consequences of terrorism.