Terrorism : Politics, Religion, Literature [1 ed.] 9781443827843, 9781443827089

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Terrorism

Terrorism: Politics, Religion, Literature

Edited by

Diogo Pires Aurélio and João Tiago Proença

Terrorism: Politics, Religion, Literature, Edited by Diogo Pires Aurélio and João Tiago Proença This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Diogo Pires Aurélio and João Tiago Proença and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-2708-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2708-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Editors’ Introduction.................................................................................... 1 Diogo Pires Aurélio and João Tiago Proença Chapter One................................................................................................. 5 New Terrorism and Mythic Terrorism: The Place of Philosophy in Studies on Terrorism Liam Harte Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 Terrorism and the Uses of Violence Fátima Costa Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 35 Reasons of Violence, Violence of Reason: An Interpretation based on Eric Weil’s Core Paradox Luís Manuel A. V. Bernardo Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 69 To Defeat Terrorism, Study Statistics and Send for the Priest or the Free-Mason Luís Salgado de Matos Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 79 Sovereignty, Global Justice and Terrorism Regina Queiroz Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 93 Postmodern Terrorism between Exclusivism and Individualism Andrea Amato Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 105 Anarchism from the Right: The Terroristic Approach of the Unabomber João Tiago Proença

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Table of Contents

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 113 Jihadi Journalism Andreas Armborst Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 127 Political Subversion or Religious Violence: The Threat of Al-Qaeda Ideology in Europe Felipe Pathé Duarte Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 141 The Impatience of Praxis in Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex David Silva e Sousa Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 149 Terrorism and Terrorists in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent Miguel Morgado

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Terrorism, as a multifarious phenomenon, can be approached from different, even opposite perspectives. This report will examine, and seek to shed light on, the purpose of terrorism by analysing a variety of viewpoints on this most elusive of issues. Scholars will find food for thought in different areas: theoretical and actual, conceptual analysis and literature. This volume consists of essays that deal with the definitions of terrorism, what qualifies as terrorism and Igor Priomoratz’s dictum that there are really only two philosophical questions about terrorism: first, “What is it?” and, second, “Can it ever be justified?” – ontological and ethical questions. Liam Hart (New Terrorism and Mythic Terrorism: A Philosophical Critique of the ‘Expert Analysis’) will track the first question (ontological) in order to clarify the claim that there is an old and a new terrorism, the latter being characterised as an irreconcilable fanatic willing to bring about mass casualties, and reaching the conclusion that there are no quantitative differences between the old and the new terrorism. Instead, the concept of mythos provides a way to understand differences of terroristic outlooks: weakly mythic terrorists demand only concessions from those who do not share their mythoi, whereas strongly mythic terrorists demand either conversion to their mythoi, or death. Fátima Costa (Terrorism and the Uses of Violence) claims that although terrorism involves the use of violence for political goals, a strictly political approach to the subject is most likely, not only to fail the specific features of terrorism, but also to become an exercise of excuse and justification. A purely political analysis of terrorism traps us inevitably in the sliding scale argument. A critical stand towards terrorism is only possible from an ethical perspective that distinguishes terrorism from other forms of a political use of violence and assesses the moral implications of terror, the randomness of its violence and the intentional targeting of noncombatants. According to Luis Manuel Bernardo (Reasons of Violence, Violence of Reason: an interpretation based on Eric Weil’s core paradox) we tend nowadays to be surprised by the continuous presence of violent phenomena in our societies, as though we’re convinced that we have reached, either in terms of social organisation or in the legal constitution

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Editors’ Introduction

of democratic states, a definitive pattern of political perfection, the epitome of our striving. Furthermore, despite philosophical thought concerning a more dialectical and critical approach, the opposing realms of reason and violence work as a presupposition of further inquiries. Accordingly, terrorism appears most of the time as an extreme practice of violence that simultaneously challenges the foundational values of modern welfare and the consensus around the preference that should be accorded to modernity’s rational guidelines in contemporary nation states. How can it be thought that, after being delivered from recent totalitarianism, humans wouldn’t choose freedom and legality? Is it acceptable to conceive of political institutions deprived of a communitarian basis, making it impossible for individuals to satisfy their identity claims? Luis Salgado de Matos (To Defeat Terrorism, Study Statistics and Send for the Priest or the Free-mason) starts by proposing a heuristic definition: terror is a violent and symbolic surprise. He then proceeds to analyse terror as an army, albeit of a special kind, in the framework of the political organisation conceived as an articulation of Stände (estates) – the terrorist is the warrior-monk. Next, he demonstrates that terrorism is a special kind of physical violence that operates through the moral element: terrorists blackmail and there is almost universal agreement that terrorism is born out of poverty. This symbolical definition of terrorism does not exclude its social roots; we think we can identify some of them with the phenomenon of rising expectations. Finally, he proposes practical conclusions on how to fight terrorism. Regina Queiroz (Sovereignty, Global Justice and Terrorism) shows that some thinkers have justified the activity of current transnational terrorist groups, such as, Al-Qaeda, by the inequalities of the distribution of the benefits of globalisation, that is, a lack of global justice. In contrast, others have sustained that transnational terrorism will be a constitutive factor in any reaction against the inequalities resulting from the globalisation process. In this case, it shares more affinities than differences with the ideal of global justice, namely, the declassification of the political principles of a state’s sovereignty and autonomy. Andrea Amato (Postmodern Terrorism amid Exclusivism and Individualism) considers that recent terrorism may be termed postmodern in line with trends in Western societies, from which it draws several and meaningful typical features. Such definition stems from: the type of consensus that the terrorism manages to gain (populist, demagogic, leader-centred, media-based); the type of religiosity permeating the very fundamentalists (which is more personal); the sort of profile fitting the militant terrorist (which is, to a certain extent, individualistic).

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João Tiago Proença (Anarchism from the right: the terroristic approach of the Unabomber) analyses the text known as the Unabombermanifesto in order to show that eco-terrorism is likely to fall prey to the far right rhetoric and glorification of violence. Since 9/11, Muslim-inspired terrorism has become the predominant object of terrorism studies. According to Andreas Armborst (Jihadi World Politics), the jihadi movement constantly issues statements about its political views. This article describes three major themes in the writings of jihadi ideologues. Although the main political claim of the jihadi movement (the establishment of a theocracy based on the principles of Sharia law according to the interpretation of Salafism) is at odds with the Western model of governance, its narrative also includes issues that cannot be so easily dismissed by the Western observer. These issues are presented in a journalistic fashion and presumably grant the movement a considerable deal of appeal and credibility. The paper concludes with a tentative answer to the question whether it is necessary and possible to counter the jihadi ideology. Felipe Pathé Duarte (Political Subversion or Religious Violence the Threat of Al-qaeda Ideology in Europe) focuses on Al-Qaeda’s doctrinal motivations. The combat against this growing phenomenon is done, primarily, by understanding its matrix. Hence, we assume that the religious irrationalism lies upstream, and that downstream lies a pretentiously political narrative that looks for some streaks of religiousness to justify profoundly revolutionary and modern action. In the river bed (the action), we have terror and violence as a way to undermine confidence. Consequently, the approach ground has been set: violence and terror which serve as means of gaining power for a movement whose inconsistent narrative merges modern revolutionary doctrines and religious faith (which, in part, helps to justify the initial violence). In other words, one either performs a rational analysis around the goals or goes forward into the deeply emotional motivations. David Silva e Sousa (The impatience of praxis in Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) focuses on the film by Uli Edel, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. This near-document fiction is based on the memories and research of Stefan Aust, who worked with Ulrike Meinhof and her husband in his early days as a journalist. He dedicated himself to the research of the Red Army Faction (RAF) after its leaders died in prison in 1977. The character of Ulrike Meinhof is selected as a personification of the problematic relation between theory and praxis that was the object of a philosophical dispute between Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse

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Editors’ Introduction

during the agitated years of 1967 to 1969. Miguel Morgado (Terrorism and Terrorists in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent) offers a reading of Conrad’s The Secret Agent against its political and theoretical background and compares the view issued by the novelist with a more contemporary notion. *** This book was made possible by the generous support of Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (PTDC/FIL/68987/2006).

CHAPTER ONE NEW TERRORISM AND MYTHIC TERRORISM: THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY IN STUDIES ON TERRORISM 1

LIAM HARTE

One can most fully understand this essay as a manifesto-by-example. Its bulk consists of a detailed philosophical analysis that, if correct, brings to light serious logical flaws in what is currently the most widely accepted analysis of the concept of the “new terrorist”– something I call the “expert analysis”– along with some proposals for correcting those flaws. I engage in such philosophising not merely for its own sake, but also to illustrate my vision of how a quite traditional type of Anglophone philosophy, in its most non-empirical guise, can contribute to an improved understanding of important concepts in contemporary disciplines other than philosophy. Possible examples of that contribution are innumerable, but I have chosen to concentrate on one that is very clearly related to the current worldwide preoccupation with violent terrorism and, particularly, that which is religiously-motivated.2 Whatever my choice of illustration, my central point remains the same: that conceptual research of the kind that philosophy purveys is vital to the success of the empirical research characteristic of terrorism studies. As a manifesto, this paper is addressed both to philosophers and to non-philosophers. The philosophers I have in mind, primarily, are those who would reject applying philosophical techniques to current events as not being real philosophy or who would, for some other reason, simply shrink from competing with empirical disciplines. The non-philosophers are those who would reject the idea that philosophy can ever be usefully related to empirical matters, whether current events or not. Clearly, therefore, I must begin by explaining why there is any need to examine the logic of the expert analysis, or of any other concept deployed in the overwhelmingly empirical field of terrorism studies.

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We in the Western philosophical tradition are notorious for disagreeing with each other. Indeed, one of the most eminent amongst us complained that, despite the fact that “it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds....there is still no point in it which is not disputed and hence doubtful”.3 Nevertheless, however much we differ on particular questions, I see little reason to doubt that we all know that our primary task is that of undertaking detailed conceptual research. Even such clearly anti-idealist projects as Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals or Charles L. Stevenson’s emotivist moral theory are attempts to psychologise moral concepts in order to show how individuals or civilisations acquired them and how it might discard them, and thus clearly count as the kind of philosophical project I have in mind. To flesh out this claim, I am going to follow Isaiah Berlin – who, as an historian of ideas, may be better placed than any philosopher, including Descartes, Nietzsche, and Stevenson, to say what it is that we are up to – and take it that conceptual research is neither empirical nor formal.4 So, on one hand, it is not, for instance, a kind of psychological research, notwithstanding the fact that its subjectmatter is concepts which must be held (if they are actually held at all) by particular individuals. A concept’s philosophical value, if it has any, resides in its accuracy regarding the phenomenon of which it is the concept, rather than in any facts about an individual’s or a group’s psychic history. On the other hand, philosophy is not a purely formal discipline, like mathematics. Philosophers cannot simply read off a philosophical doctrine from symbolic, logical proofs or truth-tables, however useful those tools are in evaluating the consistency of a position. In the light of this outlook, the conceptual research that I conceive of philosophers undertaking must be speculative, at least in part, and is for that reason verifiable neither by investigative means, including even such sophisticated ones as natural scientists use, nor by merely formal means. One obvious question, then, is why anyone should take philosophy seriously, when it is so difficult to verify its doctrines. I would make two replies. First, not everything can be verified by investigation. Examples of this are legion, among them basic assumptions made by natural scientists. Physics, for example, presupposes a physical world, but that presupposition cannot be confirmed by the techniques of physics without begging the question in favour of it. Every observation or experiment that one might make within the techniques of physics would presuppose the very claim – that there is a physical world – that it was supposed to verify. Second, the fact that something cannot be verified empirically does not imply, necessarily, that it is completely unverifiable. Such verification would have to be conducted outside the realm of, say, physical evidence or

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historical records. I cannot verify empirically what my name is, no matter how many documents I may show anyone, because the actual connection between me and my name, whatever character it may have, is not identical with those documents, as is shown by the clearly-true fact that it’s logically possible to have a name in the absence of any documents that, one may purport, prove it. (As it would be when, for instance, all my personal documents were destroyed in a house-fire.) The primary philosophical means of verifying such matters, to the extent that verification is possible at all, is that of philosophical argument, which is to say, argument that contains at least some non-empirical conceptual content. Over millennia, philosophers have developed logical techniques, which in their non-investigative way, are as powerful as scientific observation and experimentation, because they enable us to make very reliable judgments about whether claims or analyses of concepts are more likely to be correct or incorrect in terms of their logical coherence. Indeed, even empirical research is properly subject to logical constraints. As I have already said, such logical techniques are not, themselves, sufficient to establish any substantive philosophical doctrines. Nevertheless, their usefulness in thinking about issues in social science, such as the study of terrorism, is the major point that I wish to prove here. In the light of such considerations, philosophy acquires a role somewhere between Locke’s vision of it as the under-labourer of the sciences and Kant’s of metaphysics as their queen.5 Besides anything else philosophers do, we monitor other disciplines (and our own, too) for traces of conceptual disorder; and, whenever we find it, we try to put it right. Thus, we come to the reason for philosophical research into terrorism in general – and for this piece of research in particular – which is that the human sciences, also, need to be kept honest by rigorous conceptual research, being as full of philosophical assumptions as the natural sciences are. I would urge greater activity by philosophers in this area, because I believe that, since the “modern age” of violent non-state terrorism dawned in about 1968, philosophy has too often been asleep at its post or simply deferred to the human sciences, as logical empiricists would have liked that philosophers deferred to the natural sciences. Once again, I should give a short account of my reasons for this statement. Surprisingly little work about violent non-state terrorism has been published by academic philosophers, at least in the English-speaking world.6 There has been an increase since September 2001, but, in terms of a simple comparison of the number of philosophical books and essays about terrorism with that of other topics, the bibliography remains strikingly thin.7 Where this is not a manifestation of mere lack of interest

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Chapter One

in or distaste for the subject, I suspect that it is partly a result of deference to those whom I shall refer to as “counterterrorism experts”, a loose confraternity of not just academics from various disciplines, but also journalists, members of think-tanks, those who are both, and the occasional lone wolf, such as Bernard-Henri Levy. Apart from their interest in terrorism, these experts share a commitment to practically applying and publicly disseminating their work. In Britain and the United States, figures such as Paul Wilkinson, Walter Laqueur and Bruce Hoffmann often act almost as consultants to the Government, while, say, Hoffmann, Levy, Yonah Alexander, and Brian Michael Jenkins regularly appear on television or radio, contribute Op-Eds and give interviews to newspapers.8 Philosophers, talking to each other at academic conferences can, perhaps, only be cowed into silence by such influence and exposure, as well as the awe-inspiring wealth of empirical details that many experts seem to have committed to memory. Another thing to say about contemporary philosophical research into terrorism is that almost all of it conforms to Tony Coady’s dictum that there are really only two philosophical questions about terrorism: first, “What is it?” and, second, “Can it ever be justified?”.9 I call these the ontological and ethical questions, respectively.10 Here, I can pursue only one of them in depth, and so I am leaving aside the ethical question, largely because the ontological question has not only attracted greater attention from experts than from academic philosophers: it has held their attention for longer, too. Despite the fact that at least one philosophical article or book about terrorism has been published in English every year since 1968, it is a rare philosopher who has published more than two pieces on the subject in that time. Those who have published more than three, one may count on the fingers of two hands. With the obvious exceptions of R.M Hare and Michael Walzer, few are particularly eminent in the field, and even Hare and Walzer are better known for other things: Hare for his research into metaethics, Walzer for his work on the ethics of warfare. Compared to the floods of written publications from almost any counterterrorism expert (say Wilkinson and Hoffman, again), this scarcely counts as a trickle, and, when the experts’ appearances in the media and their contributions to governmental deliberations are also credited, philosophical research looks like the drop in the ocean that it is. Perhaps, though, I should entertain the idea that, philosophically, there is not much to say about terrorism. After all, the assumptions that philosophers make about the nature of terrorism – most notably, that it is “politically motivated violence” in a broad sense of the term – are usually strikingly similar to those made by the experts I have just mentioned.

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Perhaps they have it right, and we philosophers should let them get on with their job while we get on with our research into the incorrigibility of mental states and the trolley problem. I would beg to differ. To try to prove this, my next task will be that of describing one area in which I think philosophical research can show that the experts’ research (the work of highly intelligent people who know a great deal about their subject) can be shown to be logically quite unsound, and to propose corrections – conceptual ones, of course – to the problem. This, then, is where the example begins. The catastrophic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 focused attention on the “new” terrorist: an irreconcilable fanatic willing to bring about mass casualties. Obviously, such a category implies a distinction between “new” and “old” terrorism and terrorists, but I am going to argue that the most common lines of distinction between the two concepts – the components of what I call the “expert analysis” – are insignificant, because they are confused. My case is that the expert analysis, first, mistakes the undeniable quantitative differences in the destructiveness of the actions of individual persons or groups for qualitative differences between two kinds of terrorism; and, second, mistakes what I call the “limitlessness” of new terrorism for an unprecedented kind of motivation. In some quarters of the field that I have called “terrorism studies”, however, the concept has not been accepted wholesale. Despite the mutual resemblance of events such as the sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway carried out by Aum Shinri Kyo in March 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing which took place a month after them, “9/11”, the Bali bombings of October 2002, the Madrid railroad bombings of March 2004 and “7/7” in London in 2005, some commentators have questioned the claim that any acts of new terrorism have yet taken place.11 Even if such objections are correct, though, such essentially historical cases cannot be taken as reliable predictions that acts of new terrorism will never take place. I take a view of this matter that really only a philosopher can take: namely, that acts of new terrorism will never occur because they cannot occur, which in turn is because the concept of new terrorism is incoherent and cannot therefore describe any possible event or practice.12 In the early 1990s, experts noticed that terrorism seemed to be changing. The leftists, or nationalists, that had dominated the scene since the late 1960s were, it seemed, being replaced by others who were motivated by religious or right-wing ideologies, and who used more extreme violence, including crude “NCRB” weapons. Analyses of the concept of new terrorism were generated in order to make sense of such cases. As is often the case with novel analytical tools, there is a great deal

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of disagreement between different experts, but the overwhelming majority of analyses include as necessary conditions the two attributes that I mentioned earlier: namely, a willingness to cause huge casualties (which I call the destructiveness condition) and fanatical dedication to a cause that leads the agent to make “limitless” demands of their targets (from hereon, the limitlessness condition).13 These two necessary conditions are, under the expert analysis, a sufficient condition for an agent to be described as a new terrorist. Showing that either condition fails to distinguish new from old terrorism would therefore be enough to show that most particular analyses are faulty. In what follows, I shall try to refute the expert analysis altogether by showing that neither condition can distinguish new from old terrorism. There are at least two good reasons, apart from its prominence in the literature, for viewing the expert analysis as particularly important. For a start, it is pervasive in the media, especially among opinion-forming journalists. The view seems to cut across the usual categories of “liberal” and “conservative”. Consider, for instance, the following passages, the first from The Economist: “... al-Qaeda’s terrorism is different in kind from the sort practised by traditional terrorists. Well before September 11th, expert opinion started to worry that terrorists would turn to chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, and so threaten millions of victims, not just hundreds or thousands. In the late 1990s a succession of warnings were sounded that this would soon become America’s chief security threat. The warnings were ignored, not only because the cost of fending off such threats looked prohibitive, but also because of a lingering calculation that even terrorists were rational, deterrable political actors, with a strong interest in keeping their violent actions within some limits if they were to achieve their political ends. Everything that is known now about al-Qaeda indicates that it does not fit this template. Its aims are mystical, not rational. It does its violence in the name of Allah and so accepts no worldly obligation to moderate it. It is rich, and it is capable. Mr bin Laden and his men have made it plain that they are out to inflict maximum punishment on the infidel nations, and that they want unconventional weapons.”14

And, at about the same time, in the opinion columns of The Nation we find this: “... Even when talking with Abu Nidal, who was a lethal psychopath and a degraded mercenary, one was still just inside the outer boundaries of rational discourse. But with the forces of Al Qaeda, traditional propaganda terms like “hijacker” and “terrorist” have become robbed of meaning. We

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are faced with a weird combination of a state-supported crime family and a bent multinational corporation, sworn to the most reactionary worldview and entirely consecrated to a campaign of annihilation, which its targets are too profane and too corrupt to be expected to understand. This is new, and many liberals as well as many conservatives are still slow to discern the novelty.”15

Even without opinion-forming journalists, though, the idea of new terrorism would still lead experts, in particular, to suggest a need for strategies of response as different from the existing ones as new terrorism is supposed to differ from old. And, indeed, we find that the experts have made exactly such suggestions, which counts as my second reason for taking the idea seriously. As Bruce Hoffman puts it, “the emergence of this new breed of terrorist adversary means that nothing less than a seachange in our thinking about terrorism and the policies required to counter it will be required”.16 So, we might well wish that the expert analysis be complete and correct; for, if it is not, the formation of either policymakers’ opinions or of the strategic response – or both – might be literally misconceived. I shall repeat that my aim here is conceptual rather than empirical, and so we must turn to the question of what philosophers have made of this concept. Philosophical explorations of any aspect of any kind of terrorism are, as I have noted, somewhat thin on the ground, but considerations of new terrorism are about the rarest kind of all. The best-known philosophers to have yet taken on the task of examining the concept of new terrorism are Coady, whom I mentioned earlier, and Igor Primoratz. The latter accepts the destructiveness condition at least, while the former clearly accepts both the destructiveness condition and the limitlessness condition. Interestingly, though, each builds the same moral evaluation into their very analyses of new terrorism by arguing that new terrorism consists of failing to respect the unwritten rule that certain persons should be immune from attack, i.e., what is known, in just war theory, as the principle of discrimination.17 So, with respect to new terrorism, each answers the ontological and ethical questions simultaneously. On the grounds that this third, necessary condition is not part of the expert analysis, I must therefore say that neither Primoratz’s analysis nor Coady’s seems to add anything uncontroversially necessary to the expert analysis itself. To that extent, then, I shall leave them aside. Throughout what follows, I assume what seems to me to be manifestly true: that the expert analysis (whether on its own or as part of any larger analysis) is intended to distinguish new from old terrorism in kind. Indeed, unless that is true, I am quite unable to see the point of it. My basic case

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against the analysis is that it cannot establish any qualitative difference because each of its necessary conditions can, at most, establish certain quantitative differences between various acts of violent terrorism or between the methods used by different violent terrorists. Where the destructiveness condition is concerned, for instance, consider the following mind experiment. If one imagines that new terrorists only ever use NCRB weapons, old terrorists never, one thus represents the putative difference between old and new terrorism as clearly as possible. As far as I can see, though, this indicates no qualitative difference between the new terrorists and the old, but only the quantitative one, that NCRB weapons, deployed successfully, kill, maim or debilitate greater numbers of people or destroy more property, and so forth, than the weapons favoured by old terrorists. I therefore do not see how actually using NBRC weapons could make terrorism qualitatively new, rather than something distinguishable from old terrorism only by the greater deadliness of its means. We need not even alter the experiment to consider new terrorists as willing to use all degrees of force less than NCRB weapons, since if imagining new terrorists as using only the destructive extreme of NCRB weapons fails to establish any qualitative difference between them and old terrorists, I cannot see how imagining them as using less-destructive means could. What I have said, of course, cannot deny that putative acts of new terrorism are more destructive than those of old terrorism; it is intended only to show that such differences are accidental to violent terrorism in general, and therefore cannot establish any difference in kind. Asserting in response that the idea of new terrorism is somehow situational would not help matters, for if an act of paradigmatically “old” terrorism – the Provisional I.R.A.’s bombing of the Enniskillen War Memorial on Remembrance Day, 1987, for instance – happened to kill more people than an act of allegedly “new” terrorism did, would this make the Enniskillen bombing an act of “new” terrorism relative to the act of new terrorism? Such a consequence would make the whole idea of new terrorism collapse into absurdity. On these grounds, I conclude that the destructiveness condition can establish no difference in kind between acts of violent terrorism or between their perpetrators. Can the limitlessness condition do so? I think not, for very similar reasons as those I raised as objections to the destructiveness condition. It is quite true that the scope of the aims of old and new terrorists can differ greatly. Laqueur, for instance, explicitly details differences between the fanaticisms of different terrorists, that is, he explains that the ends for which new terrorists strive are larger in scale than those for which old terrorists do. The provisional IRA wants a united

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Ireland and therefore wages war against the British in Ulster, whereas AlQaeda wants to purify Islam’s holy lands by waging a worldwide jihad against the infidels who have corrupted them. Aum Shinri Kyo, for its part, covets the destruction of the whole world, whereas Baader-Meinhof wants only to bring down bourgeois civilisation. However, is such a difference in scope a difference in kind? As with the destructiveness condition, I am unable to see how it could be. Indeed, one can render a version of the mind experiment that I used when discussing the destructiveness condition. Imagine that a violent terrorist group, T1, wants to establish a certain form of government across the entire world, which seems to be as limitless an aim as any such earthbound group can have. Now imagine that another group, T2, wants only that a tiny country – Liechtenstein, say – adopt that very same form of government. The methods of each group are exactly the same – in fact, imagine that each group uses NCRB, which I have just shown establishes no qualitative difference between old and new terrorism – and each is completely uninterested in compromising with those who oppose its aims. Is the extreme difference in the scope of aims enough to identify the members of T1 as new terrorists and those of T2 as old terrorists? I cannot see how. And, again, saying that “new terrorism” is a comparative term – such that T1 is a new terrorist group relative to T2 but is an old terrorist group relative to T3, which wants to establish the same form of government across both Earth and Mars – seems to promise all kinds of problems with self-referential paradoxes and the like. The failure of a given necessary condition to distinguish one thing from another does not automatically show an analysis of a concept to be inadequate. A whole system of differences between their respective sufficient conditions may be necessary to make plain the differences between the concepts of two different phenomena. This is especially true when two phenomena are the same as each other in certain respects, as old and new terrorism presumably are meant to be. To take a commonplace example, the status of being unmarried is a necessary condition for the concept both of a bachelor and that of a spinster, and so the two concepts are mutually indistinguishable as far as that particular necessary condition is involved in each. Clearly, only if one builds other necessary conditions, such as the difference in sex, between instantiations of each concept, can one draw the essential distinction between the two phenomena. In the case of the expert analysis, however, the fact that the destructiveness and limitlessness conditions fail in exactly the same way as each other suggests to me that – at risk of making a fallacy of composition – they will fail in exactly the same way even when put together as a jointly sufficient

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condition. Since no other putative necessary conditions for new terrorism enjoy the expert unanimity that the destructiveness and fanaticism conditions do, there are as yet no further conditions to make up for this shortcoming, as the difference in sex between a bachelor and a spinster does. If I have made a sound argument and my background assumption (that is, that one must show that old and new terrorism are qualitatively different kinds of terrorism if one is to distinguish between them adequately) is correct, then the expert analysis in itself is profoundly flawed; and, as a consequence, any analysis of the idea of new terrorism that includes either or both conditions is at least prima facie questionable. While I agree that much contemporary terrorism is different from terrorism that came before, I also think that the claim that an entirely new kind of terrorism has appeared overstates the novelty and is therefore unnecessary or misleading. If pushed to suggest a better account of this novelty, I would be inclined to suggest that we are seeing wholly empirical developments that not only experts, but also everyone else, failed to foresee, but which are nevertheless quite consistent with existing notions of terrorism. Can something be said for the expert analysis after all? My answer would be yes in some ways, but no in others. The destructiveness condition strikes me as quite unsalvageable, but I think that a drastically revised limitlessness condition could help us understand this intuition. What I propose would, in fact, consist of applying the existing idea of mythicism to the concept of violent terrorism.18 Instead of articulating a new kind of terrorism, doing this would serve only to delineate possible philosophical distinctions within the existing notion of violent terrorism (in both its state and non-state varieties, as it happens). This re-characterisation of the limitlessness condition makes more intelligible certain features of at least some contemporary violent non-state terrorists’ ambitions in a fruitful new way that does not tend to represent it as an utterly novel species of the genus. So, I am not proposing a revision of the concept of terrorism (as the expert analysis does), but a qualification that it sometimes may prove necessary to make, in the same way as it is sometimes necessary to distinguish between violent terrorism in its state and non-state varieties, its politically motivated and religiously motivated varieties, and so on. I am going to talk about mythicism and, what I call, mythic terrorism in both a strong and weak sense. The aim of any kind of mythic terrorism, in either sense, is to establish the temporal ascendancy of some given mythos – that is, to over-simplify my point, to compel all persons in the social arena to which its activities are related to change their way of life to

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that which is preferred by the terrorists. In my view, this modification of the idea of terrorism explains the puzzling phenomena of latter-day violent non-state terrorism far better than the expert analysis can. Mythos and it counterpart, logos, are often distinguished from each other by means of the distinction between modernity and tradition, but I do not use it in that way. I take all human action – modern, traditional, postmodern, or whatever – to be mythic in at least the weakest sense of the term, inasmuch as human agents always act in accordance with some implicit – even unconscious – narrative that enables them to interpret the world coherently enough to take any action at any given moment. This fact seems indisputable. To walk down the street, one must take it for granted that the street will not collapse under one’s feet, even though the logical possibility of the street collapsing shows the incompleteness of such an outlook. Nevertheless, such quotidian mythicism is correct far more often than not. One whose actions are mythic in the strongest sense, however, carries around with him not an implicit narrative, but one almost painfully explicit, employing it normatively in such a way that will lead him to devalue or disregard everything standing outside his mythos – except, maybe, whatever helps establish its supremacy in his favoured social arena. This idea of strong mythicism, it should be clear, has had many manifestations in world history, though the one that has most obvious application to my concerns is that of fanaticism, whether religious, political, or anything else. Weakly mythic aims are subject to compromise with other mythoi, or even with logos. Strongly mythic aims, though, can be met only when everyone within some defined population wholly accepts the terrorist’s mythos – or at least when everyone in that population acts as if they do. I contend that the limitlessness of the aims of some violent terrorists can be best understood if we apply to the phenomenon the idea of strong mythicism. To put the point in the simplest way, a violent terrorist who is weakly mythic could be satisfied by certain concessions from those not sharing his mythos, whereas one who is mythic in the very strongest sense can offer only a choice between death and someone else’s conversion to his own mythos.19 Strongly mythic violent terrorists need not be religious or right-wing fanatics, but only the kind of people who will brook no compromise on their demands. The idea of the strongly mythic, violent, non-state terrorist, I believe, solves the problems that I have identified in the expert analysis without denying the common intuition that there seems to be something more intense about certain acts of violent terrorism. The destructiveness condition is clearly no longer required, because the possible contingent connections between strong mythicism and mass-casualty violent

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terrorism are now easier to understand, without requiring that every strongly mythic terrorist must harbour an ambition to obtain and use NCBR weapons or have no aims that fall short of world conquest. Similarly, puzzles that arise under the rubric of new terrorism do not arise under that of strongly mythic non-state terrorism. For instance, the unreconstructed limitlessness condition seems to indicate that violent communist terrorist groups of the 1970s, such as Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades, were to some extent new terrorists avant la lettre, simply because they saw no room for a deal with bourgeois society. If we conceive of them as strongly mythic non-state terrorists, though, there is no such problem. Ultimately, then, the idea of the strongly mythic violent terrorist is consonant with, and makes more precise, the intuition I mentioned above, while also dispelling the misleading impression, imparted by the expert analysis, that this phenomenon is peculiar to the recent past and to certain kinds of terrorists. It also has the advantage that it is compatible with a great deal of existing empirical research on the phenomenon that has hitherto been called new terrorism. In principle, the entire history of violent terrorism is susceptible to the kind of analysis I have proposed here. Applying a historically non-specific idea, such as that of strong mythicism, to the past events might well help us deal with the present in a way that the idea of new terrorism, which is taken to be so strongly linked to that present, cannot. Something like this is the distinctive contribution of philosophy to any endeavour.

Notes 1. Westfield State University, Westfield, MA 01085, USA. 2. For another possible illustration, that of bioterrorism, see Liam Harte, “Known Unknowns: How Philosophy Has Responded to Fear of the Post-9/11 World”, in The Impact of 9/11 on Religion and Philosophy: The Day that Changed Everything? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 3. René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method”, tr. Robert Stroothoff, in John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 114-115 (AT VI, 8). 4. Isaiah Berlin, “The Purpose of Philosophy”, in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 1-11. 5. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning the Human Understanding, “The Epistle to the Reader”; and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the First Edition. 6. Some idea, in sheer numerical terms, of how comparatively under-researched the topic is may be gleaned by looking at The Philosopher’s Index, the main record of publications in philosophy in the Anglophone world. It records a total of 531 publications with terrorism as their subject published between 1948 and 2009. This

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compares to 1048 on abortion, 910 on euthanasia, 5051 published on Ludwig Wittgenstein and 6819 on G.W.F. Hegel in the same period. 7. The Philosopher’s Index shows that, of the 531 publications on terrorism mentioned in the previous note, 431 were published between 2002 and 2009; and almost all the remaining one hundred were published between 1970 and 2001. 8. The most recent example of which I know at the time of writing was an appearance of less than ninety seconds made by Bruce Hoffman on a National Public Radio show, to analyse the PETN attack that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly made on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on 25th December 2009. (Celeste Headlee and Noel King, “Why Wasn’t Christmas Bomber on No-Fly List?” on The Takeaway, first broadcast 28th December 2009; heard via WGBH Boston; available online at .) 9. C.A.J. (Tony) Coady, “Defining Terrorism”, in Igor Primoratz, ed., Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3. 10. I also consider these questions in Liam Harte, “Known Unknowns: How Philosophy Has Responded to Fear of the Post-9/11 World”, in The Impact of 9/11 on Religion and Philosophy: The Day that Changed Everything? Ed. Matthew J. Morgan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), at 192-193 (where I mistakenly attribute the saying of Coady to Igor Primoratz). 11. See Ariel Merari, “Terrorism as a Strategy of Struggle: Past and Future”, Terrorism and Political Violence 11 (Fall 1999): 52-65; David Tucker, “What is New about the New Terrorism and How Dangerous is It?” Terrorism and Political Violence 13 (Autumn 2001): 1-14; Thomas Copeland, “Is the ‘New Terrorism’ Really New? An Analysis of the New Paradigm for Terrorism”, Journal of Conflict Studies 21.2 (2001): 91-105; Isabelle Duyvesteyn, “How New is the New Terrorism?” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 27.5 (September-October 2004): 439-454); Jonny Burnett and Dave Whyte, “Embedded Expertise and the New Terrorism”, Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media 1.4 (2005): 1-18; and Alexander Spencer, “Questioning the Concept of ‘New Terrorism’”, Peace, Conflict and Development 8 (January 2006): 1-33; and Thomas L. Mockaitis, The ‘New’ Terrorism: Myth and Reality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 12. While, as I have already noted, the idea of new terrorism implies that of an old, both imply a more general concept of terrorism that subsumes them. It is only fair to let the reader know that I take a distinctly minority view of the nature of terrorism. The general conceptual analysis of terrorism that I take for granted is that an agent engages in terrorism (i.e., is a terrorist) if and only if he tries to terrorise some subject, when terrorising a subject is understood as the agent altering the subject’s conduct in some way by making the subject afraid. It does not take much thought to see that this analysis is at odds with most of the literature on terrorism, both philosophical and non-philosophical. For a detailed explanation and defence of my analysis, see Liam Harte, “Must Terrorism Be Violent?” in Torture, Terrorism, and the Use of Violence: Review Journal of Political Philosophy 6, Part 1 (2008): 103-122. In this essay, however, I use the term terrorism as shorthand for the term violent non-state terrorism, which is to say terrorism carried out by agents, other than state authorities, who use violent means.

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The ideas of old and new terrorism are not, as far as I can see, applicable to any other kind of terrorism, whether violent or otherwise. Thus, nothing of the following argument hangs on my general definition of terrorism, because I am restricting my attention to what most of the literature calls terrorism. 13. Walter Laqueur’s analysis is a good example, because the two conditions constitute his entire analysis, as set out in Walter Laqueur, “Terror’s New Face”, Harvard International Review, 20.4 (Fall 1998): 48-52, and in the introduction to Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). I have criticised Laqueur’s view at length in “A Taxonomy of Terrorism”, in Philosophy 9/11: Thinking about the War on Terrorism (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2005), at 29-37. For other good but more complicated examples of the expert analysis, see Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Bruce Hoffman, “Terrorism and WMD: Some Preliminary Hypotheses”, The Nonproliferation Review (Spring/Summer 1997): 45-53; Bruce Hoffman, “Terrorism: Trends and Prospects”, in Ian O. Lesser (ed.), Countering the New Terrorism (Santa Monica: RAND, 1999), 7-38; Jose Vegar, “Terrorism’s New Breed”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 54 (March/April 1998): 50-55; Jessica Stern, The Ultimate Terrorists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, “America and the New Terrorism”, Survival 42.1 (January 2000): 59-75; Nadine Gurr and Benjamin Cole, The New Face of Terrorism: Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction (London: Tauris, 2002); Steven Simon, “The New Terrorism: Securing the Nation against a Messianic Foe”, Brookings Review 21 (Winter 2003) 18-24; and Matthew J. Morgan, “The Origins of the New Terrorism”. Parameters 34 (2004): 29-43. In this essay I leave aside other oft-mentioned contrasts between old and new terrorists, such as that new terrorists organise within fluid networks, old terrorists within rigid hierarchies; that new terrorists are often amateurs, old usually professionals; that new terrorists utilise new, especially digital technologies, whereas old are stuck in the analogue era; and that new terrorists rarely claim responsibility for their actions, while old always do. For an account of such characteristics, see Michael Whine, “The New Terrorism”, from the annual report of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism (Tel Aviv: Antisemitism Worldwide 2000-1), last accessed on 20th March 2009 at http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2000-1/whine.htm. (Whine’s “The Aftermath of 7/7: New Trends in Terror”, last accessed on 20th March 2009 at http://www.thecst.org.uk/docs/New%20Trends%20in%20Terror.htm suggest new items to add to the list–such as “minimal-cost terrorism”–in the light of the “7/7” bombings.) For a more recent survey, see Copeland, “Is the ‘New Terrorism’ Really New?” passim. 14. “Preparing for Terror”, The Economist, 30th November 2002: 11. 15. Christopher Hitchens, “Hijackers I Have Known”, The Nation, 275 (16th September 2002); 9. 16. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 1998), 212. See also, for example, Paul R. Pillar, “Terrorism goes global: extremist groups extend their reach worldwide”, Brookings Review 19 (Fall 2001): 34-7, for a pre-

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9/11 view of the way to respond to the threat of new terrorism; and Thomas R. Mockaitis, The “New” Terrorism: Myths and Reality (Stanford University Press, 2008) for an account of how antiterrorism, consequence management, and counterterrorism should be combined into a strategy suitable to the new terrorism (the threat of which, by the way, Mockaitis believes to have been exaggerated). 17. See Igor Primoratz, “A Philosopher Looks at Contemporary Terrorism”, Cardozo Law Review 29.1 (2007):33-51, and C.A.J. (Tony) Coady, “How New is the ‘New Terror’”, Iyyun 55 (January 2006): 49-65. I give a rather longer account of both these essays in Harte, “Known Unknowns”, 194-195. 18. What follows is a revision of ideas that I put forward first in “A Taxonomy of Terrorism”, especially Section III. 19. This would explain why “new” terrorists never claim responsibility for their operations, nor issue clear demands connected to them – would, if there were much to explain. Once again, I think that this characteristic is a matter of degree rather than kind. True, “traditional” terrorists often (though by no means always) make the connection between their actions and demands quite explicit – the provisional IRA even used to call press conferences after many of theirs. But Osama bin Laden has issued a long fatwa as a standing iteration of Al-Qaeda’s demands, among which are the removal of infidels from the holy places, and the destruction of Israel. In other words, Al-Qaeda’s only demand is that everyone accepts its mythos, or die.

CHAPTER TWO TERRORISM AND THE USES OF VIOLENCE FÁTIMA COSTA1

Violence has always been a constant in life, whether of individuals or their communities. To speak of humankind, of its history, of its artistic, scientific or technological achievements is to make incursions into a violent world. Violence is appealing when it forces reality to fulfil our desires, whether it is aggravated by love, anger, resentment or hatred, caused by our incapacity to communicate, our hunger for conquests and honour, or a desire to expand the empire, to strengthen the faith or to increase territorial and political influence. Moreover, our desires are both personal and collective. However, not all kinds of violence are to be considered political. In fact domestic violence, violence committed in the name of love, in feuds, neighbourly disputes, hooliganism or gang clashes, is quite different and complies with quite dissimilar intentions to that which takes place between political communities, through its legitimate or self-proclaimed representatives. Only this last kind of violence is distinctive of war and terrorism. The word “war” typically describes those periods in which armed force is intensified and becomes widespread. This is why Carl von Clausewitz, in his celebrated book, On War, proclaimed that “[w]ar is merely a continuation of politics”. Many statesmen or political representatives find themselves tempted or forced to use weapons to open or respond to hostilities when diplomacy or economical pressures stop being effective or when claims of political autonomy and aspirations for sovereignty do not find echo. I don’t mean to say that violence is a natural and inevitable consequence of politics and its struggles, much less a desirable one. I don’t mean either that this violence is purely reactive, or that its agents are only victims of their circumstances, determined by social, political or economic structures that they cannot control and from which they cannot escape. As in other forms of violence, its agents are often voluntarily and determinedly aggressive; they fight other aggressors

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as well as innocent and unwillingly victims. Resorting to political violence is frequently not a defensive reaction to a previous or imminent attack, but a deliberate option, a first choice born out of patriotic and religious ideals, militaristic conceptions, or simply a product of realpolitik. And we should always keep this in perspective, for as Michael Walzer has maintained, “[a]s soon as we focus on some concrete case of military and moral decision-making, we enter a world that is governed not by abstract tendencies but by human choice”.2 Political violence has a distinct nature that deserves to be acknowledged. Thus, we shouldn’t treat its agents as common criminals, although some of them do commit crimes as a result of their specific activities. A complete condemnation of political violence turns out to be quite difficult, especially when you are most likely to relate terrorism, and certain types of war, to a desperate fight of the weak against the strong. Clearly, this does not happen when you are a pacifist or a non-violence enthusiast. In this case, you reject terrorism and war as immoralities, based on the assumption that killing human beings is always without justification, due to the sacrality of human life. You may also aspire, like Erasmus and the Abbot of Saint-Pierre, to the abolition of war and, in this case, you do not entirely reject all wars, but pursue the messianic dream of war eradication, which is to be achieved by means of a new international order ruled by law. The same does not apply if you prefer the moral scepticism of political realism, especially in its strongest version. According to Robert O. Keohane, realists are sometimes permissive in what concerns political violence, for they prefer “the language of power and interests rather than of ideals or norms”.3 Realists consider international relations to be amoral, and believe, therefore, that they shouldn’t be described, judged or regulated by “idealistic” or “legalistic” rules. Kenneth Waltz writes that states, being units of an anarchical competitive system, are condemned to live in a natural state of war and to fight permanently for dominance in the international arena. Without a common sovereignty or a sharing of similar purposes, states act in order to achieve the maximisation of their own authority or at least to maintain an equitable balance of power. In order to guarantee survival, each state has to presume that all others will act to favour its egoistic interests without any concern for morality. This way, they must act, not only according to other states’ effective or declared politics, but according to their real or perceived capabilities. When states are militarily capable of attacking, all others must proceed to equal or to surpass them. As a result, warfare and terrorist activities can be seen as necessary and even prudential. “In politics,” Kenneth Waltz writes, “force

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is said to be the ultima ratio. In international politics force serves, not only as the ultima ratio, but indeed as the first and constant one.”4 That’s why Clausewitz defends that states must seek to ensure victory at any cost, making use of all unrestrained violence considered to be necessary, for only victory can compel your enemy to submit to your will. This being said, we should also keep in mind that realists are not militarists, because they often condemn the resort to political violence for prudential reasons. Although political realism is mostly a state-centred theory, its particularist and consequentialist standpoints are easily adopted by those to whom political ends seem to justify the means, whether they be the conquest of sovereignty, the dictatorship of the proletariat or the safeguard of faith. Just wars theorists, by contrast, assume that political violence sometimes can be used with justice in defence of crucial rights, like citizens’ entitlement to life and freedom and political communities’ entitlement to self-determination, especially against extreme forms of submission or enslavement. In fact, as Michael Walzer, one of the most distinguished just war theorists, claims “[t]he defense of rights is a reason for fighting. I want now to stress again, and finally, that it is the only reason”.5 The main purpose of just war theory is precisely to establish the boundaries between a just and an unjust resort to political force (the jus ad bellum) and a just and an unjust violent conduct within armed conflicts (the jus in bello). Therefore, just war theorists believe that a total refusal of armed resistance, at least in self-defence and in the presence of just casus belli, could simply leave some communities at the mercy of their aggressors, despite the fact that resorting to violence involves great dangers. As Michael Walzer said, “[a]ll aggressive acts have one thing in common: they justify forceful resistance, and force cannot be used between nations, as it often can between persons, without putting life itself at risk”.6 And because rights challenged in armed conflicts are of such an exceptional importance, and war causes sometimes appear to be just, some people, who don’t have pro-war and pro-violence attitudes, succumb to two great temptations, which we must oppose. We must resist first the utilitarian temptation to devaluate the individuals’ and political communities’ rights, accepting their sacrifices in the name of the greatesthappiness principle, especially of those we believe are fighting for the “wrong” causes. But we must also defy the deontological temptation of the “sliding scale argument”, into which, according to Michael Walzer, even some just war theorists, such as John Rawls, have fallen. According to the sliding scale argument, belligerents fighting for just causes have more rights. Certainly, the purpose of this argument is to deny the right to wage war to those who fight for the sake of an unjust cause, who hold

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totalitarian plans of world domination or wage religious or political crusades. Only those who fight for a just cause, i.e., for the entitlement to life and liberty, have the right to resort to political violence. Translated into just war lingo, this is to say that, according to the sliding scale argument, the logic of the ends, the logic of jus ad bellum, must surpass the logic of the means, i.e., of the jus in bello. But Walzer believes that the supremacy of the jus ad bellum justice traps us in the sliding scale argument. And this is conceived to be wrong and dangerous, because it disregards the universality of rights and “creates a new class of generally inadmissible acts and of quasi-rights, subject to piecemeal erosion by soldiers whose cause is just – or by soldiers who believe that their cause is just”.7 For soldiers and politicians tend to think this way: “the greater the injustice likely to result from my defeat, the more rules I can violate in order to avoid defeat”.8 This last reasoning is culturally dominant and leads us to moral relativism, which collides with the universality of rights we wish to preserve. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that most of our moral judgments on armed conflicts, and even the most apparently pacifist ones, are mainly prejudiced. They are, Walzer claims, basically condemnations of a violence that their authors “don’t like, or [of a] violence committed by people they don’t like”.9 The sliding scale argument is tremendously risky, above all because we tend to devalue the lives and rights of our enemies, both combatants and civilians, as well as the lives and rights of the members of those communities that, for various reasons, we don’t like, and to be tremendously indulgent with those we do like, especially if we think of them as being oppressed or martyrs of freedom. Since St. Augustine, it is well known that it is impossible to have two sides fighting justly in a war, but as Francisco de Vitoria claimed, nothing hinders war to be perceived as just by both factions in conflict. Hence, it wouldn’t be difficult to find combatants of opposing factions, totally and passionately persuaded for a variety of reasons that their cause is just, at the very point of risking their lives and dying for it, such is the preeminence of the values that are at stake. Wars, even the most unquestionably unjust and aggressive ones, are only possible due to wide support among the aggressor’s community, whether a freely granted one, or the result of strong manipulation and political control. All things considered, Walzer seems to mistrust the interference of idealism in war, in other words, he fears that “when winning is seen to be morally important,… when the outcome of the struggle is conceived in terms of justice”,10 or even when the messianic dream of the “war to end all wars” takes shape, political communities can rush into endless and total

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wars, giving in to multiple temptations of disregard for war conventions, guided by political and religious fanaticisms, that turn into moral crusades. That’s why Walzer states that war entails a moral duality expressed in “the dilemma of winning and fighting well” and that “[t]his is the military form of the means/end problem, the central issue in political ethics”.11 Consequently, in order to have a just war there has to be a logical independence of jus ad bellum and jus in bello, i.e., a war must always be “judged twice, first with reference to the reasons states have for fighting, secondly with reference to the means they adopt”.12 And this double judgment cannot be eliminated. The need to win cannot annul the obligation of fighting fairly and in a limited way. The justice of the cause doesn’t exempt the just soldier, because, as Walzer emphasises, “the rights of innocent people have the same moral effectiveness in the face of just, as in the face of unjust, soldiers”.13 This is why, in order to scrutinise the subject of terrorism, first of all we have to make an effort to define, to recognise those features and idiosyncrasies that distinguish terrorism from other forms of armed violence for political ends. If we don’t deny political communities the right to resort to force in defence of their members’ lives and freedom or in defence of their own political self-determination, we have to acknowledge that terrorism can be motivated by just causes, that it can be impelled by a strong feeling of injustice and a strong desire for freedom. But this does not mean that those who resort to violence are always right or that they can justifiably do whatever they wish. As in conventional war, if we examine terrorism, preferably through the optics of politics, we incur the sliding scale argument, judging terrorism through our own political and ideological beliefs, being capable at a moment to tolerate an act, that in the following moment we would disdain, if it were not perpetrated by the people we consider to be defending “the right” ideas or causes. But what is the distinctive quality of terrorism? How can we tell it apart from conventional war? And where does its moral problem lie? What seems to distinguish terrorism from other forms of political violence is its capability to create terror and this capability is mostly founded upon the fact that terrorism is a “civilian strategy”; its distinctive quality lies in the nature of its victims and in the fact that they are being intentionally and randomly targeted. For that reason, terrorism implies precisely the violation of the rules of war, that is exactly to say, the jus in bello criteria. Now, it is vital to stress that I’m endorsing a “tactical definition” of terrorism and that this definition has two major consequences: 1) it establishes a clear distinction between the terrorist and the guerrilla fighter. To attack a column of soldiers, a military or police installation or

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some economic interests does not constitute an act of terrorism, because it discriminates between civilians and non-civilians. At most, it can be named an act of guerrilla warfare; 2) terrorism exerted by sub-state groups, like liberation or ideologically oriented movements, such as the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof or the Lehi Groups, or more recently, AlQaeda, is only a subtype. There are two other subtypes of terrorism: 1) state terrorism, which occurs whenever a state harasses its own citizens or minorities, in order to prevent political dissent or to hinder secessionist movements, claims of political autonomy or rights equality; 2) war terrorism, which occurs whenever, in the context of an armed conflict, civilian populations are deliberately struck, in order to break the spirit of the enemy and to speed up its surrender. The attacks on Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Dresden are examples of war terrorism. Terrorism is also frequently used in times of war, by guerrilla movements or some regular armies, as a way of avoiding a “direct approach” with more powerful military forces. In “Terrorism and Innocence”, C.A.J. Coady stresses that this definition “contrasts with a political status definition in which ‘terrorism’ is defined as any form of sub-state political violence against the state. Some consequences of the tactical definition… [are] that (unlike the political status definition) it allows for the possibility of state terrorism against individuals, sub-state groups and other states”.14 Consequently, not all forms of sub-state political violence against the state are terrorism and many forms of violence exerted by the state can be called terrorism. To be more precise, and according to Walzer, the three subtypes of terrorism share the deliberate killing of non-combatants, and their main purpose is to “force the hand of (…) political leaders”,15 mainly because, as Walzer declares in Obligations, “[t]he state is vulnerable at this point, if at no other: majorities are made of men and men are easy to kill”.16 Terrorism wishes for “[t]he systematic terrorizing of whole populations (…). Its purpose is to destroy the morale of a nation or a class, to undercut its solidarity; its method is the random murder of innocent people. Randomness is the crucial feature of terrorist activity”.17 If violence were intended for a specific group or class, many people would feel protected simply by not belonging to that group or class or by not having direct involvement in warlike activities or politics. This tactical definition also has other consequences, one of which is to make pointless one of the top arguments presented when it comes to defending terrorism or to downgrading its criminal character, in a verbal ping pong or circular reasoning, by which state actions against terrorist groups or terrorist actions against the state are vindicated as legitimate

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forms of retaliation, as if one form of terrorism justified the other and the nature of the act itself little mattered. Given that in war “coercion is common on both sides”, the legitimacy of an act of violence should not rest on the nature of its agents or their beliefs, but on the nature of the act itself. Therefore, we ought to simply conclude that all kinds of acts of terrorism are worthy of condemnation or that all kinds of acts of terrorism are morally permissible. That is, the tactical definition of terrorism leads us towards ethical impartiality, avoiding the sliding scale trap and the worn-out and fruitless reasoning of the “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. This last reasoning drives us invariably to tolerance towards those we value, awarding them with limitless license to kill. When it comes to assessing the moral legitimacy of terrorism, another consequence of the tactical definition is the devaluation of the distinctiveness of modern terrorism and its political implications, when compared with the moral judgment of the act itself. It is often said that even though our present international order is dominated by states, many of which are nation-states, the rebirth of some tribalisms, the renewal of innumerable interethnic conflicts and the increasing number of massive violent events controlled by major sub-state and international groups seem to be jeopardising state monopoly of violence, and therefore the state itself. Moreover, it is quite possible that Al-Qaeda’s terrorism complies with a supranational political agenda, the political unification of all Islamic believers, the Ummah, being itself a challenge to sovereign and autonomous territorial states and presenting itself even as an alternative and conservative model of globalisation. But it is also true that the massive nature of recent attacks, like 9/11, turns out to be more a question of degree and proportionality that doesn’t change the nature of the issues concerning the legitimacy of striking non-combatants and the randomness of its violence. Besides, state monopoly of violence has always been more normative than descriptive, and you probably wouldn’t be able to find a state that doesn’t have in its formation and throughout its existence, stories of liberation movements, of violent attempts to intervene and control its political life or even attempts to secede by force. These approaches on terrorism can make you understand it better, being thus important and necessary, but they don’t tell you anything about its moral rightness. To achieve that, and to escape the sliding scale argument, you have to examine the nature of the action and the intention, to determine when it is morally correct to target someone with military force. As we’ll see, just war theory grants an extreme importance to the discrimination between combatants and non-combatants and to the

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principle of non-combatant immunity. And this discrimination is of great importance for the moral evaluation of terrorism, because the effectiveness of the terror strategy, as we saw previously, depends greatly on its randomness. Besides, most pro-terrorism debate rests precisely on the denial of the principle of non-combatant immunity and its inseparable idea of innocence. “A legitimate act of war,” Walzer claims, “is one that does not violate the rights of the people against whom it is directed”,18 and given that those rights to life and freedom are universal, it becomes extremely important to establish why it is acceptable that only certain people lose their immunity and can be attacked, so that the rules of war cannot be understood as simple acts of revocable kindness. Therefore, “the theoretical problem is not to describe how immunity is gained, but how it is lost”.19 And for authors like Michael Walzer, Thomas Nagel or Elisabeth Anscombe, the answer will have to be found not in people’s nature or in the ideas they share, but in the sort of action in which they are engaged. Combatants lose their right to immunity precisely because, as Elisabeth Anscombe sustains, they are “engaged in harming”,20 they are trained to kill, to injure, and the activities in which they get involved are inherently nocent. For that reason, immunity “is lost by those who bear arms ‘effectively’… [immunity] is retained by those who don’t bear arms at all”.21 Therefore, as Walzer explains, civilians (in spite of some exceptions) are considered “innocent people, a term of art which means that they have done nothing, and are doing nothing, that entails the loss of their rights”.22 In this way, being innocent is not a synonym of not being responsible or of not being blameworthy, but of not being nocent. Innocence “doesn’t refer to the participants but to the bystanders of battle, and so the class of innocent men and women is only a subset (thought it is often a frighteningly large subset) of all those in whom war takes an interest without asking their consent”.23 Because “[s]oldiers are the visible symbols and the active agents of [state] authority”,24 and because they are trained to kill by the state, they must be the intended targets of the enemy fire. But even a combatant’s immunity is temporarily lost, disappearing as soon as he/she abandons military life or becomes provisionally incapable of exercising his/her harming activities, in case of injury, disease or when he/she becomes a prisoner. In “War and Massacre”, Thomas Nagel presents a remarkable analysis of the conditions in which violence can be justifiably exerted and in which others can be legitimately treated with hostility. Nagel poses a puzzling and truly Kantian question: How is it possible to pick someone as a target and exercise on them extreme violence and nevertheless treat them as an

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end and not simply as a means? By driving our hostility and aggressiveness against those who attack us and whose activities constitute a threat to our safety. Nagel declares that “[t]o fight dirty is to direct one’s hostility or aggression not at its proper object, but at a peripheral target which may be more vulnerable, and through which the proper object can be attacked indirectly”.25 When attacking unarmed civilians you are not attacking directly your insecurity source and, therefore, you are doing nothing to reduce its power to strike. Thus, attacking civilians at random does not comply with any form of military necessity. However, this tactical definition of terrorism has to face several counter-arguments. Most of them entail the depreciation of the intentionality of action. For instance, pacifists like Robert Holmes, reject any form of political violence, because of the intrinsic badness of killing. They don’t see any relevant difference between terrorism and other warfare actions, since civilians’ safety can never be insured in war. As a result, the difference between killing with or without intention, sustained by the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is totally without sense, mainly for the victims of violence. The concept of collateral damages is thus seen as a theoretical artifice engendered by the DDE to justify some military actions, given that the DDE admits, as morally correct, actions with predictable negative consequences, since, among other conditions, its ultimate negative effects were not intended by the agent nor were a means to that end. However, it is difficult to deny the existence of a deliberate intention to attack civilians in a terrorist attack, whether performed by a state or by sub-state groups, and that this fact lies at its core, because too often, terrorism involves a series of actions that aim at maximising civilian damages, as happens when terrorists put nails in explosive devices to achieve the most destructive outcome. Another of the most repeated arguments is that which puts the case for a distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Many, such as George Mavrodes and Virginia Held, consider that it makes no sense to identify non-combatants with innocence, and combatants with guilt,26 since a soldier, especially when it comes to a child-soldier, can be forced to fight, while a civilian can be a passionate supporter or even a war sponsor. Now, as we saw earlier, this understanding of innocence is quite the opposite of the one sustained by Walzer and Anscombe. These authors would assume that a passionate supporter wouldn’t perhaps be innocent if he/she financed the war or effectively influenced its course, but still, this would not transform all civilians into legitimate targets. Virginia Held criticises Walzer and Coady’s terrorism definition, since it already presumes the conviction of terrorism. The core of their approach

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to the subject is ethical, emphasizing the violation of rights and, by this, they wrongly devaluate terrorism as a political strategy. Virgina Held considers that terrorism is the only possible weapon certain communities have to cope with oppression (terrorists usually fight against stronger conventional armies), to promote its causes and to impose a more equitable sharing of rights. This is why Held defends a kind of “utilitarianism of rights”, in which terrorism would be justified in certain cases because, “[d]epending on the severity and extent of the rights violations in an existing situation, a transition involving a sharing of rights violations, if this and only this can be expected to lead to a situation in which rights are more adequately respected, may well be less morally unjustifiable than continued acceptance of ongoing rights violations”.27 Related to the non-combatant immunity refusal, is the argument in favour of collective responsibility. Marc Bloch defended this thesis in the aftermath of France’s defeat in 1940, appealing to the fact that wars are not waged between individuals, but between states or nations as a whole. The soldier is purely an instrument in the service of his community, and he should not have to be the only one to pay for it. Wars, to proceed, depend greatly on political and financial citizen support. In democracies, citizens vote in favour of war or in favour of its promoters, therefore being maximally responsible for it, as if in some way they deserved their government and everything it entails. But Walzer firmly believes that all forms of collective responsibility and punishment should be condemned, given that this would correspond to a dilution of individuals’ rights and responsibilities and those of their communities, locking people in their inescapable collective identity. Even in the case of democracies that give clear support for war, we should never forget that democracies are by nature pluralist and that people don’t vote alike. Hence, collective responsibility “assimilates ordinary men and women to their government as if the two really made a totality, and it judges them in a totalitarian way”,28 as if communal membership involved a kind of “metaphysical culpability”. According to the principle of noncombatant immunity, there’s a substantial “moral difference between aiming and not aiming – or, more accurately, between aiming at particular people because of things they have done or are doing, and aiming at whole groups of people, indiscriminately, because of who they are… a bomb planted on a street corner, hidden in a bus station, thrown into a cafe or pub – this is aimless killing, except that the victims are likely to share what they cannot avoid, a collective identity”.29 Therefore, only material culpability must be acknowledged. If a war crime has been committed someone has to be directly responsible for it, or at least someone is more

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responsible or more capable of influencing political decisions than others. If there’s oppression, you should first of all try to identify its true agents and pressure them. Justice is enhanced whenever a war criminal is found and put to trial, but nothing is done to it when you kill indiscriminately. And bombs are not certainly discriminative. Being theoretically incapable of justifying terrorism, our societies, Walzer believes, became experts in the “politics of ideological apology”. While the Right forgives white terrorism, exercised on behalf of a state’s order, the Left specialises in excusing red terrorism, which is exerted on behalf of freedom and the fight against oppression. After the 9/11 attacks, the Left extended this politics to Al-Qaeda’s activity, delusional as regards the fact that all combatants of American imperialism are the heralds of the ideals of the Left. But Walzer finds very difficult to see in uncontrolled and blind acts of violence the sign of a true fight against oppression. Quite the opposite! He believes that terrorism is not an outcome but rather an instrument of oppression, not a weapon of the weak, but a weapon against the weak, the most vulnerable, the easiest to attack. The proof is that state immunity to terror is as big as its level of brutality. Hence, terrorism is neither a last resort nor the only possible choice, but rather a first resort motivated by an ideological agenda, whether exerted by states or by substate groups. Terrorism is a strategy which provides for political efficiency, through the denial of an enemy’s humanity and the “politics of ideological apology”, which dedicates itself to putting the blame on the victims of violence: “Of course, the September 11 attacks were wrong; they ought to be condemned; but – a very big ‘but’ – after all, we deserved it; we had it coming.”30 In democratic societies, terrorism is born out of the incapacity to mobilise the population, for whom they claim to fight, to the ideals shared by terrorists and to other forms of political struggle. However, you cannot escape paradox when it comes to political violence, for even Walzer, one of the fiercest opponents of terrorism, admits its use, though only in the case of a supreme emergency. An “exceptional and terrific” situation as it is, a time of deep crisis in which a people finds itself confronted with impending enslavement or massacre, it nevertheless admits the transitory suppression of the enemy’s rights in order to grant the survival and freedom of a political community. Although it is thought to prevent moral disaster, in the end this exception may well also represent the final victory of the rights of communities over the rights of individuals, because in those exceptional times, political and military leaders have to act immorally and intentionally kill innocent people. They have to get their hands dirty in order to avoid the imminent

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death of their community. Perhaps this paradox is a mere consequence of the inexorable character of the human condition and the harsh moral dilemmas it entails. The magnitude of the values challenged by political and armed conflicts is simply too high. Nevertheless, I truly believe that the supreme emergency exemption does not diminish the meaning and the necessity of imposing moral and military restraints on political struggles or fade the relentless wrongness of random violence and the intentional targeting of non-combatants.

Notes 1. Political Theory Group, Centre of Humanistic Studies – University of Minho 2. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. 4th ed. New York: Basic Books, 2006, 24. 3. Robert O. KEOHANE, “Realism, Neorealism and the Study of World Politics”. Robert O. KEOHANE (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 9. 4. Kenneth N. WALTZ, “Anarchic Orders and Balances of Power”. Robert O. Keohane (ed.), 112. 5. Just and Unjust Wars, 72. 6. Ibid., 52. 7. Ibid., 230. 8. Ibid., 229. 9. Michael Walzer, “On Proportionality”. The New Republic (8th January 2009). 10. Just and Unjust Wars, 226. 11. Ibid., xxii-xxiii. 12. Ibid., 21. 13. Ibid., 228. 14. C.A.J. Coady, “Terrorism and Innocence”, URL = https://commerce.meta press.com/content/r011281572321251/resourcesecured/?target=fulltext.pdf&sid=sr dcqw45efhyqa45t1wng555&sh=www.springerlink.com 15. Michael Walzer, “Five Questions About Terrorism”. Dissent 49, no. 1 (Winter 2002). 16. Michael Walzer, Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War, and Citizenship. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970, 64. 17. Just and Unjust Wars, 197. 18. Ibid., 135. 19. Ibid., n., 145. 20. See G. E. M. Anscombe, “Mr. Truman’s Degree”. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, vol. III (Ethics, Religion and Politics). Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, 62-71. 21. Just and Unjust Wars, n., 145. 22. Ibid., 146. 23. Ibid., 30.

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24. Ibid., 219. 25. Thomas Nagel, “War and Massacre”. Philosophy & Public Affairs (1971/72), 123-144. 26. See George I. MAVRODES, “Conventions and the Morality of War”. Philosophy & Public Affairs (1975), 117-131. 27. Virginia Held, “Terrorism, Rights, and Political Goals”. R. G. Frey and Christopher W. Morris (eds.), Violence, Terrorism, and Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 81. 28. Just and Unjust Wars, 261. 29. Ibid., 200. 30. “Five Questions About Terrorism”.

CHAPTER THREE REASONS OF VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE OF REASON: AN INTERPRETATION BASED ON ERIC WEIL’S CORE PARADOX LUÍS MANUEL A. V. BERNARDO1

Introduction: a Two-sided Problem Nowadays, we tend to be surprised by the continuous presence of violent phenomena in our societies, as if we were convinced that we have somehow reached, either in terms of social organisation or in the legal constitution of democratic states, a definitive pattern of political perfection. Furthermore, despite some demands coming from philosophical thought for a more dialectical and critical approach, the basic opposition between the realms of reason and violence keeps on working as a presupposition of ongoing inquiries. Accordingly, terrorism comes across, most of the time, as an extreme practice of violence that simultaneously challenges the foundational values of modern welfare and the consensus around the preferences that should be accorded to modernity’s rational guidelines as they were materialised in contemporary nation-states. How can it be thought that humans, after being delivered from recent totalitarianisms, would not choose freedom and legality? Is it acceptable to conceive of political institutions deprived of a communal basis, making it impossible for individuals to satisfy their identity claims? Likewise, it is asserted that international terrorism intends to break such a unity, as the one assumed by the composite expression “nationstate”, on the basis that it constitutes an ideal, or at least the most rational, form of politeia. But it may be argued that the effective existence and interest in such unities have been questioned for decades, as they failed to cope with the sort of rationality implied by the project of Modernity. In

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that case, international terrorism would appear in a moment when that constitutional order and the still incipient attempts at international societies, and even states, were breaking down. As such, more than just an external and irrational factor confronting the supreme rationality of nation-states, terrorism may eventually be thought of as one of the dialectical consequences of the crisis of such organisations, which were never able to avoid an important amount of violence directly implied in politics and to give a satisfactory response to the expectations of meaning of individuals. Philosophically, such a possibility assumes, first of all, that phenomena like international terrorism must be treated under a broader label encompassing violence and rationality in modern political institutions, namely in the project of modernity itself, and, secondly, that violence, very much in opposition to common philosophical beliefs, can, in certain conditions, generate paths of meaning and self-fulfilment. That is to say, that a philosophical approach to terrorism must be concerned, above all, with the paradoxes generated by the intimacy and the mutual denials between violence and reason in order to understand how it is possible that, for certain individuals, values like freedom are subdued by beliefs about good or meaningful life. Therefore, in order to deal with such mostly foundational issues, we shall retrieve Eric Weil’s conception of the relations between reason and violence, as they are central to his political philosophy, and expect that the complexity of his analysis will enable us to formulate some hypothesis concerning the reasons for the continuous spell of violence over more logical human practices. Notwithstanding that such an approach, delivered during the 1950s, would nowadays be irrelevant, returning to it with specific concerns on terrorism – a subject that, obviously, wasn’t even mentioned – shows us quite the opposite. First, globally, since Weil’s approach to violence is directly related to the problem of meaning, and not to those of truth or of reality in ontological terms, it provides significant insights into the concept, but most of all, introduces the necessity of producing what may be called a diffracted understanding, quite distinct from the common generalist use of the term. Such a perspective may be translated into precise questions concerning the phenomena of terrorism and, at the same time, establish itself as an appropriate methodology to avoid the use and abuse of broad labels or the tendency to assert rigid definitions, as its main explicit goal was to raise problems rather than to simply solve them. It should be clearly stated that to emphasise the mesh between reasonability and violence isn’t meant to produce any sort of justification for violent acts taken as specific actions in specific times and places but only to point out

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the existence of a complex philosophical problem sustaining the more circumstantial perceptions and judgments. The methodological hypothesis that we derive from Weil’s point of view is that any theoretical approach to phenomena such as terrorism is bound to fail if it depends on dual models based on the axiomatic opposition between supposed normal behaviour, taken as reasonable, and others, assumed as deviant conducts. Second, regarding the political sphere, Weil’s philosophical conception, in its efforts to combine dialectical, transcendental and realistic approaches in order to offer a pertinent characterisation of the modern state with its particular challenges, mostly the awareness of the challenges for overcoming the mosaic of politics centred on nation-states perceived as entities or individuals, establishes a sufficiently consistent frame to allow us to consider relevant similarities and differences. Expressing identical concerns on Weil’s actuality, Marco Filoni, in the 1920s, argued that it should be considered analogous to Marx’s anticipatory reading (FILONI, 2000: 34), notwithstanding substantial differences of conception between the two thinkers. It may be asserted, then, that as a suitable mirror for our own perplexities, Weil’s political philosophy stands out as an eloquent interlocutor, as it suggests some interesting ways of questioning and, most of all, reminds us of the importance of keeping the intents of theoretical systems on the horizon of freedom, whatever the dominant contingent concerns of public opinion may be. Finally, the proximity to the Second World War, in which the author was militarily involved, bearing the personal cost of a long captivity in a concentration camp, brands such a philosophy, seemingly so rational at first sight, with a mixed trait of authenticity and urgency regarding the reality of violence and the ways of overcoming it, enabling the transition, as pursued by the philosopher himself, from rational assertions to reasonable ones. This suggested path is intended to assure that philosophical thought and history will finally reveal their true connections.

The Logic of the Discourse of Terrorism In 1950, Eric Weil published his main work, La logique de la philosophie, divided into two complementary parts: a long introduction, offering a reflection on the differences between this and other logical paradigms, establishes a dialectical history of the philosophical search for meaning, from a more ontological point of view to the recent linguistic approach. As Weil puts it, the new use of the term “logic” always requires dealing with a second degree problem concerning the meaning of

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meaning, namely the meaning of searching meaning. A second sequence, bearing the same title as that of the complete book, presents sixteen schematic discourses, each one centred on a specific logical category which allows a different posture for accessing meaning and proposing a distinct wisdom. Meaning and wisdom, then, appear as the two other categories that, while being formal, also define the intentionality of the previous speech types. In doing so, they clarify that all discourse is at the same time a process of giving meaning to life and an anticipation of the sort of existence that, accordingly, would be meaningful. The Logique is mainly concerned with the type of philosophical categories that elected coherence as a decisive criterion. Consequently, it approaches discourses from the distinction between language as expression and discourse as comprehension, adopting a synthetic perspective that aims to constitute an enunciation frame for concrete historical speeches. The latter, although considered to make use of all categories, is, as Weil argues, still subjected to one of them that works as its generative centre and provides the key for its intelligibility. Moreover, categories that allow complex discourses encourage, what Weil called, the resuming (reprises) of other less determined categorical discourses, but such a recollection doesn’t affect the category nucleus. Through the combination of transcendental types and considerations on discourse pragmatics, then, Weil intends to show, simultaneously, how meaning, in the plurality of its possibilities, is to be produced, and how the generative categories operate to define the order of meaningful intentionality. For our current analysis, this proposal may offer some insights into the typical processing of the discourse of terrorism. The initial hypothesis may be formulated as such: if a pretension to discourse exists, the speeches of terrorism may be comprehended within the logic of discourses conceived by Eric Weil. So, based on the hermeneutical distinction between discourse intentionality and subjective intentions, we shall apply Weil’s proposal, accepting that terrorism is committed with the purpose of delivering a discourse, despite the patchwork technique of its narrative elaboration, the assumed meaningful counterpart of meaningless violent actions, in order to establish the logical characteristic of what would appear to be, if a circumstantial analysis was undertaken, an inconsistent amount of contradictory acts of speech, only unified by the intention of raising violence levels. Within our methodological hypothesis, as will be made clear, even this contradictory condition provides an important clue to the attribution of such a discourse to a specific category. In addition, we expect that this approach will lead to an important distinction between the categories on which such a discourse intends to be explicit and

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strategically based, and the effective category that rules over its order of speech. In doing so, it must be stated that we aren’t truly making a sort of methodological tour de force insofar as Weil, not dealing specifically with what is nowadays immediately perceived as terrorism, also sought to understand the logic of terror, namely state terror, as produced by the Nazis. His main intuition, which we propose following, was that there is a typified discourse for terror based on one category – the Oeuvre – that is designed to make use of other categories and attitudes, but not belonging to any of them, or even believing in any of them, such plasticity appearing as the result of its deliberate refusal of the value of ultimate coherence, fully acknowledging its logic, and not as a consequence of ignorance: « Les ‘contradictions’ de la catégorie se ramènent ainsi à une seule, et qui n’incombe pas à l’attitude, à savoir entre le fait fondamental de son immédiateté et la tentation de médiation qui constitue l’entreprise de parler d’elle. L’homme de l’œuvre est en dehors du langage ‘philosophique’. Cependant, non seulement le discours arrivé à maturité peut parler de lui, non seulement l’homme dans la sûreté de son œuvre laisse parler de lui, sachant qu’on peut parler de tout: lui-même il parle. Mais ce langage est fondamentalement différent de tout langage précédent.» (WEIL, 1950: 355)

This difference is to be found precisely in the particular relation between language and violence that constitutes the core of such a discourse, reflected in the eclectic declared disdain for aims of coherence and comprehension. If compared with other processes of violence in or through language, what is relevant is the disappearance of the dialectics of language and action that converted the discourse into an instrument and/or an action towards the achievement of such a discourse. For the discourse of the Oeuvre, language is less than instrumental, even less than strategic, certainly much less than expressive, because, in fact, for the idea of the Oeuvre in process, requiring the perception of its absolute uniqueness, language is finally conceived as the Oeuvre’s diction, a mere proclamation of its ongoing course. This understanding leads to the conclusion that its language is the language of the imperative (WEIL, 1950: 363). The same can be said of its conception of action: action appears as less than action in conventional terms, i.e., less than a means to achieve an end, as the Oeuvre absorbs all sorts of actions in its own practice of violence. It must, then, be noticed that Oeuvre isn’t a goal which should be achieved through violence in speech and action, but a variety of irruptive effects that coincide absolutely with the exerted violence. We may, thus, assert that

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the meaningfulness of the discourse of terror depends on the meaningless consideration of discourse itself, the same applying to action. The consequence is that the less meaning is introduced in the speeches, the bigger the effect, particularly in terms of violence, that will be produced, since: « L’attitude repousse toutes les catégories pour les utiliser toutes; (…) étant donné qu’elle refuse le discours, la compréhension, l’universel, qu’elle s’établit dans le faire, non pas dans le penser, qu’elle se fonde dans l’unicité et exclut toute communauté, toute communion (…) et qu’il ne reste entre le créateur [the leader] et les hommes que la violence et la ruse…» (WEIL, 1950: 360)

So, the use of language in apparent narrative and/or discursive conventions has to be understood in two steps. First, for the category/attitude itself they are manifestations of the inevitable dominance of the Oeuvre, regardless of logical or hermeneutical concerns, i.e., they are what they are, as they are, which may lead us to accept that the existence of a kind of supposed irrational barrier in terrorism discourses, many times attributed to the religious or cultural context, doesn’t truly have anything to do directly with such realms, not even with the opposition of rational/irrational, but rather depends, quite the opposite, on the irrelevance of all those issues to terror, which, from the start, foils any attempt at meaningful persuasion by eloquent or argumentative essays. Second, since the Oeuvre is to exist in a world marked by the idea of the value of rationality and the interest of solving most of the divergences in discursive terms, it becomes necessary to satisfy such expectations of the majority, despite the profound disbelief in the pertinence of those terms, by producing a simile of reasoned discourse, interweaving formal and substantive quotations, drastically changing their contexts of enunciation and submitting them to “over interpretations”, entirely unconcerned with the meaning they carry but focused only on the way they may be adjusted to the survival of the Oeuvre. Those two moments aren’t, in themselves, separate, but their practical efficiency depends on the deceived perception of the opposite state of affairs. The second one, particularly, becomes extremely efficient if its connection with the first isn’t detected as essential, as history keeps on showing. Weil called these inauthentic speech acts “myth” or, as we would call them, modern myth: «ce mythe se distingue du mythe de la certitude en ce qu’il se sait mythe et s’oppose à la pensée technique comme le but au moyen (bien que

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l’homme de l’oeuvre le traite comme moyen par rapport à l’oeuvre et sache que son oeuvre n’est pas but pour le raisonnement). Le contenu de ce mythe-ci n’est pas destiné ni apte à régler la vie et les actes des hommes qui suivent et doivent suivre les recettes de la communauté du travail. Il ne se fonde pas sur une tradition réelle (la tradition vivante de la communauté est comptée parmi les facteurs d’ordre technique), mais se crée une tradition mythique elle-même.» (WEIL, 1950: 358)

From Weil’s quote, it becomes clear that this mythological discourse is produced in modern times and with the deliberate purpose of interfering in modern societies, an aspect which should not be ignored in the analysis of specific speeches. Moreover, it must be understood that a contemporary global mythological version lacks, inevitably, the dimension of authenticity that used to assist the belief in ancient myths. As such, the myth designed for terror intents must not be confused with the amalgam of beliefs, convictions and reasons that sustain what Weil called the discourse of Certitude, a specific logical discourse type, in its purity no longer possible in our world. If, as we already stated, the discourse and attitude of Certitude are always present, no matter what the time or space differences may be, it has, however and for the moment, lost the capacity to be more than just resumption, in other more complex discourse patterns. Even if, nowadays, the discourses and attitudes of Certitude are frequently dealt with, they are in fact no longer central, even for those groups that try to argue for them. This means that such a mythical construction doesn’t derive directly from any actual society or cultural stage, as none really depends on Certitude, despite the degree of interference of such a category/attitude. The link, in fact, is imposed by the narrative itself on its label of legitimacy, with the generally underestimated subsidiary effect of transforming into hostages the communities singled out as producers of rigid world conceptions. What must, then, be pondered on, is that the possibility of terrorism constitutes an evidence for all societies that present a plural structure, as it depends on the dual perception of violence and non-violence as being directly associated with identification processes and with the minimal expectations of modernity shared by all actual societies, whatever the main source of such a modernity level may be. As no community is a priori designed to become terrorist, it is up to the terror mythology to strengthen the idea of a causal relation between the violence of its attitude and the supposed background from which it operates, insisting precisely upon the devices of certitude that are still active, but also, in particular, making good use of the main characteristic of the discourse of Certitude, the confusion of truth and certainty. Such

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confusion, nevertheless, is produced from the subjective side of certainty, in obvious opposition to the genuine understanding of Certitude that comes before any clear separation between objective and subjective points of view, in order to sustain the fallacy that whatever is stated with the violent force of an imperative is true. Consequently, the key to access the eventual relationships between terrorism and the processes depending on Certitude in certain societies and states should not be searched, primarily, in a determination of causality, but in a hermeneutical approach to the ways in which the discourse of terror fabricates such readings of history, so as to make it believable for individuals or groups. This detachment from specific historical communities is confirmed by the fact that, nowadays, terrorism is, opportunistically for both parts involved, closer related to certain states, as its activity tends to be on the international and trans-state scale. Consequently, it is quite misleading to assume that terrorism possesses a direct relation to any specific culture or civilisation, bearing particular features of predisposition for its production, in opposition to ours. Terrorism offers a basic narrative as a substitute for cultural, authentic life where such unifications don’t truly exist. Instead, in all cultural configurations there is a complex textuality composed of different narratives, from different sources and functioning on different levels, more or less consequent, never able to mesh together into a unique version. In that sense, violence produced by terrorism is less related to material impact than to cultural processes in general, as the former is always limited, while the latter is affected in its own prolific constitution dynamics by the intent to mythological reduction. The same reasoning must be applied to the comprehension of its relations with the religious phenomenon. Again, the issue may be considered from both a logical and a historical perspective. In spite of its continuous usage of sacred texts and the declared pretension to be the most faithful expression of God’s will, in the case of terrorism appealing to religion legitimacy, the distinctions presented by Weil immediately make us aware of the misunderstandings brought on by such a forced interaction. In fact, according to the Logique, there’s also a specific discourse that revolves around the category of God, but it has more to do with the constitution of subjectivity and human historicity as consequences of essential freedom through the personal relationship with transcendence, than with concerns over blind obedience, holy wars or eschatology. Quite eloquently, and in sequence with the Logique, it does not follow the category of Certainty, but that of the Self (Moi). That’s the reason why Weil considered it the most modern of the old categories (WEIL, 1950:

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188), inasmuch as it implies a permanent search for meaning through the dialectics of human freedom and God’s dependence, quite differently from the narrow version of religious existence as a sort of war strategy against itself, others and, contradictory enough, God itself. Not surprisingly, however, the autonomous discourse category that is the first fully modern heir of this one, in the sense that modernity finds its meaning in the idea of freedom, is Personality, prepared by the categories of Condition, Conscience and Intelligence, introduced in such terms: «L’homme qui ne se contente pas du jeu de l’intelligence mais s’interprète soi-même – sans renoncer pourtant à l’intelligence – se constitue comme centre d’un monde qui est celui de sa liberté. Il est valeur absolu, source de valeurs: personnalité.» (WEIL, 1950: 283)

We must keep in mind the logical dimension, disregarding the factual descriptive or the chronological aspects, in order to understand why Weil attributes the key of the faith in Christ to this category, as it is based on a sustained anthropology whose centre is the value of mankind, i.e., the only way to fully understand why God would bother to become a man (WEIL, 1950: 315). Even if it favours the Christian credo, the philosophical core of Weil’s interpretation would easily be found in any other religious conception, especially monotheistic ones. It thus seems that logical categories centred on religious world conceptions are mainly used to generate dialectical discourses related to reflective attitudes of men that seek to properly confront their humanity. They must then be distinguished both from the particular historic expressions of the acts of churches and their interpretations and, to a greater extent, from the eventual terrorist version. Nonetheless, Weil himself felt obliged, in his explanation of the category of the Oeuvre, to point out that it shouldn’t be conceived as the resuming of Personality, insisting especially on logical grounds (WEIL, 1950: 348). But, at the same time, there’s an obvious pragmatic reason for the possibility of such an appropriation, since for the myth of the Oeuvre excellent results may come from the combination of the notions of God’s wrath and the nihilistic interpretation of the chosen men as sources of values, with the aim of asserting the belief in a God at the disposal of those who participate in the Oeuvre. It is indeed very important to keep in mind that the Oeuvre constitutes an attitude and a category by itself, not at all a possibility or a redesign of any other logical unity. Once again, the need to analyse the pragmatics of the discourses of terror through its own devices becomes clear, namely to identify the processes through which they are able to produce the misleading representation of dependence on a religious world

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conception or on a particular church confession, that would be condemned to fight for recognition, before following the inverse path. As Canivez argued, the Oeuvre acts regardless of expectations of recognition, another distinctive aspect from Personality which, in counterpart, is totally committed to it (CANIVEZ, 1999: 64). Another, more historical, consideration can confirm those logical deductions, for no religion is by itself designated to become a realm of terror or a natural producer of terrorists. One may consider the violence implicated in pious attitude unreasonable, condemn all violent acts directly or indirectly committed in the name of religion, and assume that faith is repeatedly a starting place of intolerance, but all those critiques are to be shared by all creeds, as far as they aspire to universality and to stand out as the revealed wisdom in sentimental terms that will later have to be harmonised with the principles of reason. It might be argued that some religions have, in their fundamental texts, specific incitements to violence, but it’s evident that in all of them we can find such textual arguments. Moreover, despite the commitment of philosophy to reason, it is noteworthy that for the majority of people religious faith is a vital feature of existence, and that no assurance exists that a religion of reason would be less violent or unreasonable. But the decisive perception consists in avoiding the confusion of texts as hermeneutical open possibilities, particular readings that fixate one of them as what is meaningful, and the deliberate misreading with the aim of sustaining a rather different textual order. If we take on an approach closer to the semiotic perspective, it appears that they are like all texts: codified combinations of a dictionary, a grammar and an encyclopedia whose horizon of meaning depends on the pragmatics of reading. This kind of perspective should lead us to contradict the common idea that their meaning is closed from the beginning. This is, obviously, the result of the believer’s point of view, in itself inadequate for a textual analysis, which, in turn, would reveal the openness of their interpretative horizons, the only acceptable explanation for their broad cultural impact through the ages and for their extraordinary survival in a world shaped by scientific and technical considerations. Again, there’s no obvious causal connection between textual sequences and specific effects like terrorism, but there is an eventual hermeneutical reason for the vulnerability of religious founding texts to such subversions which lay not so much in the inner pre-defined orientation of their message as in the complexity of their structure which calls for a constant interpretative exercise. It might, then, be stated that they are so wide-open as to admit even the most violent reductions, one of the typical characteristic of texts that are interwoven

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with broad cultural configurations. The conclusion follows as above: analysis should be directed once more towards the pragmatics that sustain the myth as a constructed discourse in order to understand the use that it makes of the religious textuality intended to simulate reasonable validity claims. This would, for instance, show that more than a specific expression or sequence, religious texts offer excellent models of the imperative use of discourse, not to mention the messianic and the sacrificial expectations that are more related to contents, having therefore produced a kind of cultural easy cohabitation with forms which in other situations would be perceived as extremely violent. The discourses of terrorism are less concerned with content than they are with violent effects allowed by specific rhetoric features intended to provoke political, not religious, consequences.

The Core Paradox As the Logique, the critical first philosophical ground according to Weil, generates the need and sustains the legitimacy of both moral and political philosophies, constituting their reference frame, we shall also find in its two parts the broader problematic which will later be specified in the political sphere. However, sustaining such an expectation implies the previous acceptance that violence, such as reason, is a general philosophical problem, the biggest one for the author, according to Patrice Canivez (CANIVEZ, 1999: 38), that is present not only in the political sphere, but also already in action in foundational issues, political forms of violence being particular processes of what Weil considered a first choice. As it appears, such a decisive choice between reason and violence, individual and historical, must be understood as a wide-ranging attitude oriented both towards coherence and meaning in discourse terms, with any other orientation being unable to accomplish both the interpretative and the legitimating tasks required to propose universal, meaningful, discussable conceptions, or lean towards violent solutions, that can’t in any case be reduced to explicit, mostly physical injuries. Consequently, philosophy, similarly to violence, must be considered as a general choice before becoming a particular activity, a choice founded on discourse which makes sense of human existence. If we accept Weil’s conception, it follows that, as may have become clearer, those two paths involve complex networks made of ideologies, convictions, beliefs, perceptions, speeches, strategies and expectations, each of these terms implying its own inner complexity apart from what they inherit from the whole. In contradiction with the increasingly

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dominant perception, violence and discourse aren’t inevitabilities in themselves, nor historical or metaphysical entities, but anthropological possibilities, both signalling ways of conducting life that may appeal to certain individuals and groups and, most significantly, not existing in absolute exclusion of the other. In principle, violence may be as attractive as reason and, in reality, it must be conceded that most human actions correspond to some figure of violence. Ignoring such evidence and/or operating in theoretical and practical terms as if the two possibilities determine clear opposites, one diabolical, the other angelical, inscribed in a sort of half-natural, half-historical reality, introduces to any intention of comprehending the complexity of human action a first level of misunderstanding that will echo throughout all the subsequent stages. At the same time, however, stemming from its nature of being universal, not general, Weil’s concept of violence does not cover biological behaviour such as natural aggression, in which case it wouldn’t correspond to a choice and, as such, it would be separated from the realms of ethics, politics and law. Clearly, Weil’s proposal does not point to an aetiology (KIRSCHER, 1992: 123), but to a hermeneutical approach, according to its fundamental assertion that the concept of violence depends on the amount of reason that may be attributed to it. Moreover, such an intimate relationship stands on a core paradox that Eric Weil is straightforward in presenting: «La violence est un problème pour la philosophie, la philosophie n’en est pas un pour la violence, qui se rit du philosophe ou qui l’écarte quand elle le trouve gênant (…). Le résultat paradoxal est donc que la violence n’a de sens que pour la philosophie, laquelle est refus de la violence.» (WEIL, 1950: 58)

The universality of violence must indeed be conceived as resulting from the way it stands as the dialectical counterpart of reasonability, even more than of reason, for reason itself, in the traditional sense, presents itself as an important source of violence. The main point is, then, that reason and, even more so, reasonability, must always be constructed in the midst of violence, with a certain amount of violence, quite distinct from belligerent violence, yet symbolic violence nonetheless, requiring a strong educational effect to become acceptable and followed by the majority. At the same time, since this is a project that deals with the best way to live, the search for reasonability must constantly be submitted to and remain in search of legitimacy procedures. Reasonability as the opposite of violence is thus a task to be constantly sought, in order to change it to the point where it acquires a satisfactory meaning equivalent to what may be

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considered an acceptable life. In Weil’s own terms, this task may be summarised in the following way: «Il ne s’agit pas de trouver un but dans la réalité, mais de trouver un but à la réalité. » (WEIL, 1950: 397)

Nevertheless, the dialectical relation between them supposes that the absolute eradication of violence from history is, in itself, impossible. Only formalistic or teleological conceptions, waiting for an end not only to history but also to historicity as an anthropological feature, can argue otherwise. Furthermore, if such annihilation did occur, it would signify that the most extreme violence produced by reason had been successful, and from the representation of an apparent victory of reason, it would also mean the confirmation of the ultimate reign of violence. According to this argument, both reason and violence, through the effect of the anthropological search for meaning, should not be used as single concepts corresponding to obvious procedures. Even before a case analysis of historical events, it is necessary, then, to deal with what may be called the chief logical distinctions. In view of that demand, Weil considered three broad violence levels: 1. violence of life, i.e., of attitudes; 2. violence of discourse, i.e., of categories, as they establish the meaning of a certain attitude and justify such a conception of life as being the best; 3. purposeful evil violence. It must be noticed that this third level can’t be understood without the other two, as it makes use of and reverts back to them, which, again, demands a dialectical and hermeneutical approach to particular action. In order to better assert this point, we shall also put forward the four anthropological figures of violence established by the author concerning violence of life: 1. violence of one who doesn’t accept another’s discourse; 2. violence of one who stands in his own identity, not wanting to access and share expression; 3. violence resulting from the conviction that what is important in human life doesn’t result from human decisions and actions but from some natural effect or the deliberation of some supreme authority; 4. violence of those who don’t think it possible to be delivered from the accepted circumstances (WEIL, 1950: 57). In all four situations it is always a certain way of dealing with the discourse or the attitude, or both, that is at stake. It also becomes obvious that terrorism interferes, to a certain extent, with the four figures, simultaneously making use of the last two, more typical of victims’ existences, to claim the legitimacy of the first two, more characteristic of domination attitudes. As it stands, the strength of the impact of modern terrorist actions is to be understood partially as the result of taking advantage of such an ambivalent attitude, not depending

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on one single violent schema, as usual, but using all of them. In following, it appears that even on the existential level, terrorism acts in an inauthentic way, as we pointed out when discussing discourse features. Besides, the framework proposed above allows us to understand that terrorism works within a totalitarian cycle of violence, as the ground attitudes, as well as the planned ones, work together at the same moments, showing that there are no true goals or a proposal for an alternative, freer or more satisfactory, conception of life which sustains the exertion of violent devices. Furthermore, it should be noted that terrorism is as global as the public spaces wherein it acts. To insist on considering it a one-sided issue is, once more, to be led along an erroneous track, one that we think could eventually clarify, better than the current excuse for the existence of excessive information, some of the disastrous gaps of interpretation. In fact, the efficacy of contemporary terrorism, unlike previous national or local terrorism, comes from the way it explores one of the main characteristics of second modernity, i.e., the progressive deconstruction of the representations of closed identities, national idiosyncrasies and cultural frontiers, by revitalising a new version of a golden era that is as meaningless as the presentation of life as sacred would be unbearable, thus inducing in individuals the belief in a sort of revolutionary horizon. This explains why terrorism is at ease in the global society, besides the obvious conscious manipulation of technical resources inherent in such a society: by insisting on the supposed value of pre-modern well-being, terrorism finds no difficulty in exploiting the actual indecisions over the expectable balance between individuals, communities, societies and states in a new political order that must inevitably overcome the already overextended crisis of the nation-state model. Moreover, the way governments apparently intend to solve such a critical turn, governing with authority as if the problem could be entirely reduced to well-being in security, defines a circular relation between security and insecurity fears that, again, is designed mostly to accentuate the fragilities of organised politics, making the terrorist logic progressively dominant, even if only in its defensive aspect. The path of bio-politics, an ever-increasing choice of governments in terms of security, with its insistence on local and strictly materialistic preventive solutions, leads to a progressively spread state of inner terror that may lead to, or probably has already achieved, the contradiction of the reasons for state organisation, whatever shape it takes on, and finally destroy the ideal of a freer and more meaningful collective life, presenting a grave vulnerability to the effects of international terrorism.

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In fact, the effects of terrorism depend as much on a precise awareness that there’s no longer a true space for significant divisions between life worlds as on a clear perception that such unification implies the progressive decadence of the idea of the nation-state. Consequently, it might be considered, on one hand, that terrorism doesn’t affect only the democratic, occidental type of nation-state, but this entire type of political organisation, whatever sort of constitution it may be committed to. On the other hand, what becomes significant is that it plays with those constitutional differences, simultaneously and strategically encouraging two global attitudes: 1. for those struggling with misery and domination, the scapegoat existence in which freedom and well-being are presented as depending on the increase of brutality against the supposed masters; 2. for those trying to deal, for the very first time in human history, with representations of freedom and well-being, the useless version, induced through incidental, unexpected acts of concentrated violence intended to generate a collective sense of insecurity and fear as if one should be punished for expecting a more human existence. In both cases, terrorism makes the most of the same structural dimension of social and political organisations that modernity puts across as one of the most critical aspects, i.e., the sacrificial demands on the nature, interests and legitimate expectations of individuals, but the misleading twist of such an intervention appears in some obvious argumentation inconsistencies that allow us to distinguish terrorist from revolutionary action: in the first narrative, for instance, by presenting masters as generic and indirect entities, any possibility of effective action against the true oppressive causes is decisively denied, while in the second there is a meaningless use of extreme violence predicted to be limited to the circumstantial range of its own effects which, as such, avoids any constructive or utopian dimension, as expected from revolutions and, even more so, as the inflicted punishment is directed towards what may be considered the revolutionary facet of those societies. If it is not, then, revolutionary in nature, and lacks the consistency of an eventual alternative, how does terrorism come to effectively assert itself as an important threat to institutional political order? The first reason has already been laid out: terrorism achieves a significant part of its effect from the gaps that are becoming wider in the order of nation-states and in the pathologies inherent in modern political societies, for it works at the same time as a sort of mirror that offers selective problematic images of polarising issues and as a potential accelerator of dissolution processes, an insurgency suggestion which constantly recalls the possibility of following a violent path. Nevertheless, the most fundamental reason for its impact, is

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found in the meaninglessness of the violence that is inflicted, directly questioning the pretentions of legitimacy of nation-states, as the majority of them are committed to presenting themselves as the most reasonable solution in political history: the more the nation-states become aware of their own difficulties in terms of legitimacy and validation, the more they tend to amplify the importance of terrorist actions. This particular interpretation of terrorist phenomena logically results from the previously stated point of view concerning the specific role attributed to discourse, which, in this case, argues that states are more committed to reason than their terrorist opposition, whereas in historical terms it reveals a sudden perception that the ultimate destructive force of an organisation that claims to be the incarnation of reason in history, surpassing the rationality and the reasonability of individuals, groups, communities and societies, is meaningless violence. Nation-states are prepared to deal, in varying degrees, with ample ranges and differentiated types of violence, both internal and external, but always within the frame of legality, if not of legitimacy, for legal design is the characteristic justificatory ground of modern political organisation. In his Philosophie politique, published in 1956, Eric Weil already made reference, in general terms, to this issue: «C’est l’insensé, c’est-à-dire l’a-moral, qui est le danger du monde moderne et qui est conçu et compris comme son danger par ceux qui agissent dans ce monde et sur ce monde – conçu et compris, non sous la forme dans laquelle nous venons de l’exprimer, mais comme le danger de la violence gratuite entre des individus qui ‘n’on plus rien d’autre à faire’». (WEIL, 1956: 236)

In order to fully understand it, we must keep in mind the difference between intention and meaning, namely the fact that meaning doesn’t depend mostly on the intentions of subjects but on the complexity of the pragmatics which globally constitute the action. Widespread Kantian moral conceptions wrongly suggest that good individual intentions produce, regardless of any possible delays, meaningful actions, while bad intentions will do the opposite. Such a moralistic view of politics, based on a narrow interpretation of man as pure conscience, shows itself unable to deal with meaningless actions, as it assumes the equivalence of pure meaningless acting with radical evil, something of an anthropological impossibility. The same generous humanism supports, even implicitly, the consideration of terrorism under the category of crime, i.e., under a legal conceptual mantle. In political terms, it must be noted that, in doing so, states are attributing a certain atmosphere of legitimacy to such acts,

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especially with the introduction of new ambiguous and rhetorical typologies which are used to draw the perceived borders. Such integration may be considered the only acceptable option for states, as the idea of a kind of violence that contradicts the principle of exclusive and legitimate use of violence would destroy one of their pillars; however, this, in a theoretical analysis, would work as a misleading approach as Weil’s quote shows us, meaningless actions are neither moral nor immoral, but rather amoral, despite the eventual declared or assigned intentions of actors, since their lack of meaning is the result of the act itself, as it stands for pure violence, and for the full contradiction between illocutionary, locutionary and perlocutionary acts, that must be also understood as a trait of material violence and of the discourse of violence. In his discussion of Kant’s text on A Pretentious Right to Lie by Humanity (1767), in which the German philosopher argued for a universal duty of veracity, even in the case of a murderer whose homicidal intentions towards a good friend were out of question, based on the belief that there should be an equalitarian regime for those signing the same social contract, Eric Weil suggested a solution to overcome both consciousness and consequence moral perspectives through the analysis of the consistency of the relationship that the murderer keeps with the fundamental contractual situation: «Ce qui décide de la question, c’est que l’assassin de l’exemple a rompu le contrat de la non violence: l’argument kantien ne porte pas, parce que la rupture est accomplie au moment où le problème se pose. (…) il n’y a plus lieu de parler d’attente légitime là où la violence a déjà nié toute légitimité…» (WEIL, 1961: 113)

Despite the fact that Weil’s thesis, probably inspired by Rousseau, needs sustained analysis on anthropological and ethical issues, especially with regards to the inherent humanity of those who commit the most extreme acts and the eventual existence of a transcendental limitation to radical or diabolic evil in human actions, it seems to us that it provides an interesting clue to our discussion on terrorism, albeit not of the terrorist as a person. In fact, much more than individual murder, which goes against a number of elementary interdictions but does not question social organisation as such, terrorism not only breaks the fundamental pact, but also proclaims total disbelief in that paradigmatic concept which lies at the basis of societies. The way violence is projected denies the very first principle required for any kind of state, i.e., a certain contractual solution to avoid the eventuality of pure violence. Because this principle, even when ultimately

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showing a particular fictional consistency, sustains the organisation of communities in terms of states, before the differentiation between totalitarian, theocratic and democratic regimes, terrorism may be conceived as a considerably effective way of introducing the opposite idea of the lack of meaning to such an assumed rational consensus when faced with meaningless violence. The fact that in the discourse of legitimacy of recent terrorism the reference to theocracies frequently appears shouldn’t cover up that this type of regime would, probably even more easily than democracies, suffer the same consequences, since the divine pact is no less than a sort of political contract. Furthermore, while it may be perceived as absolute, that does not mean that it will show itself stronger in resisting pure violence, especially because of its constitutive lack of malleability and multiple points of view, which allow more relativistic conceptions to weaken the destructive processes. It must also be considered that the overall effect of the deliberate reactivation of a natural state of war is enhanced by the way it perverts the shared consensus on the need to support state violence, which contrasts with the irrationality of individual violence. The problem directly reverts back to the critical situation of nation-states as it interferes with existing representations on the validity of political organisations created to deal with violence that are no longer able to accomplish their original mission. For the moment, of course, this comes across as a security problem, but even if that were the case it would be one of lesser concern, since states are excellent systems for dealing with such difficulties, when we consider that that was one of their very first vocations. A further aspect that should be taken into account in the phenomena of terrorism is the corrosive effects they cast over the constitutional principles of nation-states, understood as reasonable political organisations (WEIL, 1956: 131), not only as mere formal controllers of irregular or deviant situations. The threat of terrorism to states stands once more on the induction of a basic meaningless consistency which does not present any alternative political system. This strategy shows, therefore, the first general feature of terrorism that we would like to put forward: terrorism, as an attitude, consists of meaningless violence, not as a result of mere empty or radical personal intentions, but as a consequence of the absence of a critical urgency to improve its foundations, the proposal of reasonable changing processes, and the utopian view of a better common existence that, in the past, supported actions which sought transformation. If we take another look at the pragmatic analytical model, with its three entries, we can see that, from the moment that each terrorist act is void of everything except the eloquence of violence, whether material or

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symbolic, the illocutionary and the perlocutionary acts are also empty, or, more precisely, they are both incorporated in the locutionary act that is in the proclamation of violence, for the paradigmatic spheres of intentionality and of expectations cannot be differentiated from the evidence or the obscurity of the message. In fact, this reduction does not come as a surprise, since it may be asserted that an increase in violence leads to a decrease of effective communication, unless we adopt the nihilistic conception of the elitist achievement of mystic minds designed for immediate access to evidence. By avoiding the validity claims that arise from the expected adequacy of locutions to the sphere of intentionality and to legitimate anticipations, terrorism reveals the non-communicative dimension of its expression, as recognition and communication are based on meaningless violence that, at the same time, the prolificacy of apparent speech acts – religious interpretations, political declarations, apocalyptical lectures of history, … – intends to disguise. Significantly, it is this particularity, a characteristic of terrorism that we called meaningless violence, which is distinct from gratuitous individual or collective acts, despite the amount of violence used or the material and symbolical damage they may produce. To clarify this point, we shall make use of the classical distinction introduced by Jürgen Habermas between three rational spheres – objective, normative and subjective – each one with its particular pragmatic structure centred on different values – truth, rightness, truthfulness (HABERMAS, 1991: 58). In fact, these acts, even with their long-lasting negative consequences on the collective representations of social coherence and personal security and on the more or less stabilised conception of acceptable human behavior, are perceived as individual, a sort of irruption of the expressive level on the domain of the normative, which is easily understood as such. Gratuitous violence appears, therefore, as the result of an individual pathology that, at most, points to some disruptions of the modern existence but does not operate directly within the typical processes of public space, and even less so of the public sphere, i.e., it cannot truly reach social or political dimensions. Nevertheless, as Eric Weil asserted, the increasing number and diversity of such acts will seriously affect the representation of coherence on which modern states base their legitimacy, because, at a certain moment, banality may become normality, producing the conviction that the way society regulates itself is chaotic, as no policy shows its capacity to generate wide consensus. However, as far as they are kept within the boundaries of individual expression, they present the pragmatic structure of a confession whose authenticity is to be considered as an element of the global judgment of the violence produced by the act.

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Such a confessional determination fully reveals itself in the absence of discursive justifications (the act itself is the limit of what the person would like or need to confess concerning their own tragedy) or in the scarcity of declarations intended as illocutionary acts, written or recorded, which were left behind. The sparseness of speech acts and the denotative simplicity of the messages’ contents are an evidence of the particularity of the act, even from the point of view of the author. Of course, this almost absolute lack of the assumed interactions between discourse and event defines the reason for its dramatic impact, but, at the same time, may be considered by others as a clue for the comprehension of such senselessness, i.e., as a confirmation of the fact that it is confined to personal motivations. In this sense, gratuitous acts maintain the connection between intentionality, declaration and expectation, the pathology appearing in the three dimensions, as the individual directs his overexpressive violent confession to a broader confessor with obviously illegitimate expectations: quite paradoxically, then, gratuitous acts are still communicative acts, even if they remain pathological ones, susceptible to analysis in ethical and anthropological conventional terms. In Weil’s perspective, which assumes five levels of violence in speech, from coherent discourse in search of meaning to coherent discourses, from partial and particular discourses to language, either sentimental or technical, to absolute discourse as equivalent to pure practical violence, they would fit in the typical incoherence of sentimental language: «(…) il est négativité au milieu de ce qui le nie, il n’a pas de discours cohérent et ne cherche pas la cohérence, ne cherche même pas la noncontradiction la plus pauvre.» (WEIL, 1950: 58)

This relation with language, even if insufficient in all aspects, defines nevertheless for philosophy, at the same time, the possibility of comprehension and the reason for refusal, as there is no expression completely void of a principle of meaning. The same applies to its conformity with the dialectics of reasonability versus violence. The question revolves around the fact that authors are on the victims’ side, since their behaviour shows, precisely, a lack of understanding of the global networks and, therefore, the incapacity to use a critical foundation for their profit. Gratuitous violence, in this case, may appear as the extreme intent to deny the perceived emptiness of the author’s existence situation through an exceedingly violent act conceived to perform a last heroic redeeming statement, following the absolute unaccountability accorded by him to the true dominators, which, therefore, are not linked by mob invisibility and muteness. Again, this type of proclamation questions,

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by itself, a policy that totally depends on the mass conditioning of the majority, but the plan which underlies the event does not intend to change the institutional organisation. It seeks, on the contrary, to recover the personal sphere by means of a loud sacrifice, a very last paradoxical gesture of introducing some sense into a senseless life through pure lack of sense. In contrast, as previously discussed, terrorism doubles the concentrated violence of its actions with the prolixity of its speech acts. Terrorism is not bothered by the obvious contradiction of its global duplicity, but makes the most of it by constructing a discourse of sorts: on one hand, intended to sustain a broad justification of its necessity and even of its legitimacy by critically diagnosing current world policies, insisting on the argument of violence as the sole means to fight against the status quo, appealing to a certain conception of good existence supposedly based on transcendent motives; on the other hand, intended to produce fear and uncertainty through the use of pattern linguistic forms, like curse, anathema, proclamation, anaphora, analogical arguments, metaphoric expressions and out of context quotations, as processes for revealing truth. Quite differently from mere gratuitous violence, meaningless violence, then, presents itself with more than just language fragments, with a sort of discourse that raises doubts on the meaning of what, as we argued above, is clearly meaningless violence. The fact is that terrorism, in doing so, not only seems to accept to play the game of meaning, but additionally forces others to deal with it in such terms. Furthermore, the construction of such a discourse, as mentioned, in including explicit references to some particular traditions or conceptions in both hyperbolic and schematically ludicrous terms, tends to produce a generalised misleading on the intimacy between terrorism and certain identities as collectivities, countries, or religious confessions, which reverts back negatively to those groups, not only from an external point of view but also from their own. Of course, the way terrorism points to them as essential references has different results for each party involved: for the implied groups, it forces them to deal with the question of identity in critical or dramatic terms; for terrorism, it enhances the naturalisation evidence process, introducing a kind of identity at disposal, from the moment that terrorist phenomena are presented as the only natural consequences of historical dynamics. Accordingly, it follows that the discourse of terror is in itself purely ideological and strategic except for the authenticity of the conviction that any discourse is power, its inner violence appearing as completely adequate for serving the will of domination. Nevertheless, it is this conviction that makes it understandable from a reasonable standpoint, at

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the same time allowing for the introduction of the major philosophical issue of the meaning of the delivered meaning and the distinction between the declared central concerns and those corresponding to the categorisation that results from the first moment of our analysis. In opposition to a gratuitous violence scheme, it might be asserted, consequently, that terrorism adopts a type of domination discourse, making use of supposedly outdated epidictic categories, like heroism, but whose effectiveness reveals their strong belonging to common language. Summing up the above considerations, it appears that terrorism is a violent process that is based on a paradoxical practice of meaning and violence, as it uses violence as meaning and meaning as violence. Its strength depends considerably on the ability to define a sort of permanent circulation between the two contradictory claims in order to force recognition from others as a creditable threat or as an acceptable action type, i.e., more than mere common violence.

Vulnerabilities of Modern States The strength of the effects of such acts depends, obviously, on the fact that the essence of the crisis of modern states is a predictable ideal amplifier for disruptive interventions. Concerning inner-produced violence, it might be asserted that boredom, as a specific possibility of modern states, represents the extreme institutional violence, for it signifies that states aren’t able to offer the most important conditions for the achievement of meaningful lives by individuals, to which some of the latter respond with the utmost individual hostility. However, as the particular relationship of individuals with the whole is denied, nationstates don’t perceive phenomena like gratuitous violence as potential threats to their logics and/or survival as much as they do terrorism. Such differentiation is, obviously, misleading because it avoids the fact that gratuitous violence, which strives for individuality, is no less of a symbol of profound internal conflicts facing society and of state demands on individuals and individuals’ expectations on behalf of such demands. It especially misses the fundamental awareness that such a critical pattern is the dynamic key of modern states, standing as its major strength and chief vulnerability, something that existed before terrorism and will still exist after its annihilation. In fact, modern states based on modern societies inherit the continuously growing dissatisfaction that characterises the relations between individuals and society, which is the result of the discrepancies between sacrifices and fulfilment of claims, collectively perceived as

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legitimate and as the inevitable consequence of the inadequacy of a value like efficiency to meaningfulness. To this, nation-states add another layer of potential dissatisfaction based on their intrinsic difficulty to coordinate historical morals, personal ethics, social requirements, political decisions, and to the level of abstraction with which they deal with such issues, meaning that individuals must sacrifice their personal interests in all realms in order to become normative actors, ethical subjects, workers, citizens, i.e., less and less egos. Internal crisis, then, translates itself into two pathological conditions that raise the mutual levels of both active and passive violence, making it more permeable also to terrorist interventions: 1. individuals or organised groups are progressively less satisfied with social and political fulfilment of their claims on recognition, well-being, values, meaningful life; 2. states are increasingly more concerned with the actual or the anticipated effects of such dissatisfaction than with interfering in the activities through which individuals tend to seek ways of compensation and partial reconstruction of their individual influence. So, institutions and network processes through which individuals search recognition and participation in collective decisions become increasingly unable to sustain their validity claims within the legal/constitutional frame and/or the democratic discussion without raising states’ suspicions and consequent violent procedures like monitoring, controlling, surveillance, or even direct physical dissuasion. In a way, it may be argued that, in different parts, both sides generate a global feeling of fear, which, because of its irrationality, tends to become uncontrolled and provoke unpredictable consequences. Centreing their response on the encouragement of basic feelings, such as fear or insecurity, either towards the inner powers or the multiple faces of otherness, progressively tending to be mixed up with the category of the enemy, will probably appear as the easiest solution for nation-states in crisis, but Machiavellian measures, in contradiction with the constitution of democracy, accentuate the problems and, in the end, produce a sceptical representation of the differences between terror inflicted by terrorism and terror arising from state policies. On the contrary, and following Eric Weil’s suggestion, the kind of feelings that are to become increasingly universal, even positive ones, like trust, must be in direct correspondence with reasonability: «Dans un monde où tous participent au travail, tous doivent avoir le sentiment de participer aux décisions portant sur le sort de la communauté. (…) La justice et l’utilité ne doivent pas être en contradiction, parce qu’une communauté qui se veut société moderne du travail rationnel et qui, en

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As Weil reminds us, the problem is not just that modern nation-states were born from violence, many times against the will of the majority (WEIL, 1956: 158), and therefore keep many violent features, but that evolution towards constitutional regimes assumes some minimal conditions that cannot be avoided without severe consequences: «Le régime constitutionnel présuppose comme conditions minima, du côté des citoyens, la rationalité du comportement et la soumission par consentement à la loi comme formellement universelle, et, du côté du gouvernement, la volonté de raison, sinon la raison.» (WEIL, 1956: 174)

It must, then, be clearly understood that in modern states citizenship assumes a triple commitment – to take on public roles in terms of reasonability, to resolve any subjective private problems as an individual and to be inventive in the social and political contribution – that represents a true contradictory challenge. To achieve all those tasks as a dynamic identity and, at the same time, to find in such an accomplishment a meaning for life is rather difficult as it involves an enormous amount of sacrifice and dedication within a complex and unstable frame of representations, values, and convictions. Furthermore, in serious critical situations, the only stable reference is a paradoxical one: faith in reason, as Kant called it. Listing the main demands of the construction of modern citizenship, in addition to more traditional ones, will clarify why it is easier to reject it than to try to accomplish it: to convert primary into secondary feelings was assumed to be more reasonable, and thus believed to be better prepared for the complex mediation processes of interactions within public spaces; to acquire constant obligation awareness; to transform obligation into the negative form of duties concerning itself, as the search for ways of satisfaction, and especially concerning others; to acquire increasingly demanding working skills and a broad perception of market operations; to address meaningful issues, like religious convictions, as private, and to try to find the best answers on its own; to ensure a continuous vigilant behavior as the personal contribution for global security devices; to apply these commitments to collective life and actions dealing with them from a universal specific point of view; to acknowledge in such a configuration the pattern of a credible human life. As such, it may be asserted that modern citizenship, more than a fact, is a value, for the most part a constructed one, inevitably perceived from

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the polarity inherent to value judgments: while it appears for some as a meaningful challenge, for others it will be felt as a sort of burden which does not compensate for all the sacrifices, especially when one of the invoked main attractions – the increasable materialistic well-being – is losing its direct connection to the modernity stage of nation-states, due to the globalisation of the economical sphere. Nation-states, if committed to the “unachieved project of Modernity”, to make use of Habermas’ suggestive expression, should become aware that security, as well as efficiency, are not real threats to the effective search for a meaningful existence, since they can be guaranteed by any kind of regime. No doubt all regimes are not equal in terms of worth, but such differences have to do, precisely, with other values, like freedom. The whole issue, then, is to accept, as the initial point of view, that modern citizenship is a matter of choice, not inevitability or destiny, and so depends on the horizon meaning from which it is evaluated, not on a universalistic teleology of history. That is to say, that if we consider that people, above all, search for meaningful lives, modern citizenship functions as a possible way of accomplishing such a purpose, but, despite the convictions of a significant portion of us, it is not the only one. This is the basic ground for its rejection by so many individuals or communities. Following such evidence, more than insisting on translating the incapacity to accept it into violent imposing methods, modern states should rely on the only reasonable long-lasting persuasive process, the only acceptable violent procedure, i.e., education conceived as a collective practice of discussion, debate, argumentation on mutual consensual or opposed convictions. Francis Guibal pointed out that, for Weil, this educational construction of citizenship was also the only way to avoid the dangers of generalised stereotyping (GUIBAL, 2009: 186-187) and, further, Canivez presented it as the main condition of the survival of democracies, according to the author (CANIVEZ, 1999: 198). If we consider the demands of modern citizenship presented above, we must recognise that they assume a complex global life-long learning system combining at least five levels: instruction, training, formation, cultural education and public discussion. This basic analysis allows us to understand three phenomena that are already challenging, from the inside, modern nation-states. First, as each state reveals itself unable to fully accomplish the five educational aims, it tends to substitute them by more simplified processes that lead to the opposite construction. Faced with crisis, educational systems are gradually promoting a kind of education that prevents the development of consistent democratic life. This impoverishment can be summarised in some obvious, often-repeated

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statements that, in reality, point to adverse principles: to have thoughts but not to think (the principle of certainty); to have intentions without corresponding coherent consequences (principle of negative ethics); to be able to play a role in society without understanding the reason underlying it (principle of mechanisation); to generate the legitimate expectation of political participation without having the true means to achieve it (principle of oligarchy). Second, governments are progressively following the short path of replacing education by fear and, particularly, the consequent immediate self-control and paranoid permanent vigilance arising from the fear of fear. In doing so, they are pushing citizens back to an irrational condition, for, as Eric Weil pointed out, commitment to rationality depends on the overcoming of such extreme feelings, by facing at the same time violence and reason (WEIL, 1950: 21). Third, by presenting modern citizenship as an obvious acquisition, or the only fulfilment of truly human projects, thus avoiding the complex cultural processes leading to the consideration of the sacrificial core of its consistence of value, nation-states hide the most important understanding of modern states as, themselves, primary values. In contrast with common opinion, it may be argued that modern states aren’t valuable because they are facts, but they stand as facts as long as they keep on being perceived as values. In such dialectics, what appears to be losing the dimension of value is the correspondence between modern state and the specific configuration of nation-state. In the ongoing transition, the legitimacy process of modern states is extremely important for making sure that the eventual failure of a particular design does not imply the end of the matrix. This becomes even more relevant when current terrorism increases such a confusion, since, firstly, it questions the possibility of survival of the modern kind of state if modern nation-states are to disappear and, secondly, it accentuates the identification of the exercise of power with a paternalistic condition which, from the institutional side, plays a relatively large role in the idea that the foremost duty of states is to solve security issues. We would, then, argue that it is not the transformation of the nation-state model that will determine the end of modern states, but the insistence on its uniqueness, which seems to be shared by all types of current states. The problem stands with the concept of nation that it implies, for it relies on a premodern fiction of a metaphysical unity, with little correspondence with social life. Moreover, the patronising view promoted by such an idealisation becomes a true obstacle for the rational understanding of the commitment of modernity to legality and legitimacy, as it supports the opposite classical totalitarian conception of politics as concerned with an

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effective or latent state of war, a judgment obviously akin to the one terrorism intends to assert. The nuclear modern sacrifice mainly concerns liberation from the weight of particular personal affairs for the sake of the logic of the mediation of universal processes. This dialectic should, in itself, explain why nation-states, which are restricted by their self-definition of nation, cannot be the ultimate type of modern states, and, at the same time, justify the constant difficulties in making it truly acceptable by individuals. It must be considered that nations are not the only thinkable or consistent communitarian organisations. Individuals surely need, as Eric Weil insisted, to relate as much to states as to communities, but it is no longer evident that those communities have to be nations. In fact, it seems rather easy to argue that nations represent the most abstract stage of premodernity, up until now designed both to give rise to modernity and to produce quite the opposite effect. Faced with the developments of modernity, it tends to generate an inner contradiction between tradition and modernity that accentuates the vulnerability to violence based on supposed traditionalist patterns, as terrorism intends to incorporate. This is certainly one of the biggest challenges of terrorism to nation-states, i.e., to compel a general discussion on its own validity for the continuity of the project of modernity. However, it is already becoming clear that, while states somewhat accept the features of modernity as ideal criteria, they are also neutralising terrorism’s attempts to reactivate the basic ontology that sustained the ideological identities of conventional nation-states, which means that they are questioning their own conservative patterns. The consideration of the discussed sacrificial level allows us, in addition, to understand one important point concerning the violence of reason, for reason in this dialectical conception isn’t natural, if by natural we understand granted. The majority of conceptions accept that reason is an obvious and appealing feature to which individuals are naturally committed. In one way or another, they all agree on the legitimacy of the analogy between the supposed anthropological distinctive characteristic and its reproduction on all human realms, regardless of the evidence that a psychological faculty or an intentional behaviour are not sufficient conditions for reasonable use of reason or for the project of a reasonable life according to reason processes. That belief, common to teleological, strategically communicational, systemic approaches, is still based on the plain classic definition of man as rational. But it becomes quite clear that this level of rationality is present in terrorist acts as well and, even more, that, probably, the acknowledgment of this feature, the combination of a legitimacy discourse with strategic planning, is one of the main sources of

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its impact on individuals and collectivities. What arouses the highest levels of fear is precisely the fact that we recognise the practice of identical patterns and the use of similar techniques that have been attributed only to more powerful institutions rather than deviant or marginal ones. The amount of violence, the surprise effect, and the abuse of civilian targets, however, are not enough to define a clear distinction between the rationality or the irrationality of those actions, particularly if we make use of the consciousness of effectual history as a reference frame, because the nucleus of the issues is not found in the rationality, defined in conventional terms, but in the reasonability of the actions. Reasonability, differently from rationality, is invested with a meaning that is a more difficult task to accomplish than to certify, to invent more than to discover, to produce historically more than to deduce from any essential aspect or revealed wisdom. Terrorist actions must consequently be considered from the point of view of their relation to meaning, the explicit or implicit choices that sustain what we consider to be a meaningful life, the frontiers between acceptable and non-acceptable violence that work as basic criteria for juridical and political decisions, the principles that constitutionally incorporate such options, as with all types of actions, even those related to nation-states. In that sense, we may propose that modern societies are not the direct result of technical developments, easily reproducible under conditions of slavery, or of strictly political choices concerning the regime, which have also been replicated by the most ferocious totalitarianisms, usually sustaining their legitimacy with formal democratic constitutions, or even of economic systems, especially in this period of global capitalism. In fact, all those features work together to generate a specific meaningful (the expression intended to correspond to a global horizon, not to the ways individuals or groups perceive the reality of that meaning) configuration that claims its modernity from the moment that strict confidence on a particular wisdom is broken and discourse/attitude, depending on the category of Certainty, accepts the demands of the discourse/attitude of Discussion. Modernity is not a fact in itself or an attribute per se of specific societies, but as it arises from discussion, from the progressive submission of all crucial issues to argument procedures, it must also be understood as a task, the task of societies that have chosen to depend more on the justification of meaning than on the validation of wisdom, pushing all types of wisdom needing to present their claims to offer the best paths to satisfaction in terms of meaning. That is to say, that even to assume an attitude based on the importance of putting everything in perspective is a fundamental feature not a

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contingency of modern states, designed to assure its coherence and its survival, and is seriously restrained by one-sided representations of pretended fixed religious, cultural or political identities. The adoption of this perspective should not be confused with a typical relativistic conception, as it so often appears. The first concerns the analytic demand of introducing a differentiated understanding on all levels in accordance with the diffraction of rationality, as stated by Habermas, as one characteristic of post-metaphysical thought; the second sustains that such a methodological differentiation is useless, whether because all the positions are equivalent or because only one is valuable. What, then, must be submitted to perspective are precisely the modalities of intimacy and interference between violence and discourse, at the same time in specific discourses and in actual attitudes, as these are the ways for mankind to act both on nature and in history.

Conclusion: The Struggle for Meaning Making an analogous use of the above core paradox, it may be said, then, that while, understandably, terrorism is a problem for nation-states, the survival of nation-states isn’t a true preoccupation for terrorism. In this dialectic we may find both the strengths and the weaknesses of each side. As Weil asserted, the fact that man builds his discourse historically in the midst of violence raises the decisive question of knowing which man is in which history (WEIL, 1950: 69). That is to say that, despite the extraordinary significance of its pragmatics, combining the violence of action with the violence of discourse, as though they were inevitabilities, despite the abusive reduction of all sorts of events to the condition of evidences for the need of carrying on the Oeuvre, we must be aware that the extreme violence that it produces stands, nevertheless, in the deconstruction of the value of truth underlying reasonability and, therefore, history. What has to be contradicted, therefore, is the perverse effect of a general acceptance that violence is necessary, for such judgment denies the actual violence in itself, and contributes to the introduction of doubt in the existence of a certain comprehensible motivation that deserves to be discovered, a principle of hypothetic legitimacy for terror, that may appeal to different-sized groups owing to its closed and effortless explanatory horizon. It must be noted that we are not considering truth as the supposed main goal of knowledge or of wisdom, as it is in itself a matter of debate, but only the minimum of veracity that must be assured in any reasonable act of speech, the denial of which prevents expression from reaching

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communication and events from becoming meaningful. Since it is more than a deontological minimum, an effective pragmatic condition of speech validity, its annulment is in the symbolic domain equivalent to the utmost material violence. The proposal of a pure myth as an acceptable substitute for a logic discourse is intended to destroy the idea of logics itself, not by discussing its validity claims formality or even the limits of its criteria, but by showing in the effectiveness of the fiction that all those principles and rules are useless, not because they are inapplicable, but, on the contrary, because they suit any discourse production, even one conceived to deny their own value. In this sense, if any terrorist discourse is based on terror intents, any discourse of terror is at the same time a terrorist discourse, the most dangerous situation occurring when the two terms are perfectly tuned. At the same time, its impact depends, as we have insisted, on the eventual reception of the societies upon which it intends to act. To deal with the issue of the basic sacrificial foundation of any community, i.e., the ensemble of shared and commonly non-discussed beliefs, principles, values, rules, topics, defining the qualitative differences between essential and non-essential, that is perceived by such group as the nucleus of its identification process, Eric Weil proposed the concept of sacral core (le sacré), which in any case should not be reduced to predominant religious credo (WEIL, 1956: 65). In one way or another, individuals, and the community as a whole, will perceive such sacral horizons as something which deserves their definitive sacrifice. The elements that integrate this sacral core are variable according to communities’ representations of good life, and we can argue, beyond Weil’s analysis, that in modern states different sacral cores can cohabit, as long as there’s a sort of consensus on the sacral that gives meaning to the more particular ones. This cohabitation regime, needless to say, is one of the main sources of dissension and, with growing frequency, of violence, one that is, obviously, exploited by terrorist factions. Therefore, it becomes extremely important to identify the sacral core of modern societies which allows such conviviality, particularly given the need for rebutting the argument of its own insufficiency, in terms of guiding human existence, when confronted with more traditional ones. Again we are dealing with a paradox, since the sacral of modern societies, according to Weil, lies on two main negative and formal characteristics that may easily be subverted. First, it is comprehensive, through the effect of both the consciousness of itself as sacral and its interpretation in historical terms. Such awareness, in spite of its integrative capacity, may be converted to a sort of sceptical instrument

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that, in extremis, would destroy the sacral dimension of the sacral core, by making meaningful decisions impossible. Second, it is original: «Ce qui complique la tâche en notre cas, c’est, en plus de la difficulté générale, le fait que notre société se présente, quand on la compare aux autres sociétés du passé, comme communauté qui a pour sacré ce que toutes les autres ont regardé comme le contraire du sacré. Car jamais la lutte avec la nature n’a été sacrée, elle ressortissait, au contraire, au journalier, à l’ordinaire, au profane, à ce qui ne pouvait pas constituer le sens de la vie des individus et du groupe.» (WEIL, 1956: 66)

Here, we recognise the fundamental integration of all differences through the modern labour system and the well-being that it guarantees, but the question remains if there exists a capacity of values arising from such basic spheres to function as sacral, in order to satisfy more complex existential demands for meaning. This difficulty increases when we propose them to other communities that partially rely on different ones. They are not, of course, our only current resource, but the collective task should be to avoid an impoverishment that substitutes the plasticity of the search for meaning with the rigidity of technical objectivity. For, finally, it becomes possible to anticipate the condition that would lead to a new terror era: the sudden convergence of an absolute meaningless violence level with the mythological tendency that is increasing in societies in general, progressively uncovering more domains of eventual meaning fulfilment for individuals and communities. The extreme consequence of this, that no welfare or security is able to prevent, would be the ultimate effect of our core paradox, i.e., that the mythology of terror could be perceived as meaningful when compared to the absence of positive meanings in our modern mythologies. In terms of politics, Weil suggested the dialectical necessity of a worldwide social organisation (WEIL, 1956: 225), different in its rationality from the market, which would introduce a sort of new government process. This broad institution, in its utopian design, was destined to be erroneously understood as a world state. This narrow interpretation led to the concealment of a pertinence of an underlying insight: that the crisis of modern states must produce a political alternative. The same challenge is even more urgent for us, as the breaches are increasing. The fact is, that from the moment we become aware of the difficulties in sustaining a certain political organisation, we must face the basic choice between the insistence on avoiding the evidence and the discussion of the best substitute. Should the second solution depend on more investment in education, on the revitalisation of the public sphere, on

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the effective interaction of public space with the public sphere, on the overcoming of the nation-state model, or on the development of wider social and political institutions intended to correspond to the universal search for reasonable existence, to name but a few possibilities, it is, nevertheless, already evident that politics must search for a different path and, that much has to be produced by political philosophy, in the concepts that comprehend the meaning of such a transformation, especially when the challenge is to avoid terrorism becoming terror. Maybe the following questions formulated by Eric Weil in the last chapter of his Philosophie politique can establish the starting guidelines of a new perspective: «Comment les morales vivantes, ces universels particuliers, peuventelles être préservées, malgré l’universalité formelle et générale de la société et malgré la morale formelle qui correspond universellement à celle-ci? Comment l’universel formel du travail social peut-il être conservé malgré les résistances des morales particulières, malgré ces luttes qui naissent d’autant plus facilement entre elles que cet universel les force à établir des contacts plus étroits? Comment, pour le dire encore autrement, peut-il y avoir un sens si jamais dans la réalité on ne rencontre que des sens particuliers? Et comment ces sens pourraient-ils être sensés si aucun d’eux n’est le sens et si l’universalité formelle a introduit dans le monde l’exigence, non seulement d’un sens, mais du sens, d’un sens qui serait universellement et donc absolument justifié d’après des critères universels?» (WEIL, 1956: 234)

Bibliographical References Bernardo, Luís. Linguagem e Discurso: uma Hipótese Hermenêutica sobre a Filosofia de Eric Weil. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2003. Canivez, Patrice. Le politique et sa logique dans l’oeuvre d’Eric Weil. Paris: Kimé, 1993. —. Weil. Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1999. Costeski, Evanildo. Atitude, Violência e Estado Democrático: sobre a Filosofia de Eric Weil. Fortaleza: Unisinos, 2009. Filoni, Marco. Filosofia e Politica: Attualità di Eric Weil. Urbino: Quattro Venti, 2000. Foucault, Michel. Naissance de la biopolitique. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2004. Ganty, Étienne. Penser la modernité: Essai sur Heidegger, Habermas et Eric Weil. Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 1997. Girard, René. Le bouc émissaire. Paris: Grasset, 1982.

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Guibal, Francis. Le courage de la raison: la philosophie pratique d’Eric Weil. Paris: Felin, 2009. Habermas, Jürgen. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. —. Postmetaphysical Thinking. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Kirscher, Gilbert. La philosophie d’Eric Weil. Paris: PUF, 1989. —. Figures de la violence et de la modernité. Lille: PUL, 1992. Labarrière, Pierre-Jean; Jarczyk, Gwendoline. De Kojève à Hegel: 150 ans de pensée hégélienne en France. Paris: Albin Michel, 1996. Perine, Marcelo. Eric Weil e a Compreensão do nosso Tempo. São Paulo: Loyola, 2004. Weil, Eric. Logique de la philosophie. Paris: Vrin, 1996 [1950]. —. Hegel et l’Etat. Paris: Vrin, 1994 [1950]. —. Philosophie politique. Paris: Vrin, 1996 [1956]. —. Philosophie morale. Paris: Vrin, 1992 [1961]. —. Problèmes kantiens. Paris: Vrin, 1992 [1970]. —. Essais et conférences II. Paris: Vrin, 1991.

Notes 1. (Department of Philosophy/Centro de História da Cultura – FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1069-061 Lisboa, Portugal).

CHAPTER FOUR TO DEFEAT TERRORISM, STUDY STATISTICS AND SEND FOR THE PRIEST OR THE FREEMASON 1

LUÍS SALGADO DE MATOS

In this study, we’ll not emulate the analysis of security or military science; we’ll deal with terrorism as the object of political and philosophical analysis. We’ll consider terrorism as a unity, without trying to account for differences derived from the aim of terrorism or the quality of the terrorists. We’ll start by proposing a heuristic definition: terror is a violent and symbolic surprise; we’ll then proceed to the analysis of terror as an army, albeit of a special kind, within the framework of the political organisation conceived as an articulation of Stände (estates) – the terrorist is the warrior-monk. We’ll then proceed to demonstrate that terrorism is a special kind of physical violence that operates through the moral element: terrorists blackmail and a widespread example of this blackmail is the almost universal idea that terrorism is born out of poverty. This symbolical definition of terrorism does not exclude that it has social roots; we think we can identify some of them with the phenomenon of rising expectations. Finally, we propose practical conclusions on how to fight terrorism.

Terror is a violent and symbolic surprise There is a tendency to explain terrorism as a result of a given religion or philosophy, both of which we’ll name as symbols. Islam or Hegelianism are the usual suspects of the terrorist religion or philosophy. The identification of terror with a given set of symbols is central to the debate between Alexandre Kojève and Leo Strauss about the effects of political philosophy. For neoclassical Strauss, the philosopher points out

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the justice to the ruler; for the Hegelian Kojève, the thought is immersed in history and any violence is justified provided it helps the march of history2; for Merleau-Ponty, the French existentialist philosopher, communism implied terror, so, he would agree with Kojève on the necessary connection between terror and a given philosophy, although disagreeing with him about the good moral effect of the march of history.3 In the end, the thesis of a necessary connection between terrorism and any philosophy or religion is propaganda. As a matter of fact, no one has proposed a scientific identification of the set of symbols which would by necessity produce terrorism. The above-mentioned usual suspects are at odds with each other: Islam has at its basis an action philosophy and Hegelianism lies at the opposite, objectivist pole. One could fancy they are both finalists, but some violent terrorists are non-finalist liberal-democrats: the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem was carried out on 22nd July 1946 by Irgun, a Zionist terrorist group. Zionists are ultimately liberaldemocrats, not finalists.4 The three contradicting sets of symbols – Islam, Hegelianism, liberal democracy – have all originated terrorism. Empirical observation shows us that there is not necessarily a connection between terrorism and the given content of a given set of symbols; the opposite would, rather, be true: any philosophy or any religion can mother terrorism. This holistic conclusion is unhelpful if we want to understand terrorism. To achieve this aim, we should take another road. We’ll study not what terrorists believe but the way they believe or, to put it another way, their mode of believing; terrorism is not a faith, it’s a method. Terror is a violent and symbolic surprise. We shall start from this heuristic assumption. In the sphere of violence, the terror of terrorism is at the opposite pole of state terror, that is of mass destruction and total war; state terror inherits from God’s terror. Non-state terror is selective and small scale. In this study, we’ll deal only with non-state terrorism.5 How does terrorism select? In a random way, and it’s the randomness of violence that makes terror terrifying. In an ordinary war, every soldier is sure he might be killed, so he is not afraid of being killed; German Jews were restless in the train voyage to the annihilation camp, before they knew their future, and became calmer when they knew that the worst would ensue; they were sure when threatening uncertainty had vanished.6 Definitions of terrorism underline the violent, military element and forget its selective, random aspect. The exception is Michael Walzer: “the method of terror is the arbitrary murder of innocent victims”.7 Arbitrary is prescriptive, surprise is descriptive; he speaks of an arbitrary act and we speak of surprise. We’ll not analyse the “innocent” element, because it is also prescriptive and so remains outside our scope.

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There are other theoretical references to the connection between organised violence and surprise. “Surprise” is the title of chapter nine of book three, “Of strategy in general”, of Clausewitz’s On War; for him, surprise is a permanent element in the execution of war, alongside perseverance, superiority of numbers or stratagem; surprise “seldom succeeds to a remarkable degree” because it “rarely happens that one state surprises another by a war, or by the direction which it gives to the mass of its forces”.8 Clausewitz’s surprise is placed inside a war, which is a non-surprise event. Our surprise is of another kind: it is placed outside any well-established pattern that ought to be respected and is actually respected. The terrorist action is not codified before being acted out, it does not come out of an institution, like the army, and no one expects it. Terror’s surprise is always a renewed type of violence – of symbolical violence, for that matter; it’s a surprising event (I don’t try to guess what) inside an evident, non-surprising conflict of symbols (anarchism or radical Islamism against representative democracy).

Terrorism is an army Terror is not private, unorganised violence – and that’s why terror is never a police problem: by itself, terror is not a threat from one individual to another; it’s a threat to the existence of the political organisation. Terror is organised violence; so, it’s a counter-army. The sheer existence of terror means that the armed services no longer have the monopoly of legitimate, organised violence; the violation of this vital monopoly can go more or less deep into the fabric of society.9 An army has to win at least half of the wars it engages or is engaged in; if it wins less than half, it’s certainly wiser to have no such army. Has terrorism won at least half of its wars? The answer is no. Even the powerful Russian terrorists were defeated. There has never been a military victory for a homegrown terrorist movement. There were some real or apparent victories of terrorism movements in former British colonies (Palestine, Aden, etc), but these territories were not independent political organisations. In the aftermath of World War One, did the Irish Republican Army (IRA) win? Not a military victory; the settlement was contrived by the combination of IRA terrorism and pressure on London from Washington.10 Anyway, British Ireland was between a colony and the homeland. If terror is an army that fails the survival test of armies, how does it survive? Terror is not a Westphalian army: a Westphalian army applies violence in the name of its state; for its victims, the moral superiority of its

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state results from the military victory, or from values that are previous to the army, and not from any symbolical action of the army; the violence of the army is sheer physical destruction. Terror is different; its violence is a symbol. At the end of the nineteenth century, the French anarchists spoke of “propagande par l’acte”, propaganda through action. The slogan meant that any act, including terrorist acts, should be by itself a moral lesson. This contraposition is clearer if we take into account that the political organisation is made of three Stände: symbols, security, and reproduction. The symbols tell us who we are; when we know who we are, we guarantee our security, having recourse to physical violence, if necessary. After we are sure we’ll wake up next morning, we reproduce ourselves on a daily basis (economy) and on a life-long basis (biology). These three elementary types of social activity are connected with three correspondent institutions: churches, armed services, state. Churches are the traditional institution of symbols but modern institutions, like the Freemasons, have to be classified in this category, and given its name, since they provide identity and manipulate symbolical violence. Armed services give security because they manipulate physical violence; the state assures reproduction. Since the Modern Age, each territorial state, the so called “nation-state”, keeps a specific alliance with a church and an armed service; this specific alliance is a combination of singular Stände and triangular institutions. Many religious organisations are not state-churches, and many security organisations are not state-armies. That’s the case of terrorism as an army. Terrorism is an army that comes directly from the Stand; as an institution, it is weak or non-existent. When we say that terrorism is cheap, we really point to that weakness as an institution: the Stand is nearer the market than any of the institutions, including the armed services; the institutions are built on a surplus extracted from the market and at least in this sense they are automatically more expensive than the equivalent market function.11

Terrorism operates through the moral element How does terrorism operate? Terrorists invoke a higher moral than the moral of their victims. Russian terrorists killed state servants and appealed to the moral feelings of the Russian citizenry. The revolutionary communists wanted freedom from economic oppression; terrorism wants freedom from oppression in general. The violence of terrorism is a remembrance of the violence of the old gods, punishing individuals for their deeds. The moral element of terrorism was not entirely bypassed by analysts. It’s interesting to observe that Clausewitz underscored the “moral” effect

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of surprise in war, but did not develop this line and of course made no connection with terrorism.12 Michael Walzer pinpoints the random dimension of terror but forgets its moral element. Randomness nears coincidence, and coincidence is traditionally one of the voices of God. This moral element is activated by a modicum of violence. Actually, compared to war, terrorism is not very violent. Its violence is amplified by the bad conscience and guilty feelings of the violated. The moral modus operandi of terrorism becomes evident when we consider a widespread theory of its nature: terrorism is the result of poverty. This idea is shared by most of the printed opinion. In the opening session of the Monterrey Conference, held in Mexico in March 2002, Kofi Annan, General Secretary of the United Nations, declared, “in this world, no one can consider himself well or safe when so many suffer and are in need”. Even President Bush Jr, although not personally inclined to overemphasise the social side of any problem, declared at the same occasion, “we fight against poverty because hope is the answer to terrorism”. On 14th September 2005, the 60th anniversary of the United Nations, the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, recommended “the solution of problems such as poverty, underdevelopment and social injustice in order to eradicate terrorism”.13 The reader could certainly provide more examples of this thesis. This thesis legitimises terrorism: according to it, we are guilty of terrorism, even when we are its victims. When the developed world says that poverty is the mother of terrorism, it is saying that it is itself the father because the developed world is generally seen as responsible for the underdevelopment of the rest of the world. Other arguments run in the same direction: many people consider economic development a zero sum game, that is, if I get richer, you get poorer; so the richer I am, the more terrorist prone you are. On a less deep level, poverty forgives terrorism, even if it doesn’t father it: poor people are supposed to be a special entitlement group by definition. Terrorism operates by making the victims feel guilty and unable to fight back because of that feeling. Terrorism operates in the moral element, though being immoral.

The terrorist as a warrior-monk Terrorists may act alone, though acting alone is of course an exception in organised violence. Is this a real exception? The terrorist acts alone in the army type activity (security Stand) but he belongs to a church where he is not alone (symbolic Stand). This is obvious in Islamic terrorism, but

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Russian terrorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries belonged to the revolutionary party (equivalent to the Church, in so far as it provided identity). This dual belonging to church and armed services, or to a church acting as an army, should be the subject of further empirical research, but it is apparently confirmed by anecdotal evidence. The mix of violence and symbols (the sacred) is the essence of the warrior-monk. The phenomenon of the warrior-monk is quite common in history, although it seems extinct in Christianity. Contrariwise to him, the soldier of a Westphalian army does not embody any symbolic values. His values are created by the Church and managed by the State; the soldier just carries them out them. The warrior-monk creates the symbolic values, as a monk, and executes them by violence, as a warrior; he bypasses the State.

Political and economic conditions of terrorism Is terrorism a by-product of poverty? We shall consider two different aspects of poverty, that of nations and individuals. Let’s start with the poverty of nations. Alberto Abadie, among others, demonstrated the empirical falseness of the link between poverty and terrorism.14 According to our own research, there is a random relation between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in purchasing power parity dollars (ppp)15 and the number of terrorist acts per country. In the period 1968-2006, their linear correlation coefficient is near 0.16 The connection between terrorism and the poverty of individuals was studied by Claude Berrebi, based on data on the terrorist activities of members of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) between the late 1980s and May 2002. He found that both higher education and standard of living were positively associated with participation in Hamas or PIJ and with becoming a suicide bomber.17 So, terrorism is not the result of poverty. But has it any connection with social and political conditions? Let’s start with political indicators. First of all, there is an empirical connection between terrorism and liberty: we found no terrorist acts during the periods1968-2006 and 2000-2006 in the eight poor countries that are “free”; on the other hand, of the eighteen poor countries that are “not free”, there were no terrorist acts only in five.18 There seems to be a connection between terrorism and individual income in different nations. We divided the United Nations members into four income groups on a GDP per capita ppp basis: poor, less than 2000 dollars ppp; enriching, 2000 to 9000; enriched, 9000 to 25000; rich, more than 25000. We considered terrorist acts in 20001-2006. Terrorism is

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lowest in the poorest, highest in the enriching; it goes down in the enriched and it rises again in the rich. The standard deviations of the four income level distributions are high, but we have taken into account countries without terrorist acts. The correlation is not a linear one; actually, we find a bimodal distribution. The shape of the curve is the same either for the countries or for the population per country. See graph (for country distribution alone).

Note: Sources and concepts are explained in the text.

This preliminary quantification gives some information by itself on the terrorist phenomenon and, on the methodological level, enables us to vet our initial hypothesis. If terrorism had a social and economical basis, there would have been a correlation between GDP per capita and terror acts. There is not, so we can conclude that our hypothesis is not excluded. Since correlations are stronger between terrorism and political aspects, our data suggest that terrorism is a symbolical activity, although carried out by violence. We can interpret these data in a political way: poor countries do not have the capacity to generate native terrorism, or are not interesting to foreign terrorists; the enriching countries are dominated by rising expectations which generate terrorism; the enriched ones are no longer interested in terrorism because they feel they have “arrived”; in the rich countries, guilty feelings of the natives, plus resentment of the supposed representative of the poor, originate a rise in the rich countries (this line

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about terrorism in rich countries is a deviation from our rule of analysing terrorism as one single unity). This is a logical thesis, but a preliminary one from the statistical viewpoint. According to the present hypothesis, increasing individual income equality among poor and enriching nations, or among enriched and rich, will increase the likelihood of terrorist acts. Of course, there are arguments for increasing equality in individual income among nations, but decreasing terrorism is not one of them.

Practical conclusions: how to fight terrorism With this information, we are better equipped to fight terrorism. Let’s use first the socio-political information and then the structural analysis of terror. The socio-political information enables us to detect the potential terrorist situations. When these situations are identified, it helps us to offer a legal, peaceful institutional solution which unarms the terrorist elite and separates it from its social base – instead of bombing them. The structural analysis of the terror gives us indications on how to deal with terrorist acts. First of all, we must send for the priest or the freemason: terrorism never wins militarily, it only wins when its identity is stronger; priests or freemasons give identity. Secondly, we should summon the military if the physical violence entailed by terrorism cannot be solved by peaceful means. The military should never be called alone: a moral solution is a practical necessity to fight terrorism. Second, never violate civil rights. Civil rights are our “religion”, that is, they are our civil religion.19 When we violate them, we give a victory to terrorists because we deny justice. Carlos Marighela, in his Minimanual Urban Guerilla, taught that the guerrilla acts should always show that “the government was unjust”.20 When we violate our own rules, we are unknowingly doing the terrorists’ job. Never forget, terrorist acts always imply that their victims are unjust men. Third, if anything moves, be suspicious. Because a surprise is a surprise. In a democratic society, we shall defeat terrorism with statistics. Statistics tell us what is normal. Terrorism is abnormal by our definition, because surprise is abnormal by definition. So we should use statistics for the identification of potential terrorist acts. If you see an unattended bag in a railway station, please tell an officer. This type of warning comes from the statistical anti-terrorism approach. It should be developed. We should train ourselves to identify the unexpected and act accordingly. Shall we use profiling? Profiling is statistics about the terrorist, not about the terror. Profiling is often harmful: the Soviet spy in Graham Greene’s, The Human

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Factor, is an establishment boy – and he is not a suspect because establishment boys were not profiled as potential Soviet spies. September 11 terrorists were upper class Saudis and probably because of that they were not profiled as terrorists: Upper class Saudis don’t look like Islamic terrorists. Profiling fails all too often because for the terrorist it is easier to conceal being an agent than to conceal a terrorist act: the terrorist is free to parade as a rich guy if he knows the police profiles terrorists as poor guys, but the terrorist is not free not to leave an unattended bag – the unattended bag representing unusual and dangerous behaviour. He has to leave the unattended bag because every political organisation excludes every kind of unusual and dangerous behaviour and every citizen is automatically aware of this social norm.

Notes 1. Institute of Social Sciences of Lisbon University. 2. Dominique Auffret, Alexandre Kojève: La Philosophie, l’Etat, la fin de l’histoire (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2002), 464 ss. 3. Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 111 ss. 4. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven-London:Yale University Press,1979), 81. 5. Luís Salgado de Matos, “Terror” (2005), Dicionário de Filosofia Moral e Política, Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem da Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa; at: http://www.ifl.pt. 6. Jean-François Steiner, Treblinka (Paris: Fayard, 1968). 7. Michael Walzer, Guerres Justes et Injustes, French translation of Just and Unjust Wars (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) 362 my retranslation. 8. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976). 9. Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1992). 10. Alan O’Day, Irish Home Rule 1867-1921 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998). 11. Luís Salgado de Matos, O Estado de Ordens, Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, Lisbon, 2004. 12. Clausewitz, On War, book 3, chapter 9 at the beginning. 13. http://cd.china-embassy.org/fra/xw/t214321.htm; my retranslations of the quotes of the current paragraph. 14. National Bureau of Economic Research, “Does Poverty Cause Terrorism?”, in http://www.nber.org/digest/may05/w10859.html. 15. Cia Fact Book; data for 2006. 16. We used the Rand statistics on terror which we collected at http://www.nationmaster.com/. 17. Berrebi, Claude (2007) “Evidence about the Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism among Palestinians”, Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy: Vol. 13: Iss. 1, Article 2; at: http://www.bepress.com/peps/vol13/iss1/2.

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18. We used Freedom House data and concepts. 19. Fernando Catroga, Entre Deuses e Césares. Secularização, Laicidade e Religião Civil (Coimbra Almedina, 2006). 20. Marighelas’s title is on sale in bookshops; actually, the quote comes from the excellent Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, Histoire du Terrorisme De l’Antiquité à Al Qaida (Paris: Bayard, 2006), 43.

CHAPTER FIVE SOVEREIGNTY, GLOBAL JUSTICE AND TERRORISM REGINA QUEIROZ

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1. Cosmopolitan theories of global justice Despite a lack of consensus about what terrorism is, some features are commonly accepted by researchers on terrorism, such as its political nature, the unexpected use of violence against apparently random targets, and the attack on innocent people by non-state actors.2 In “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism”, Audrey Cronin, quoting Rapoport, gives a brief description of the history of terrorism, including current terrorism with its strong religious inspiration.3 Cronin gives five reasons why jihadist terrorism is the most dangerous form of terrorism for international security. First, these terrorists are engaged in a Manichaean war against evil, and have an endless number of human targets. Any citizen identified with evil is a target to kill.4 Second, their attacks are perceived as a divine order, which makes them more unpredictable.5 Third, they see themselves as not linked to any secular law, and try to demolish the current post-Westphalian system.6 Fourth, religious terrorists are completely alienated from the social system. They do not try to make it fairer, more perfect or egalitarian. Finally, religious terrorism is particularly worrying because it is dispersed throughout global civil society.7 Besides this, Cronin states that the main goal of terrorism in the twenty first century is not religious, but the search for power.8 And its main feature is a tension between having and not having nation-states, and between the elites and the poorest of those nations, as these terrorist movements exploit the frustrations of common people, mainly in Arabic countries.9 The cosmopolitan approach to terrorism emphasises those frustrations, namely the economic and social. In “The Moral Response to Terrorism

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and Cosmopolitanism”10, Pojman recognises that, although: “(...) the cultural attitudes, such as, the religious dogmas may be the significant cause of terrorism, the despair or the hopeless rooted in oppression, ignorance, poverty and injustice acknowledged can be (...) the solo where the fundamentalism can grow and flourish.”11

Even though Pojman recognises that poverty and oppression are not sufficient or necessary conditions for terrorism, they are causes that contribute to its outbreak and continuation.12 According to him, the way to prevent terrorism from flourishing is to eliminate the causes of poverty and oppression.13 According to Pojman, then, in order to have peace, the war against terrorism ought to be waged through institutional cosmopolitanism, a worldly state or a global law state.14 He bases these measures on the Moral Point of View Argument and the Trend Toward Globalization argument.15 The first argument sustains that it is important to create institutions and reinforce laws in order to promote peace and to prevent international anarchy, for both of these can be affected by international morality and reliable expectations.16 The second is based on the expansion of a global economy, free trade, international transportation, communication systems (from the airplane to the Internet), and the transformation of English as a lingua franca, etc.17 Daniela Archibugi and Iris Marion Young also sustain that the world should apply the same principles of the rule of law that governments apply to domestic terrorist organisations to international terrorist organisations.18 They defend five principles for international institutions: legitimising and strengthening international institutions, coordinating the reinforcement of law and collection of information on a worldwide scope, incrementing financial regulation, using international courts, and decreasing global inequalities.19 Much like Pojman, Daniela Archibugi and Iris Marion Young agree with the opinions of researchers who say that the discrepancy in wealth between the most prosperous societies (USA, EU, and Japan) and the Middle East and South Asia can be sources of terrorism, because it motivates the citizens of those states to belong to terrorist groups.20 Even though they recognise that there are poor countries where terrorists are not recruited, they also admit that the indifference of rich countries to poor countries increases the resentment in many places of the world, putting in danger the peace and prosperity of these countries.21 Speaking from the perspective of cosmopolitan global justice, David Held does not attribute the causes of terrorism directly to poverty. At the heart of terrorism is a fight for global power, with Held admitting that it is a perverse geopolitical struggle against the no less perverse Western

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geopolitical struggle.22 He suggests, however, that in our attempt to eliminate the jihadist modality of terrorism, we must also do all we can to attenuate economic and social inequalities, especially when they are linked to the extreme poverty of great part of the population. In this last case, there is a distinction between the leaders and their followers. Implicit in Held’s reflection is the idea that the terrorist leaders of jihadist movements are moved by political motives, being totally insensitive to social justice, especially the egalitarian ideals of social justice. However, the recruitment of young terrorists has social and political causes. These result from the internal economic policies of their own countries, and from the global economic order, which is devoid of the cosmopolitan principles of legal and social justice. Even though Held does not admit that a fairer world is also a more peaceful world in every aspect, unless we accept the challenge of implementing a system of global egalitarian justice, there is no hope of solving the problem of jihad terrorism.23 In this case, instead of acts of military coercion being the solution, they exacerbate terrorist practices. That is why Held is in favour of a global cultural consensus, under international law, to solve the problem of terrorism.24 Here, some questions come to mind. If, on the one hand, those who are in favour of finding peaceful solutions to conflicts through the regulations of international organisations acting in accordance with the egalitarian principles of global justice do not agree among themselves, and, on the other hand, all one finds is the doctrinal content of sacred terrorism, how can we reach a global cultural consensus? If the former sustains that global justice, founded on the separation of politics and religion, is the most important political principle for global institutions, and the latter sustains that divine order ought to be the main political principle of those institutions, how can a consensus between them be possible? In my opinion, such a consensus is almost impossible, even though religious terrorism and global justice equally reject the political importance of sovereignty, which is understood, grosso modo, as a supreme authority that rules indisputably over a given territory. And such a consensus ends, ironically, by subsuming religious terrorism and global justice under a cosmopolitan ideal. If, in general, cosmopolitanism states that ultimate political unit rests with the individual, not the states, it belittles the importance of the sovereignty of states.25 Even though, in their network-like systems, terrorist cells have not denied the support of states for their attacks (see the cases of Afghanistan and Pakistan), their non-differentiation between civilians and combatants is rooted in the rejection of state sovereignty.

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Therefore, from a theoretical point of view, both cosmopolitanism and terrorist practice minimise the principle of state sovereignty. Several cosmopolitans relate this underestimation of sovereignty to the refusal of a just war pacifism. They sustain that it is not easy to distinguish civilians or non-fighters from fighters, when part of the war is not against a state (2003, 178). For example, Archibugi and Young sustain that democratic states should never respond to terrorist attacks with military power. So, although Pojman accepts the possibility of a just war26 against terrorism, upholding what Sterba calls a just war pacifism27, this is unthinkable for some cosmopolitans28 because, as Card notes, it is not easy to distinguish the civilians or non-combatants from the combatants when a war is not being waged against a nation or a state (2003, 178). By eliminating the nation-state and, with it, the principle of sovereignty, it is hard for cosmopolitanism to advance, without contradiction, the possibility of a just war. Cosmopolitans sustain, then, almost exclusively, a non-violent pacifism to eliminate definitively the threat of global terrorism. Yet, when cosmopolitans set the individual, not the state, as the ultimate political reference, any distinction between civilians and combatants becomes unsustainable. Such a distinction is clearly related to the war between states, where one of the most important functions of sovereignty is to defend its own territory through a regular army. This is why some supporters of state sovereignty easily resort to the rhetoric of war, which is based on the maximisation of the political principle of sovereignty. However, this maximisation and this rhetoric are not viable solutions for religious terrorism. This draws attention to the spread of terrorism by some states, implying that states menaced by terrorism must declare war against the states that provide lodging for terrorists, such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, it also means that, in a reductio ad absurdum, such states must also declare war against themselves. Besides this, as Tujan, Gaughran and Mollet say, if the war against terrorism is the only way of suppressing terrorism, it may generate the opposite effect, that is, the increase of terror.29 In other words, belligerent violence against terrorism cannot be subsumed under the nature of war as it has been understood since the creation of modern states. This is so, not only because terrorist attacks ignore the difference between combatants and non-combatants, but also because war is something that happens between states, as Rousseau showed in his criticism of the Hobbesian concept of a war of all against all.30 If belligerent violence against terrorism were subsumed under the nature of war in its traditional sense, terrorists, as .

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Held points out, would be treated as soldiers and military enemies, instead of being treated as criminals.31 The fact is that the fight against terrorism, whether looked at from the stance of global cosmopolitan justice, or the rhetoric of war against terror, places before us a dilemma. If we advocate the principle of sovereignty and associate it with the rhetoric of war, states will do what they accuse terrorists of doing, and open the door to the practice of state terrorism. If sovereignty is underestimated in the international order, it is not clear how a government or a worldly state can embrace both cosmopolitan principles, directly associated with an egalitarian concept of global justice, and the principles of jihad, linked to religious terrorism. We will also have to recognise that (a) we do not know how to deal with countries that harbour religious terrorists, and (b) cosmopolitan concepts of justice do not explain how the egalitarian distribution of human resources can be an efficient weapon against people for whom the concept of equality (between men, women, and religions) is one of the motives for terrorist attacks. Until conceptions of global justice find other means to fight terrorism besides creating transnational institutions like governments or a worldly state, it will be difficult to decrease the sources of terrorism, i.e., economic and social inequalities, and to, ultimately, eliminate them. In sum, cosmopolitanism seems incapable of stopping religious terrorism. What about the non-cosmopolitan theories of international relations and justice, one may ask, are they better suited to fight terrorism?

2. Non-cosmopolitan theories of international relations and justice Rawls’ theory of international relations seems to offer a productive solution to the issue of terrorism. In The Law of Peoples32, Rawls rejects the cosmopolitan ideal of justice and, polemically, the principle of state sovereignty.33 He bases his rejection of the cosmopolitan ideal of justice on the fact of pluralism. Cultural and political pluralism are adverse to agreements on the substantive(s) principle(s) of justice. One might agree, at best, on a common law, the Law of Peoples, accepted by liberal and decent peoples. But this law cannot prevent conflicts from arising between such peoples and outlaw states that do not recognise the principle of territorial jurisdiction of every peoples. Rawls bases his rejection of the sovereignty of states on the states’ selfish and constant impulse to conquer and dominate other states.34 These

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impulses imply the prevalence of a principle of violence in the relationship between states. Contrary to states, people are defined by their reasonability and the acknowledgment of the principle of reciprocity, which enables them to maintain a peaceful international order.35 That is why Rawls replaces states with people. Even though, in line with Pogge36, I disagree with the minimisation of states in order to favour the people, I also believe that the application of Rawls’ conception of Law of Peoples to fight religious terrorism preserves the notion of territorial jurisdiction and the distinction between outlaw states and decent and liberal people. Founded on this distinction, any attack on the citizens of a territorial jurisdiction by an outlaw state that provides bases for the recruitment and training of terrorists justifies warfare intervention as a just war. Rawls’ theory also allows for the principle of a just war to exist, without the perversion that states wager a war against themselves37 and his idea of duty of assistance does cater for the needs of poor populations from burdened societies where it is easier to recruit terrorists. Rawls’ theory does not, however, prevent the resources for the worst-off from being diverted by corrupt elites. And when religious terrorists do not recognise the principle of territorial jurisdiction, one might wish to ask how it is possible to sustain the difference between outlaw states and liberal and decent people; how it is possible to avoid responding to non-state terrorists with state terrorism, as Israelis and Palestinians do; and how one can avoid adopting controversial measures against human rights, as Dick Cheney did in the USA. Rawls’ The Law of Peoples does not provide a certain assurance of resolving the issue of religious terrorism. In view of the fact that cosmopolitanism and Rawls’ theory seem unable to put an end to religious terrorism, one might ask if nationalistic perspectives of justice offer better solutions.38 In his complex justification of the ethical character of nationality, Miller says that the best solution to help the poorest is not found in the distinction between global and national justice, but in national justice and justice in small units (families, religious communities, etc).39 After negating the distinction between global and national justice, Miller declares that the stronger the nationality is, the wider the scope there is to help the poorest.40 Goodin acknowledges the importance of the national frontiers of nation-states, but he also maintains that the duties of the officers towards their citizens are not based on the political value of sovereignty, but on the general duties that any person has in any part of the world.41 This means that national frontiers only compel agents of individual states to discharge their duties in relation to individuals who are citizens of their nation-

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state.42 For Miller, then, the concept of subjective nationalism, in which frontiers are not criteria for nationality, has an ethical, not a political, basis. For Goodin, the duties of a nation-state are not based on the idea of territorial sovereignty. While this only indicates the object of the duties of a state43, it also shows that the frontiers are between people, not territories.44 In spite of this, Goodin concludes that (a) in our current world-system, it is often wrong to give priority to compatriots45, and (b) when a government or country is unable to discharge its duty of responsibility towards a citizen, it is because of this general duty.46 The most relevant aspect of the conceptions of nationalistic social justice is its defence of the principle of the protection and promotion of the rights of the nation-state’s citizens, to the detriment of the citizens of other states. I infer, in this context, that the defence of poverty and oppression of citizens in countries that harbour terrorists is, primarily, a responsibility of national communities or of the small units of communities (families, religious associations, and so on). So, if we believe that the causes of terrorism are inequalities and poverty, the defence of the elimination of extreme worst-off conditions will only be accomplished at the national level, not at an international, and much less a global, level. However, situating the solution for global poverty in the frame of the defence of nationalist conceptions of social justice is no less problematic than the cosmopolitan conceptions were. Miller’s theory, for instance, does not propose that extreme poverty be eliminated by defending a state’s frontiers, but in the shared inter-subjective beliefs of citizens in small units.47 Miller distinguishes nations from states, because these are defined by a codified system of rules, and nations are defined by shared beliefs between compatriots.48 By highlighting these nationalistic beliefs in his reflection about social justice, Miller also minimises the principle of territorial jurisdiction, which is one of the most important criteria of sovereignty. This nationalistic solution may, however, imply ethical, political and armed conflicts inside the communities of a state with different histories and traditions, and deepen religious terrorism. (See the case of the Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq). Even though I am aware of this limitation, I believe the nationalistic view of justice is the most promising means of overcoming sacred terrorism. I base my opinion on the following two points. First, the nationalistic view of justice states that nationality is based on a background of historical beliefs related to its past, which help build the

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state’s self-definition and which represent the ends its members will pursue in the future.49 Second, the background of historical beliefs enables us to expect a dynamic nation actively engaged in a critical debate about its ends.50 Even though this does not seem to apply to the groups that endorse sacred terrorism, for they are not permeable to any form of critical debate, if we accept that the identity of nations is based on a common history, this debate ought, for example, to historically contextualise the koranic concept of jihad, which literally means great effort and fight.51 In this day and age associated with Islamic fundamentalism, the word jihad was not linked, in the seventeenth century, to the fight against members of other monotheistic religions. It was no more than an answer to the persecution of a Muslim community by rulers of Mecca, called the Quraysh. The Quraysh viewed Muhammad as a direct menace to their economic and political domination.52 The jihad or military fight was their way of replying to an attack, or when another course of action was not possible.53 Moderate interpretations of the jihad, today, will be capable of instituting the version of the seventeenth century. This debate also needs to be adapted to the changing perceptions that some Western thinkers have of the Islamic religion as one that does not recognise any territorial jurisdiction. As Kassam points out, in the great richness of the Arabic language, the Muslims “(...) developed a vocabulary for war which is not accepted to defend its religion but mainly the defence of their territory: the words jang and harb are two examples”.54

Conclusion Even though poverty and resentment may be one of the causes for the recruitment of terrorists, scholars who support a global conception of justice do not provide a satisfactory solution to the problem of terrorism. The cosmopolitan underestimation of sovereignty has two drawbacks. First, it weakens the security of the people living under the principle of global justice, and in countries that harbour terrorists. Second, it leads, ultimately, to the intensification of terrorism and to the impoverishment of populations. The nationalistic perspectives, mainly those of Miller, seem more promising in terms of a long-term victory. However, they are incapable of avoiding the intensification of military conflicts among the various communities of the same state. Despite the conceptualisation of sovereignty by cosmopolitans and nationalists, the hypothesis of a just war against terrorists seems to be

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unresolved. The absence of a territory does not prevent, however, a just war from transforming itself into a terrorist war of extermination. The solution for this type of terrorism may be unrelated to the principles of global justice, duty of assistance, or, even, the acknowledgment of the political principle of sovereignty. In actual fact, if religious terrorism does not recognise the difference between the political and religious spheres, and justifies its political violence in a radical interpretation of Islamism, the solution to global terrorism may very well be related to the clarification of that union in a new and non-foreseeable way. In the West, this solution resulted from the separation of religion and politics, under the doctrine of human rights. In theocratic countries, it may be different, because the human rights doctrine is based on the principles of equality and individualism. In this case, it might not be necessary for the societies where terrorism flourishes to become democratic and liberal. If we accept Rawls’ taxonomy, it may only be necessary for them to transform themselves into decent societies.

Bibliography Archibugi, Daniela, and Iris Young, “Envisioning a Global Rule of Law”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 158-170. Card, Claudia. “Making War on Terrorism in Response to 9/11”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 171-185. Cronin, Audrey. Cronin, “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism”, in International Security, 27 (2002-2003): 30-58. Goodin, Robert E. “What is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen”, in Global Justice: Seminal Essays, Global Responsibilities, vol. I, eds. Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moellendorf, (St. Paul:, Parangon House, 2008), 255-284. Held, David. “Violence, Law and Justice in a Global Age”, in Social Science Research Council (http://essays.ssrc.org/sppt11/essays/held.htm, (2009) 7. Accessed on 22/07/2009. —. Democracy and the Global Order. From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Polity, Cambridge: Polity 1995). —. Global Covenant: An Interview with David Held http//info.edgehill.ac.uk/SPSNNewsletter/interview.asp?id_int=1, (2004) 6. Accessed 22/07/2009. Kassam, Zayn. “Can a Muslim Be a Terrorist”, in Terrorism and

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International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 114-131. Miller, David. “The Ethical Significance of Nationality”, in Global Justice: Seminal Essays, Global Responsibilities, vol. I, eds. Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moellendorf (St. Paul: Parangon House, 2008), 235254. Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). Pogge, Thomas. “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples”, in Global Justice. Seminal Essays, vol. I, eds. Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moelendorf (St. Paul: Parangon House, 2008), 461-94. —. “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty”, Ethics, 103 ((1992): 48-75. Pojman, Louis. “The Moral Response to Terrorism and Cosmopolitanism”, in Terrorism and International Justice, (ed. James P. Sterba), (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 135-157. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). —. The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999). Rousseau, Jean J. Du Contrat Social (Paris: Gallimard [1762] 1964), 101292. Sterba, James P. “Terrorism and International Justice”, in Terrorism and International Justice (ed. James P. Sterba), (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 206-208. Tujan, A. A. Gaughran A. and H., Mollet, “Development and the ‘Global War on Terror’”, in Race & Class, 46 (2004): 53-74.

Notes 1. Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Paper sponsored by a fellowship grant from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia SFRH/BPD/2007. 2. Audrey Cronin, “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism”, International Security, 27 (2002-2003), 33. 3. Cronin, Audrey 2002-2003, 35. 4. Cronin, Audrey 2002-2003, 41. 5. Cronin, Audrey 2002-2003, 41. 6. Cronin, Audrey 2002-2003, 41. 7. Cronin, Audrey 2002-2003, 42. 8. Cronin, Audrey 2002-2003, 55. 9. Cronin, Audrey 2002-2003, 35, 38. 10. Louis Pojman, “The Moral Response to Terrorism and Cosmopolitanism”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York, Oxford:

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Oxford University Press, 2003), 135- 57. 11. Pojman, Louis 2003, 140. 12. Pojman, Louis 2003, 141. 13. Pojman, Louis 2003, 142. 14. Pojman, Louis 2003, 147. 15. Pojman, Louis 2003, 147. 16. Pojman, Louis 2003, 148. Pojman acknowledges the objections against a worldly government and presents them in “The Moral Responses to Terrorism and Cosmopolitanism”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 152. 17. Pojman, Louis 2003, 148. 18. Daniela Archibugi and Iris Young, “Envisioning a Global Rule of Law”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), 161. 19. Archibugi, Daniela and Young, Iris 2003, 162-68. 20. Archibugi, Daniela and Young, Iris 2003, 166. 21. Archibugi, Daniela and Young, Iris 2003, 166-67. 22. David Held (http://essays.ssrc.org/sppt11/essays/held.htm, 7, accessed on 22/07/2009 and Global Convenant: An Interview with David Held (http//info.edgehill.ac.uk/SPSNNewsletter/interview.asp?id_int=1, 6, accessed on 22/07/2009). 23. Held, David (http://essays.ssrc.org/sppt11/essays/held.htm, 9, accessed on 22/07/2009). 24. Held, David (http//info.edgehill.ac.uk/SPSNNewsletter/interview.asp?id_ int=1,.6, accessed on 22/07/2009). 25. Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty”, Ethics 103 (1992), 48-75. I am not saying cosmopolitanism categorically minimises the principle of sovereignty because Pogge, a supporter of global cosmopolitan justice, proposes a cosmopolitan theory of sovereignty. According to Pogge, sovereign states dispute natural resources among themselves, because possessing them affects the distribution of power in international bargaining (economic and political), and because the most powerful also try to create frontiers between them and the poorest, in order to circumvent the duties of justice towards their compatriots (Pogge, Thomas 1992, 70-1). So, the establishment of social policies at a global level brings about the reallocation of political authority (Pogge, Thomas 1992, 701). This means eliminating the predominance of nation-states in a global order and replacing it with individuals, as well as abandoning the concentration of governmental authority, and consequently the institutionalization of global justice. The dispersion of sovereignty is followed by the stipulation of the principle of positive intervention in the case of human rights’ violations. But the vertical dispersion of sovereignty over political units that fight one another for the implementation of human rights extends conflicts between states to other political units, and does not decrease the intensity of conflicts across frontiers. The hypothesis of dispersion of sovereignty seems also to presuppose that the

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achievement of global justice does not exclude the existence of an impartial world state, which would have the authority to solve conflicts concerning the distribution of economic goods among political units. The defence of the dispersion of sovereignty falls, then, victim to the ideal of a final authority and, despite the fact that global democratic states do not have the monopoly of violence, such a state would develop into an absolute state. In this case, the world state, instead of bringing about global justice, would be controlled by individual interests and, instead of helping decrease economic and political inequalities, would intensify oppression and global injustice. This is why I disagree with Held when he sustains that those who violate the cosmopolitan principles, with respect to other people, are terrorists. Held wrongly associates cosmopolitanism to the Kantian principle of equal dignity of every human being and to the capacity to act and make choices (cf. Louis Pojman, “The Moral Response to Terrorism and Cosmopolitanism”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 146). He minimises the alternatives the jihadis, who see humanity in non-egalitarian theocratic terms, have. Yet, not all conceptions of social justice are rooted in Kantian principles. Some are rooted in merit or historical principles, and their supporters are not terrorists. It is for this reason that I disagree with Held when he states that the Islamic community, based on its historical tradition, has to reaffirm the compatibility of Islam with cosmopolitan principles (http://essays.ssrc.org/sppt11/essays/held.htm, 10-11, accessed on 22/07/2009). 26. In traditional just war theory, there are two basic elements: an account of just cause and an account of just means. Just cause is specified as follows: (1) there must be substantial aggression; (2) non-belligerent correctives must be hopeless or too costly; (3) belligerent correctives must be neither hopeless nor too costly. Just means require that (1) harm to innocents should not be directly intended as an end or a means; (2) the harm resulting from the belligerent means should not be disproportionate to the defensive objective to be attained. 27. This concept expresses the reconciliation of just war theory and anti-war pacifism, and it is applied to the small wars and large conflicts that meet the stringent requirements of just war theory and which anti-war pacifists cannot justifiably object to (Louis Pojman, “The Moral Response to Terrorism and Cosmopolitanism”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 144 and James P. Sterba, J. (2003): “Terrorism and International Justice”, in Terrorism and International Justice (ed. James P. Sterba), (New York, Oxford:, Oxford University Press, 2003), 211. 28. Daniela Archibugi and Iris Young “Envisioning a Global Rule of Law”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), 161. Card also defends that the international rules that govern war only apply to states and nations, which are able to take decisions. Claudia Card, “Making War on Terrorism in Response to 9/11”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 176. She wonders if a just war by tradition must be declared by appropriate authorities against whom the war against terrorism will be declared

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(Card, Claudia 2003, 176). But if the war against global terrorism is not against a specific territory, it is not clear who the individual targets are (Card, Claudia 2003, 176). 29. A.Tujan, A. Gaughran and H. Mollet, “Development and the ‘Global War on Terror’”, Race & Class, 46 (2004), 54. 30. Jean J. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (Paris: Gallimard, [1762] 1964), I, 179. 31. David Held (http://essays.ssrc.org/sppt11/essays/held.htm, 8, accessed on 22/07/2009, Cf. Claudia Card, “Making War on Terrorism in Response to 9/11”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003),174. 32. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 33. Rawls, John 1999, 25-27. 34. Rawls, John 1999, 27-30. 35. Rawls, John 1999, 23-27. 36. Thomas Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples”, in Global Justice. Seminal Essays, vol. I, eds. Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moelendorf (St. Paul: Parangon House, 2008), 464-466. 37. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999), 89-92. 38. Robert E. Goodin, “What is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen”, in Global Justice: Seminal Essays, Global Responsibilities, vol. I, eds. Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moellendorf (St. Paul: Parangon House, 2008), 255-84, David Miller, “The Ethical Significance of Nationality”, in Global Justice: Seminal Essays, Global Responsibilities, vol. I, eds. Thomas Pogee and Darrel Moellendorf (St. Paul: Parangon House, 2008), 235-54. 39. Miller, David 2008, 250. 40. Miller, David 2008, 250. 41. Robert E. Goodin, “What is So Special about Our Fellow Countrymen”, in Global Justice: Seminal Essays, Global Responsibilities, vol. I, eds. Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moellendorf (St. Paul: Parangon House, 2008), 272. 42. Goodin, Robert 2008, 272. 43. Goodin, Robert 2008, 272. 44. Goodin, Robert 2008, 275. 45. Goodin, Robert 2008, 275. 46. Goodin, Robert 2008, 255. 47. David Miller, “The Ethical Significance of Nationality”, in Global Justice: Seminal Essays, Global Responsibilities, vol. I, eds. Thomas Pogee and Darrel Moellendorf (St. Paul: Parangon House, 2008), 236. 48. Miller, David 2008, 240. 49. Miller, David 2008, 244. 50. Miller, David 2008, 255. 51. Zayn Kassam, “Can a Muslim Be a Terrorist”, in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 114. 52. Kassam, Zayn 2003, 114-115.

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Chapter Five

CHAPTER SIX POSTMODERN TERRORISM BETWEEN EXCLUSIVISM AND INDIVIDUALISM ANDREA AMATO1

For a Description and a Definition of Terrorism Terrorism is not in itself a new phenomenon, something that has emerged in recent decades. However, we need to acknowledge that, starting from the late ‘60s, the world has had to face a novel danger, one that is new for the extent of its duration, spread and virulence, to the point that we can now consider terrorism as an endemic disease affecting our society. Prima facie, I would define the fundamental character of terrorism as hostility towards a civil society that is considered corrupt. This element applies to both the terrorism of religious matrix and the terrorism of exclusively political nature, since the former considers the habits and the way of life of the citizens, while the latter undermines the legitimation of political power at the moment of elections. Such character distinguishes present-day terrorism from the revolutionary and reactionary movements of the 1900s. Indeed, Marxism fought the alienated individual, while Nazism opposed the standardised and levelled individual. On the contrary, recent terrorism fights against the spiritually corrupted individual, by now intimately analogous to society, because, through it, he has emphasised its immoral and material natural tendencies. This fundamental inspiration motivates and justifies some characteristic features of the current terrorism: its exclusivist need; the indiscriminate attack against the civil population; the urgency of the times; and the new centrality of the individual. Indeed, the action of terrorism consists of a work of purification, which, as such, is placed as unique and unequivocal. In parallel, civilians can be indiscriminately hit by their objective joint responsibility.

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Moreover, since terrorism thinks that the decay of the individual has reached immense proportions and has insinuated itself deeply, the redemption of the individual must be induced from the top and must be sudden, therefore a free reformation cannot be adopted because it takes time to implement. Finally, for present terrorism to subvert political institutions is not enough to rehabilitate the individual, a direct action of re-education is also necessary. The new centrality assigned to the individual has its origin here. There is no doubt that, for some, the use of suicidal attacks is novel. However, the novel element should be limited to the “technical”, military and unpredictable aspect of the attack, to its devastating psychological effects, to its ability to undermine the enemy’s defence. In terms of defining what terrorism is in essence and identifying the terrorist, suicide attacks do not constitute a break with the past, given that however subversive or purely revolutionary, the action aims at death. Thus, as far as this aspect is concerned, the novel trait of suicidal attacks must be traced back to the same danger, made real, that is already part of specific political strategies. Moreover, the kamikaze’s “instinct of death” matches not solely political needs, but rather the individual need to give one’s life a role and a meaning, although that paradoxically takes place by means of its dematerialisation. Not even the global dimension, which religious terrorism in particular has taken on, represents a typical trait of subversive activity in recent years, because both national and nationalistic terrorism had tried to set up an international terrorist organisation in previous decades. In addition, the globalisation of terrorism, more basically, reflects the universal feature, albeit distorted, that the relevant religions and ideologies assume to represent. Having stated that, I do not mean to place at the same level the customary practice and worship linked to great religions, or support to specific political theories on part of historical revolutionary movements with their subsequent aberrant interpretations and bold manipulations. On the contrary, I wish to highlight that no political fight or programme may on its own arouse vast-scale and world-wide interest, unless it establishes itself as the only representative element of the core of truth, be it religious or ideological, that is deemed unquestionable and universal. As Habermas (2003, 36) purports, terrorism turns religious or ideological universalism into “exclusivism”, thus laying the premise for its dogmatic and fanatical degeneration.2 In other words, it claims that everyone (and not only those who freely believe in it) acknowledges the assertiveness of specific ideas or principles. Thus, terrorism turns into a forced and historically topical phenomenon, a form of universalism that should be promoted only in

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potential and ideal terms. Therefore, with reference to global terrorism, we must refer once again to a “technical”, military novelty, rather than to a different basic characterisation of terrorism. Lastly, we may hold that the novelty of present-day terrorism is linked to having included the population at large as one of its targets. Once again, in itself, that is only partially true. Indeed, also in the past, civilians were deliberately targeted during warfare. With regards to this issue, Schmitt (2003, 89-90) reminds us of the extent to which the coming together of land and sea war operations, from the sixteenth century onwards, introduced the novelty of involving the population at large. The reason for this is that “the very nature of the peculiar means” used in sea warfare operations, such as “blocking the coasts”, “cannon-targeting”, exercising “the right to prey upon enemy and neutral merchant vessels”, inevitably enables them “to be used against service-men and nonservicemen alike”.3 Moreover, even during the Second World War, several towns were bombed by both parties involved. The most resounding and disturbing case was the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The objection may be that those were conflicts between states. Yet, nothing prevents states from implementing terrorist measures, nor state authorities from being involved in both sides of the conflict, or a state from standing for one belligerent party alone. Nevertheless, in the sea warfare operations mentioned by Schmidt, or in Second World War bombings, the action was justified by the need to stop the war as soon as possible, thus decreasing the number of victims on either side. Nowadays, no one even strives to find these political reasons behind the action, while deploying violence against civilians is acknowledged and legitimised as an ordinary means of fighting. This violence is justified with ethical motivations, interpreted in an absolute and fanatical manner. But, theorising and legitimising such an approach have become the most degrading and shocking aspects of the planned attacks against non-servicemen. Terrorist techniques so far taken into consideration are not, per se, the basic features of recent terrorism. They contribute to define the nature of present-day terrorism, but do not determine this nature; this is true whether we look at either single terrorist techniques or all of them together. It may be useful to consider those techniques in the wider context. With the aim of identifying the wider field in which the different, specific aspects of recent terrorism may be described in depth and in which they may contribute to clarifying the nature of terrorism, we must

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trace once again the common traits featured by the varied forms of terrorist activity. In order to accomplish the task adequately, the issue may be addressed by asking: “Why do people opt for terrorism?”. Initially, we may answer that the movements embracing such approaches feel they are, and/or are in fact, minorities within the society or context in which they operate, and therefore have no choice other than to resort to violent acts – the only ones which give them visibility and credibility as to their organisation and military power. If that were so, terrorism would be a set option, rather than a truly free choice. However, the objection may be that all antagonist or revolutionary political forces were originally a minority or lacked power, although not all of them resorted to violence. In the West, the workers’ movement itself had to fight social censure and the dominant power of well-established classes to reach its present leading role. Therefore, the idea that terrorism is an inevitable option is untenable. At this point, it should be specified whether the movement is a minority in political or military terms, on the national or international level, within a democracy or not. Events in recent years show that terrorism has developed within democratic and authoritarian systems. As for democratic governments, resorting to violence has been justified either by the presumed incompleteness of the existing democratic system or by its pure mystification. But, in practice, there emerges a deep sense of distrust towards democratic mechanisms, existing procedures, and existing constitutional systems; therefore, antidemocratic regimes and democratic ones are ultimately placed on the same level. From this point of view, results may only be achieved by using strong measures, but, Popper (2009, 568) warns us “the prolonged usage of the violence can lead to the end of the freedom”.4 Moreover, the objection can be, again, that past history shows that peaceful struggles within partially democratic or even antidemocratic systems lead to positive results in the long run. Therefore, in real terms, it must be assumed that democracy is rejected owing to hostility towards it rather than because it is impracticable. The example set by Gandhi reveals that even the powerful British military was overcome by peaceful movements. Lastly, it is not necessary for military opposition to be carried out by means of terrorist-like activity. I wish to end my observations on the deployment of military-terrorist acts, related to the clash between political groups or states, by analysing the aims of such strategy. With reference to this issue, military conflict may seem to be aimed at largely overcoming the enemy. In fact, that is not

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always the case. On the contrary, when the stalemate is long lasting or when the hope of disrupting power relations by military action recedes, military-terrorist activities are often resorted to, though only to achieve limited results. In other words, the main objective is not always pursued, while at times, what is sought is partial success, because minor results may be achieved more easily and, above all, sooner. The aim thus turns into destructuring the enemy organisation, its defence and offence system, to shatter the enemy’s nerves. The aim is not victory, but rather placing the enemy in the position where it cannot gain victory. At first sight, I have so far welcomed the theory that opting for terrorist activity is due to the fact that opposition forces find themselves operating as minority groups. However, that claim too needs to be recanted, at least in part. Indeed, terrorist groups are not always minorities. For example, several movements have been supported by large sectors of the population, yet they have not stopped terrorist attacks. Overall, even groups fighting dictatorial regimes have welcomed terrorist strategies, despite sometimes enjoying popular support. In light of the above considerations, we must reject that theory whereby terrorism is basically the result of illiberal regimes fought by terrorist groups, or the insuperable disparity of the existing military forces. Well, then, what is the real reason for terrorism? In order to answer that question, I wish to explore the case of Iraq. In this country, Al-Qaeda had established itself, monopolising military intervention and setting up single terrorist headquarters. Although there were several anti-US forces from the outset, they all drew strength and coordination from the terrorist organisation Bin Laden set up. Later, the front divided: the Schiites vs. the Sunnites, then Al-Qaeda vs. the Sunnites, lastly Al-Qaeda’s leaders reproached their representatives in Iraq. Presently, terrorist groups are highly fragmented and there are divisions within Al-Qaeda. A similar development has occurred in different contexts. Let’s consider the tragic fratricide clashes between Palestinians, or the real wars fought between national freedom groups. Such clashes between antagonist forces do not only stem from the degeneration of political conflict, but also, more often than not, from one group’s wish to wholly dominate or predominate over the other groups involved. To explain this, we must refer to Habermas’ (2003, 36) theory, according to which “fundamentalism” draws on “returning to the exclusivism of pre-modern beliefs”.5 I would further specify that notion, interpreting it as a trend towards exclusivism per se. That drive emerges when terrorist groups draw on religious beliefs and creeds or political ideologies, set out dogmatically and fanatically, as

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indeed Habermas claims. However, generally speaking, they emerge when democratic debate is rejected within opposition movements and in the relationship between antagonist forces. In all those cases, there prevails the ambition to impose one political viewpoint or worldview; a clearly noncontingent imposition, one that is not only valid under the exceptional circumstance, when an authoritarian regime or an external enemy is to be faced, but rather a type of imposition that is applicable today and, also, tomorrow. Terrorism uses the friend/enemy pattern, whereby all those who oppose are considered enemies, rather than co-protagonists (if they are on the same side), or adversaries to be defeated. We can therefore define terrorism as a type of struggle pursued by means of violence with the aim of establishing antidemocratic regimes, of fighting against both authoritarian regimes and democratic systems, of treating potential allies and adversaries as enemies. Only within the framework of the above complex definition may we find a suitable context and explanation for the practice of resorting to specific fighting techniques, such as the planned, systematic and strategic use of civilians and their property as targets for offensive and defensive ends, or the technique of using kamikaze fighters. Hence, opting for one or the other strategy makes no difference from the military and political point of view, as well as from the moral one. Moreover, the very means used become the final goal, and therefore their deployment becomes the terrorists’ main concern. In addition to the above basic features, present-day terrorism is also peculiar given that it aims to achieve the most attainable results in the shortest time. Recent terrorism seeks to achieve all of its goals as soon as possible or, alternatively, to obtain at least something in a short time. That is the reason for its impressive actions and devastating operations, the latter being more of an option owing to their destructive psychological impact on the enemy and their resounding effect on the media. Indeed, media impact is paramount for terrorism, as it produces effects locally and world-wide, and also because it addresses a friendly public opinion, (but also an unfriendly one), or simply people who are not directly involved. On this issue, I wish to refer to statements made by the President of the Youth Tibetan Congress, Tsewang Rigzin (2008), who has declared that the movement strives to “give back freedom to our country, at any price. But we have to hurry. Every day widens the gap between us and our goal, especially after the railway has been built” (linking Tibet to Beijing). He adds that “pacifism has led us on a dead-end track. We are mentioned casually, limitedly (….). Let’s turn our eyes to the impact of what Palestinians and pro-Iraq activists achieve with their suicide-attacks. The

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world media is focused on them”.6 These words clearly express two basic concepts: the urgency of the times and the role of the media attention. The two aspects need to be considered as basic elements, tenets of recent terrorism and not only tools to achieve its goals. With regard to this issue, in democratic countries too there is an increasing trend towards dramatic protests, given that, here, the fracture between society and institutions is deepening. As a consequence, people often believe that immediate results may only be obtained by staging impressive or disruptive protests. Such attitudes ensue from the widespread distrust in the country’s institutions, in their ability to be efficient and honest, while revealing rejection of high-standard planning and, specifically, its complex mechanisms and delayed timing. Increasingly, there emerges a drive to simplify relations and to shorten lengthy procedures, to avoid and reject mediation and, consequently, to ignore the quality of results. Nevertheless, in democratic countries, the gap between civil society and politics and the institutions has been leading to instances of rebellion, though not to systematic subversive actions. This is due to the existing deep respect for one’s rights and for individual freedom, as well as to the utter disbelief that an overall better society is possible or feasible.

Terrorism and the Issue of Consensus So far, I have discussed the antidemocratic nature of terrorist groups, while acknowledging that they, sometimes, succeed in securing popular support for themselves. At this point, I wish to review the topic in order to avoid misinterpretations. It is absolutely impossible for a political organisation to avoid the problem of mass support of its political proposal. Maybe only in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could anarchic-individualists elude this issue. On the other hand, whenever terrorist groups aim at gaining support among the population, and if they succeed, they do so by both stamping out dissent by means of violence and by enforcing a policy based on demagogy and populism, which fulfils mass ambitions and needs. Nevertheless, terrorist groups seek unanimous support rather than democratic consent. The ensuing support is then manipulated, given that it is used to crush the minorities within and to spur manichean conflict with the enemy without. Hence, once again terrorism features exclusivism and heads towards confrontation.

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The present approach to the analysis of terrorism not only takes into account the fighting stage, but also the time when the political forces close to terrorism manage to prevail and establish themselves within the institutional bodies and governments. However, the latter stage raises new problems linked to their legitimacy. Exclusive, mass consensus presupposes a unified, highly compact society, inspired by a sense of belonging, dominated by a spirit of community. However, all these features are nowadays hotly debated in all societies, including the most traditional ones, though in different measure. Everywhere individualism is markedly advancing, and atomisation and social fragmentation are emerging as well. Globalisation is prompting such standardisation, therefore what were once closed, granitic and incontrovertible communities are now questioned to some degree. The debate specifically confutes interference in the private life of individuals, who claim a more or less marked division between the personal and the public sphere. Terrorist organisations are primarily affected by such demands, as they too face problems in setting up centralised terrorist headquarters, which direct groups or terrorists cells from above, according to a hierarchical structure. In this area too, excessive self-promotion is spreading among leaders and followers, causing some fragmentation of terrorist activity and, at times, competition and conflict among the various groups. In the light of the above, totalitarian control and exclusivism must necessarily revise their theoretical and pragmatic formulae to somehow adapt to reality. In particular, people’s demands for a more relevant role and for greater freedom for women are the thorns in their excessively dogmatic and centralising outlook. One solution to the problem involves building unanimous support. By ‘unanimous’ I mean the type of support obtained on the grounds of emotional involvement, which obscures critical and objective thinking, or raised by resorting to a stilted approach and proposing policies in such a simplified and final way, that it lays down an either/or to people. If that is the goal, then real or imaginary emergencies may serve the purpose; just like the appeal to patriotism against an external or internal enemy (thus demonising all criticism), setting vital or extremely ambitious targets for the masses to pursue. The final aim is keeping society at large under pressure, because under these circumstances, simplified messages are more easily conveyed and ambitious leaders have better chances to gain support. Nevertheless, such tactics may wear out in the long run. They often work, yet they cannot work forever.

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For a Terrorist Profile In the attempt to outline the psychological profile of terrorists and to identify the reasons determining their choice, several scholars studying the phenomenon highlight the sense of frustration prompting terrorist actions. Such feeling fits the under-privileged and the wealthy alike, as they experience economic hardship as well as the ideal impasse; they feel humiliated, both as individuals and as members of a nation or a country, by being unjustly discriminated against by the world socio-politicaleconomic system and by the overbearing hegemony of some superpowers. Such opinion is expressed by Enzensberger (2007, 3), who considers armed extremists to be people who feel resentment towards others, that is society, because they blame them for their own failure and they nurture the ‘mimetic drive’, namely the wish to be like the Other whom the armed extremists see as the winner. Terrorists are “radical losers” who think even the slightest difference is a form of injustice and thus they wish to destroy and annihilate others, as others have destroyed them.7 In another paper, Enzensberger (2007) adds, “today Islamic terrorists are obsessed by the historical decline of the Arab world, by its by-gone grandeur”.8 Likewise, Hamid (2007) explains Muslim hatred towards the USA on the grounds of their “envy” for the “richest and most powerful country in the world”.9 Westerners, too, nurture similar feelings, though they are directed towards other targets. For instance, Dahhrendorf (2006) ascribes the decline of mass parties in our society to the fact that “people” no longer find a political home within parties, and they react to situations, trends, emotional calls and even resentment.10 Baudrillard (2005) specifies that “‘resentment’ is not only social or economic”.11 The analogy between people’s “feelings” (as Dahrendorf terms them) in the West and in the Middle East (although the similarity may apply to all peoples feeling somehow discriminated against) is interesting and crucial to our understanding the reasons leading to radical protest or deeprooted discontent in the West and to violent, armed actions elsewhere. In my opinion, in whatever form it appears, the aforementioned “resentment” reveals there is a wide gap between society and the individual who feels resentment not only for the huge social and economic inequalities, as Baudrillard has highlighted, but also because they blame society for having failed to promote their own potential, their skills, their merits. However, the individual blames society in a general and unspecified way, given that most people feel resentment. Consequently, their harsh criticism may, in fact, be groundless. The emphasis on their unfair treatment, which Enzensberger links to Islamic fanatics, may indeed apply to large sectors

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of the population in the West and elsewhere. A certain form of individualism affects religiosity too. Director of CNRS (research centre, Paris), Roy (2006) mentions the spread of the “born again” phenomenon, that is the personal recurrence of faith “breaking away from traditional religion based on the family and its social milieu”. Therefore, “faith is experienced individually: society is deemed too secular and therefore corruptive”. Roy thus concludes that “Muslims’ religious practices (…) have become much more ‘Westernised’ than one might expect”.12 I trust such considerations may well extend to all religions. Such an individualistic claim may be somewhat met by adhering to a terrorist-like political programme. Indeed, though terrorism is strongly dogmatic and overall totalitarian, it allows its members to fulfil, even partially, their ambitions and to express themselves as individuals, and, specifically, to assert themselves in the face of the masses. This holds true for its leaders and its militants. Thanks to the organisation and within the organisation, to different degrees, all the members of a terrorist group succeed in finding a task and a mission that fulfils: their aspirations; a distinctive role to play; a reason to live; a set of values to believe in; a pay and other benefits that will help them financially and socially; a prestigious or awe-centred role within society; and some form of visibility that would be otherwise precluded to them. All this ensures some form of fulfilment and enables people to find their inner psychological stability once again, thus balancing their initial sense of frustration. More specifically, their new position in life establishes their new individual identity. Moreover, such inner spiritual pleasure, the re-found self-confidence, the pride in being able to make decisions and take options, the awareness of a rather unusual moral condition, often foster a feeling of superiority. Enzensberger (2007, 23) points out that megalomania and resentment are closely interwoven, just as often occurs between megalomania and the longing to die. In particular, “the external world that has never taken him [the terrorist] into consideration, acknowledges him when he seizes weapons. The media ensure he receives enormous publicity – be it just for one day – …”.13 With regard to suicide terrorists, Ben Jelloun (2007) similarly claims that their “death instinct replaces life instinct and turns into a driving force in life”. Besides, he also states that the chance to decide on other people’s life and death provides a certain degree of “pleasure”, ensuring “a somewhat magic position”, to the point that the suicidal person thinks “he is God” or, at least, he will persuade himself to have “reached a divine space”.14

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Therefore, the new identity a terrorist creates for himself features some degree of syncretism, whatever the viewpoint, be it psychological, religious, social, or cultural. This new identity hosts traditional and modern aspects, according to a pattern that is sometimes inconsistent, though being practicable and credible at all times. In conclusion, recent terrorism may be termed post-modern in line with trends in Western societies, from which it draws several and meaningful typical features. Such definition stems from: the type of consensus that terrorism manages to gain (populist, demagogic, leader-centred, mediabased); the type of religiosity permeating the very fundamentalists (which is more personal); the sort of profile fitting the militant terrorist (which is to a certain extent individualistic).

Bibliography Augé, Marc. Diario di guerra [War Diary]. Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 2002. Beck, Ulrich. I rischi della libertà. L’individuo nell’epoca della globalizzazione [The Risks of Freedom. The Individual in the Age of Globalization]. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000. Bocca, Giorgio. Il terrorismo Italiano [Italian Terrorism]. Milan: Rizzoli, 1979. Borradori, Giovanna. Filosofia del terrore. Dialoghi con J. Habermas e J. Derrida [Philosophy of Terror. Dialogues with J. Habermas and J. Derrida]. Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003. Drewermann, Eugen. La Guerra è la malattia non la soluzione [War is the disease, it is not the solution]. Turin: Claudiana, 2005. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Il perdente radicale [Radical Loser]. Turin: Einaudi, 2007. Gilbert, Paul. Il dilemma del terrorismo. Studio di filosofia politica applicata [The Dilemma of Terrorism. Study of Applied Political Philosophy]. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997. Grandi, Aldo. Insurrezione armata [Armed Insurrection]. Milan: Rizzoli, 2005. Popper, Karl Raimund. La società aperta ed i suoi nemici [The open society and its enemies]. Milan: RCS Libri, 2009. Roy, Olivier. L’impero assente. L’illusione americana ed il dibattito strategico sul terrorismo [The Absent Empire. The American Illusion and the Strategic Debate on Terrorism]. Rome: Carocci, 2004. Schmitt, Carl. Terra e mare. Una riflessione sulla storia del mondo [Earth and Sea. A Reflection on the History of the World]. Milan: Adelphi,

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2003. Vecchio, Concetto. Ali di piombo [Wings of Lead]. Milan: Rizzoli, 2007.

Notes 1. University of Bari – Department of Letters and Philosophy. 2. Habermas explains the “fundamentalism” referring to a “mentality stiffened by fanaticism” and mentions the “return to the exclusivism of pre-modern beliefs”. By contrast, the German philosopher holds that “rigorous universalism” consists of “the equal respect for everyone…”. For these quotations see Giovanna Borradori, Filosofia del terrore. Dialoghi con J. Habermas e J. Derrida [Philosophy of Terror. Dialogues with J. Habermas and J. Derrida], (Rome-Bari: Laterza,2003), p. 36. 3. On this issue, Schmitt adds that in the land warfare operations of the time, “as long as [civilians] did not take part in the fight” they were not considered as “enemies and treated accordingly”. For these quotations see Carl Schmitt, Terra e mare. Una riflessione sulla storia del mondo [Earth and Sea. A Reflection on the History of the World], (Milan: Adelphi 2003), pp. 89,90. 4. Karl Raimund Popper, La società aperta ed i suoi nemici [The open society and its enemies], (Milan: RCS Libri, 2009), p.568. 5. Giovanna Borradori, Filosofia del terrore. Dialoghi con J. Habermas e J. Derrida [Philosophy of Terror. Dialogues with J. Habermas and J. Derrida], (Rome-Bari: Laterza,2003), p. 36. 6. Lorenzo Cremonesi, “La non violenza? Non paga. Potremmo usare i kamikaze” [Non Violence? It doesn’t pay. We could use Kamikazes”], “Il Corriere della Sera”, 27th March 2008; p. 19. 7. Hans Magnus Enzensberger,”Il perdente radicale” [Radical Loser], (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), p. 3. 8. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Cosìsono diventato il piantagrane della sinistra” [That Is How I Turned Into the Pain in the Neck of the Left-Wing Faction], “La Repubblica”, 2nd October 2007; p. 25. 9. Mohsin Hamid, “Se l’America chiede: ” [If America asks: ‘Why Do They Hate Us’], “La Repubblica”, 7th July 2007; p. 15. 10. Ralf Dahrendorf, “Quando i populisti mettono in crisi i partiti” [When Populists Bring Havoc to Parties], “La Repubblica”, 29th August 2006; p. 21. 11. Jean Baudrillard, “Il popolo perduto della elite della politica” [The People Lost by Political Èlites], “La Repubblica”, 9th December 2005; p. 1. 12. Olivier Roy, “Una fede senza radici, ecco il diavolo globale” [A Faith without Roots, here is the Global Devil], “Il Corriere della Sera”, 14th February 2006; p. 14. 13. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Il perdente radicale [Radical Loser], (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), pp. 23, 64,65. 14. Tahar Ben Jelloun,“Il terrorismo e la morte di Dio” [Terrorism and the Death of God], “La Repubblica”, 5th November 2007; p. 25.

CHAPTER SEVEN ANARCHISM FROM THE RIGHT: THE TERRORISTIC APPROACH OF THE UNABOMBER JOÃO TIAGO PROENÇA1

Anarchism has been generally and unanimously defined as a peaceful way to organise human life. Indeed, it was credited by its supporters as the most peaceful way to bring about such a condition, since it was the final act that would put an end to the curse of violence and exploitation that have been the hallmark of history until now. The golden age recommended was supposed to eliminate once and for all the scarcity afflicting human life. Scarcity that was a consequence of an ill-organised society, one divided into rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. This diagnosis was shared by many other currents of political and social thought from the Left. With all of them, anarchism shared also its anthropological optimism, to use Carl Schmitt’s phrase: man is fundamentally and radically good. The political change that would allow for this goodness to reign finally is social revolution, that is, a revolution that eliminates bad government. We find here a distinction from the other leftist trends of thought; for the anarchists, every government is intrinsically bad on account of the radical goodness of man, since the government, from the Left or from the Right, hinders the goodness of man developing. It cannot avoid controlling, directing and administrating popular and spontaneous life. This last, left to itself, can bring about a balanced, socially harmonic form of life, in correspondence with the good nature of man. The traditional way to conceive this popular and autonomous form of life was the commune, patterned after medieval communes. But for many anarchist authors, Kropotkin for instance, the commune was under siege from both the inside and the outside. From the inside, because it had not touched upon the propriety relations; from the outside, because of intercommune rivalries and, especially, because of the power of the kings who

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made use of them in order to defeat the barons. Thereafter, they smashed the communes themselves. But as a model of solidarity, the commune is of unsurpassed usefulness, since it offers in small and deficient scale what must be realised in a universal way. True solidarity must be universal solidarity. Moreover, Kropotkin considered that the existing conditions prevent a limited solidarity, since modern, industrial conditions imply the destruction of all parochial solidarity. Human needs and interests are so developed in the modern, industrial age that a true human solidarity necessarily crosses all territorial bounds. The individual now has multilateral needs that no territorial commune can satisfy, so there is no place for rivalries inter-commune since the individual will belong to a set of communes in order to accomplish its development, to expand, one might say, its natural goodness. The unrestrained development of humanity will result from the uninhibited development of the individual, which is only possible after the elimination of all outer government. Since man is good, he can start under existing conditions to build the embryo of future society. If political revolution is followed by a centralised change of society that means that government is still – as in pre-revolutionary times, perhaps even worse – above individuality as an instance of command that deprives man of its autonomy. Interestingly, the Unabomber ideas share a somewhat similar moral vision, but also display some very important differences. It is to those ideas that we now turn. In the view of the Unabomber, the centralisation will be replaced by the technical and industrial system. Technology, however, can be divided into two kinds: small-scale technology and organisation-dependent technology. The first kind is dependent on individual skills, or at least on small communities’ skills, by which the Unabomber means societies with a simple division of labour. The second kind is defined as organisation-dependent technology, that is, technology whose condition of possibility is a high degree of complexity that is institutionalised, forming thereby a system, the technical and industrial system. It is this very system that is the target of what is known as the Unabomber Manifesto, the original text is entitled Industrial Society and Its Future.2 Contrary to traditional anarchism, the Unabomber, mathematician, Ted Kaczynski, does not charge directly the system with the principal shortcoming that was highlighted by leftist anarchism: scarcity. At least in developed countries, the system provides enough consumer commodities – perhaps too much. This “plenty” is but an extra means to subtract freedom from individuals, so that the main fault is essentially a moral one. Of course, the system produces physical suffering

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in the Third World, but in the First World its consequences are mainly psychological, indeed derived from that moral fault. The system strips the individual of his individuality, causing thereby the maladjustments of an increasing amount of people. In his view, social disruption is a symptom of the lack of autonomy promoted by the system. To gain a clear understanding of how the Unabomber envisions autonomy, we must refer to what he calls the power process, which can be roughly described as his philosophical anthropology. “Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the ‘power process’.” (§33) The power process consists of having goals that require some degree of effort to be achieved. A need that is immediately satisfied cannot put the power process in motion because there is no motion at all. Goals, however, are not interchangeable. There are some goals that, if not achieved, jeopardize sheer physical survival. These goals are the physical needs. But under the spell of the industrial system, the satisfaction of physical needs requires effort but not a decision of the individual. This effort is merely obedience. From this, one gathers that effort is not the right word to portray the power process. The most important thing is that effort is made independent of the decision of the individual, so much so that very demanding physical efforts are but a form of obedience. The efforts required by the industrial system are mainly efforts of obedience and so they can be ruled out as autonomous. The example provided is the soldier whose display of physical effort is altogether compatible with strict surrender of the self. This example casts light on the fact that effort without a personal decision is not an autonomous activity. It is not the fact of dispending great efforts that can prevent human beings from being a “cog in the social machine”. Even when people try to act autonomously, if they do not direct their action to survival goals, they are not acting autonomously. They are indulging in surrogate activities. These can be defined as activities that “are directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the ‘fulfilment’ that they get from pursuing the goal”. (§39) From this excerpt, one can see that artificial goals are those that are not connected to survival, moreover, one can only pursue these goals if the others, the natural ones, are satisfied; they are a kind of luxury product. Even working hard is, or can be, a form of surrogate activity, since people tend to work more than they really need to, as if this could be a form of autonomy. Technical apparatus prevents autonomous action even if one has chosen to comply, and is happy in complying, with technical rules. From a certain degree of quantity onwards, there is a qualitative change in

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action. When the individual loses sight of, and the possibility of, controlling a vital process, the activity is no longer autonomous. And the same applies to political decisions. In such matters a clear-cut border line cannot be drawn, but it should be realized by everyone that beyond a certain degree the individual surrenders his individuality to the system. What really makes autonomy is the satisfaction of a vital need, as if only in this case could a life have value, personal value. This accounts for his dismissal of surrogate activities, since they can never promote this feeling of fulfilment. The Unabomber’s description sounds like the Tocqueville’s description of the soft despotism transferred to the techno-industrial system. Nineteenth century social rebellion focused on two main, internally connected, aspects. Firstly, the proletarian lives to produce commodities that others will consume. His work belongs to the exploiters, who leave him only enough to keep himself alive and to reproduce living work force, his children; hence, the designation proletarian. Secondly, the proletarian is seen – from Adam Smith to Nietzsche, passing through Marx, Michelet, Fourier, Leroux, Poudhon and many others, if not all, thinkers and culture critiques of the nineteenth century – as someone who becomes a machine in the process of operating a concrete machine, and indeed a hard working machine, soon exhausted. Feudal despotism centralised power physically, political power opposed to the individual was based on superior physical force; bourgeoisie despotism was based on the state law enforced by military means when needed. Both were opposed to the majority of individuals on the basis of (physical, natural) scarcity. But in the last century, scarcity is no longer a problem, since material needs are easily satisfied by modern industry and people are not so savagely worn out. But this new predicament is used by the Unabomber to highlight the intrinsically moral fault of the system. In his narrative, Tocqueville’s soft despotism becomes Marcuse’s total administration. The problem he is faced with, is how to get out of this magic circle of technology. Since there is no political centre clearly identified as such which could support a Bolshevik approach, so to speak, that is to make a political revolution whose target was to hold possession of the realm opposed to society and from there organise social relations, the solution must be an anarchist one, and this means a revolution from below, from society. The traditional anarchistic way of rebuilding society consists of the formation of small communes, ideally interconnected, forming communes of communes, and so on. Federation is the set of all communes. However,

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as we have pointed out at the beginning, modern communes require the acceptance of modern social, economic, even cultural, conditions, so that communes can no longer be self-sufficient entities contained by the walls of small towns. There is no primitivism in anarchism, as there is not in Marxism. Since leftist thought was coined amid social battles for consumer commodities, technical evolution was approved of, for it put an end to material misery. The romantic destruction of machines was due to the very prosaic fact of their causing unemployment, not because of any technophobia. Technological progress was thus inherent to the productivist view of the communes. For the Unabomber, however, this view cannot be anything other than wrong. It presents no way out of the technological, soft, administered oppression. He faces a dilemma. The Bolshevik approach cannot be taken because there is no political centre severed from an industrial system that has become self-sufficient, but the anarchistic approach commits the error of using the means that are the very thing to get rid of. His answer is to limit the use of technology in order to destroy technology; any other use of technology is liable to foster the system: “It would be hopeless for revolutionaries to try to attack the system without using SOME modern technology. If nothing else they must use the communications media to spread their message. But they should use modern technology for only ONE purpose: to attack the technological system.” (§202)

The exact measures to be taken, however, are completely absent, except those which deal with the deficiencies of the industrial system in order to elevate them to their maximum destructiveness, so as to make people realise their hurtfulness. As in Marxism, the conditions of revolution must be developed entirely in order to grant success. The Unabomber goes so far as to recommend the begetting of children on two accounts. Firstly, overpopulation is likely to increase the dysfunctionality of the system. Secondly, children normally take up their parents’ social attitudes, so it would increase the number of revolution soldiers. He does not take into account the fact that all vital, physical needs can be satisfied only within the system, so that everyone is unavoidably engaged in the system. But that is, of course, the main problem. As long as one is involved vitally in the system, one can never materialize the conditions of liberation – only expect to do that after the revolution. This is what Martin Buber, in his book on utopical socialism, called apocalyptical eschatology (the Marxist-Bolshevik). But as we have seen,

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there is no political centre upon which revolution could be exerted. The other way out of the system, the anarchistic one, the prophetical eschatology in Buber’s words, is also precluded, since no action can claim to be autonomous if it is not connected with vital needs. Even the isolationist way out, namely to go into the wilderness, is ruled out. Overpopulation and pervasive technology make this impossible for the individual, let alone for small groups. Nature, defined as “that which is outside the power of system”, is the positive ingredient of Unabomber revolutionary ideology, (the negative being the destruction of the system), and provides man with a model for action, autonomous, that is, moral, action. It is very interesting to see that he envisions the possibility of a green party winning the elections and then going on to start dismantling industrial systems, but he goes on to say, that the necessary measures would be so unpopular that the green party would lose subsequent elections. This is the danger of starting a revolution when society is not ready for it. The Unabomber discards the Leninist tactic, of the party as the vanguard of the masses, which centralises power and moulds social relations. Accordingly, there are some passages in the Manifesto explicitly against the Bolshevik Revolution and even the French Revolution. An electoral revolution, if one may use such an expression, is doomed to failure. There is an impasse in his argument pertaining to social change. The way out will be terrorism. We turn, now, to this. The Manifesto refers only once to the terroristic actions of the author. To expose the evils of the system and to be heard, he had, so he says, to kill. This was the old anarchist rationale of nineteenth century attacks. But more, he does not say. We have reached a point at which both traditional directions of social change are impassable, the one from above, as well as the one from below. There is only one way out of the system, and that is the terroristic one. Not in the instrumental sense, that intended to make publicity for the cause or to get rid of the institutionalised obstacles. On the contrary, terrorism consists in practising the way of life expected to be generalised after the breakdown of the industrial system. In terrorism, one can already live autonomously and not surrogately, since in illegality one puts one’s life at risk or is at least ready to accept serious consequences. Terrorism is thus the only way to live autonomously within the system, because it uses technology only against the system and, simultaneously, one faces personally harsh consequences, as if the system had broken down only for the individual terrorist.

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In 2006, Donald R. Liddick published “Eco-terrorism: radical environmental and animal liberation movements” in which he transcripts a written answer from the Unabomber to some questions he sent him in 2005.3 In his answer, we can find confirmation of this view of the need for terrorism. The Unabomber asserts: “If technological civilization collapses, many, many people will die, and the survivors will have to live under conditions that will seem exceedingly harsh to those accustomed to the soft life of modern society.” It will be a: “struggle for survival where highest value will be placed on courage, skill, effort, endurance – and on freedom, but not the pampered freedom of the modern man or woman to whom society gives a long leash. Instead, the movement must value the self-reliant freedom of the rugged survivalist, and it will have to glory in the hard life to be expected following the dissolution of technological civilization.” (§107)

Terrorism is the only way of glorying in actual conditions. Notwithstanding, Kaczanski did not have to struggle for survival in the vital, physical sense in which one faces nature and subdues it in order to survive. So glorying in actual conditions is, on his own terms, just a surrogate activity – one could say the most surrogate activity – that cannot reveal its name, a mere masquerade of real autonomous action. The rugged survivalist glories in dangerous conditions freely chosen as he decides to act illegally, achieving thereby not the mutual aid of medieval communes but the honour and glory of the isolated medieval lords of war. The Unabomber terroristic strategy turns out to be a search for personal distinction in the midst of a democratic life. This is nothing other than the usual rightist anarchism.

Notes 1. Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem / Universidade Nova de Lisboa. 2. Since there are several editions of the text, all quotations will made by paragraph §. 3. Donald R. Liddick, Eco-terrorism – radical environmental and animal liberation movements (Westport, Connecticut London: Praeger Publisher, 2006), 104-108.

CHAPTER EIGHT JIHADI JOURNALISM ANDREAS ARMBORST1

Introduction It is difficult to assess whether jihadism and jihadi terrorism are volatile phenomena in decline, or whether its global and regional conflicts will sustain and intensify, and thereby coin the future of foreign affairs and domestic security like other conflicts did before. The future “success” of the jihadi movement partly depends on the appeal and credibility of its ideology and worldview. This ideology has to maintain a narrative that convincingly demonstrates how the application of violence is legitimate, functional and necessary.2 This article deals with the jihadi worldview that suggests violent activism as the opportune means to enforce the salafi conception of society.3 Jihadi violence is an illustrative case of contemporary terrorism. Although jihadi violence is not identical to terrorist violence, jihadism resorts to the “strategy of terrorism”4 as it resorts to similar forms of political violence, such as insurgency and guerrilla tactics. Jihadism can be described as one contemporary form of (Sunni) Islamic fundamentalism that opposes secular influences through violent activism (namely jihad). Contemporary jihadi violence can be defined as physical harm against persons, committed by agents who thereby execute the doctrine of jihad (according to the heterodox interpretation of jihadism). In other words, jihadi violence is violence motivated through and inspired by the ideology of jihadism.5 This definition is subjective because it is characterised by motivation rather than clear-cut behavioural criteria (violence is considered jihadi when the agent claims it to be so). However, this subjectivity is intrinsic to jihadi violence: there is no univocal Muslim position on central religious-judicial questions concerning jihad. Although there always has been a discrepancy between the strict orthodox interpretation of jihad “in the book” and its actual application “in action”

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as performed by past Islamic rulers,6 specifically the terrorist dimension of contemporary jihad seems to be novel: contemporary jihad is waged by subversive non-state agents, instead of being an Islamic state doctrine of foreign policy, and it is partially directed against civilians as part of its strategy. Understanding the motives and reasons for non-justifiable violence is usually not the immediate concern of security and law enforcement agencies. However, some governmental institutions do pay dedicated attention to the ideology and worldview of jihadism, such as the Combating Terrorism Center at the West Point Academy, the FFI (Norwegian Defence Research Establishment). In addition, there are numerous private think tanks, non-profit organisations and academic institutions that investigate the issue.7 But what are the merits of understanding the political perspective of jihadi fundamentalists? Are there any, or does understanding mean to surrender to one of the goals of terrorism: to pay attention to the terrorists’ claims and grievances? Ironically, Western analysts have become experts in jihadi matters, and the New York Times reported that al-Maqdisi (a famous jihadi cleric) is “complaining bitterly that secular Western analysts generally understand him better than many in his own community” (Worth 2009).8 The following paragraphs will, in a nutshell, explain one aspect of jihadi ideology: its view on current socio-political affairs. For this purpose, it refers to transcripts from jihadi video broadcasts. After this brief discussion, a tentative answer is given to the questions of whether analysis of ideology and worldview may provide important insights for counter-terrorism and whether it is necessary and possible to counter the jihadi media campaign.

The world according to Al-Qaeda9 One reason why jihadi violence is sometimes considered crazy and psychotic is that most jihadists have a fundamentally different worldview and perception of current affairs. Jihadists are acting on the basis of different premises. However, this biased perception is usually not due to psychological or neuronal deficiencies, but is the result of socialisation, learning, steady influence of different worldviews and sometimes indoctrinations and ad hoc religious education. Apart from this flawed perception, even extremist behaviour (such as terrorism) can be rational and consequent. The maintenance of a worldview that is plausible, credible, and, at the same time, flawed and deceptive is difficult. Accordingly, jihadi intellectuals put considerable efforts into a narrative that shows how

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the application of violence is legitimate, functional and necessary. It is not argued here that jihadi ideologues are political scientists that just come to different conclusions about international affairs. Of course, they manipulate their audience for their cause, but their propaganda skilfully mixes sometimes precise and correct analysis with lopsided information and false conclusions. In social sciences, the communication processes that intend to mobilise people for a political cause are called framing (Snow, Benford 1988). Framing means that a communicator presents a topic or event with the intention that the audience forms a desired impression. Framing techniques simply exploit the fact that people’s interpretations, attitudes and choices can be influenced by the way information is presented and selected. The message can “frame” single situations and events, but it can also frame complex, social-political circumstances, such as conflicts. There is experimental evidence that framing has an impact on the way people choose (Tversky, Kahneman 1981): participants of this study were introduced to a hypothetical dilemma situation (Asian disease problem) in which they were asked to choose one of two alternatives. There were two, different text versions of an otherwise identical scenario. The study shows that the wording of the scenario, rather than the actual results of the decision (that included the death of infected people) determined most participants’ choice. A frame entertains certain interpretations while it discourages others. Problems can be presented in a way that suggests certain means of their solutions. Framing is a common PR strategy of political campaigns and social movements. Beside attitude formation, framing has the potential to mobilise people for action if it contains three elements (Snow, Benford 1988, 200f): 1. diagnostic framing (identification of a problem and attribution of blame); 2. prognostic framing (suggestion of solutions, strategies, and tactics to a problem); 3. motivational framing (providing a rationale for (violent) action). In AQ’s propaganda we find all three elements and that might be one reason why their message is so appealing for so many. The jihadi discourse provides an elaborated diagnosis of the societal status quo; it offers an alternative to the current social-political organisation of Islamic countries that aspires to a purified society liberated from cultural and legal pluralism, solely based on the pristine principles of Sharia law according

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to the interpretation of Salafism. Unlike non-jihadi Salafists, AQ dictates jihad as the means to transform the ummah from their current malaise to the aspired theocracy. The diagnostic frame of jihadism basically identifies three problems: the conflict between Islam and the West (that in fact is a conflict between fundamentalist Islam and Western values), the “problem of apostasy”, and the incompatibility of democracy/secularism and Islam.

The war against Islam In AQ’s propaganda, there are numerous references to military aggression against Muslims. Regardless of context, these events are all framed as the “crusader aggression against Islam”. Military resistance and opposition are thereby rendered legitimate and necessary to defend Islam. If one looks at them as isolated events, atrocities committed against Muslims in Chechnya, Afghanistan (e.g. Qala-i-Jangi situation10) Algeria and elsewhere, can indeed foster the impression that Muslims are deliberately victimised because of their religion. The incidents that are mentioned in the jihadi media are facts, exaggerated facts, or simply not verifiable information, but usually they are not just bold lies. Many war incidences, for instance in Chechnya, are barely covered in Western mainstream media. Consequently, the West appears to be ignorant about the fate of Muslims, or even more detrimental, the audience of the jihadi message starts to believe that the Western media intentionally conceals these facts. This probably has the consequence that the recipient distrusts Western media and instead starts to believe that Ayman alZawahiri is the more reliable anchorman and Abu Yahya al-Libi the better news reporter. Jihadi news about current affairs appears to be insider information, revealed to a small, privileged circle of people who don’t trust Western mainstream media and who feel they understand what really happens in these conflicts. It is part of AQ’s PR strategy that reports about Muslim war victims are de-contextualised and then recompiled into a single and coherent message that subsumes very different conflicts under the “war against Islam” theme. The jihadi movement is well aware of the impact its media has, as can be seen in the following excerpt from Zawahiri’s fourth as-Sahab11 Interview in 200712: “Jihadi information media are today waging an extremely critical battle against the Crusader-Zionist enemy. The media used to be the exclusive domain of two parties: the first comprising the official government media, and the second compromising media, which claim to be free and non-

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governmental, some of which are mere government channels, which stubbornly claim to be free, like the BBC. However, Jihadi information media have demolished this monopoly, and placed the facts in front of the world, and the world has been surprised by critical truths and shocking realities, which it wouldn’t have been able to see or hear about, had Jihadi information media themselves not shown them. The other media only rarely bother in the first place to try to reach the Mujahideen to hear their voice, and if something of their productions reaches them, its fate is usually to be held and prevented from the broadcast. Allah has favored the Mujahideen with victory in this ideological-propagational battle, and it suffices us the huge number of reports about the danger of Jihadi media, among the most recent of which was what Petraeus acknowledged in his report to Congress concerning the danger of the Internet and the facilities it offers to the Mujahideen, and before that, Rumsfeld’s admission that alQaida has won the battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world.”

The movement utilises its media to discuss recent political events and proliferate its worldview. Usually these parts of the message are more sophisticated than the simple enumeration of atrocities. It shows that the author is informed about current affairs. For instance, al-Zawahiri (2006) in one of his messages stated: “And furthermore, the UN is the one who established the Jewish presence in Palestine, the Crusader presence in Afghanistan, and the Crusader occupation of Iraq, and it is the international false witness which runs the rigged elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is the one who today is attempting to enable the Crusaders to invade Darfur under cover of the UN. The United Nations is the one whose international forces are today deployed on the borders of Lebanon, to prevent the meeting up of the Mujahideen from outside Palestine with those within it, in order to complete the blockade against the Mujahideen in Palestine. The United Nations is a tool in the hands of the United States and its Crusader partners for taking over the world through intimidation, enticement and extortion, and it has a leadership comprised of the Big Five and a backyard called the General Assembly in which the weak states shout at one another.”

These words might make quite an impression on those who already have a pessimistic opinion about work of the UN.

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Apostasy Another field within the jihadi ideology concerns the authoritarian governments in the Middle East. Grievances within the apostasy narrative are about issues such as human rights violations (political repression, torture, imprisonment of oppositional leaders),13 corruption, bad governance, the social disparities in the Gulf States, allowing usury and other Shariaprohibited action,14 military cooperation with the US, military weakness, and the incapability or unwillingness to assert Islamic matters in domestic and foreign policy. An illustrative case is given in Zawahiri’s video broadcast, “The advice of one concerned”, 4th July 2007, in which he bemoans the level of corruption in Saudi Arabia together with its military impotence. The as-sahab production uses somewhat sophisticated video technology, such as blue screen, subtitles, flashing of statistical charts etc, and extensively refers to Western media, such as BBC documentaries and interviews with journalists and politicians. Mimicking the format of popular documentaries, Zawahiri explains the case of the al-Yamaha arms contract in order to demonstrate the extent of the corruption in the Saudi royal family The expression of grievances within AQ’s political communication can be considered rather moderate since it picks up public sentiments of many Muslims in various Islamic countries. It can only be speculated whether AQ’s outrage about bad governance and corruption in the Gulf States and elsewhere in the Middle East is sincere or whether the critique is adopted in order to make the jihadi ideology more appealing to the masses. And also, from a human rights perspective, some parts of the jihadi critique are appropriate. The fact that Western governments hold close relations with these regimes, despite knowledge about their repressive conduct, is for the jihadists a clear indicator of the ongoing conspiracy against Islam between Western states and their proxies in the Middle East. More polarising and extreme than the mere expression of popular grievances is another part of the apostasy narrative, namely the claim that the repressive and irresponsible conduct of these regimes is not about mere personal ambitions and power but is a deliberate strategy against Islam and constitutes apostasy that cannot be tolerated by faithful Muslims. According to the “political theory” of jihadi ideologues, the military, cultural, and political influence of the West in Islamic countries is only possible because Middle Eastern governments cooperate with the Western powers and execute their command against the interests of Muslims. Any form of dialogue, concession, or political agreement with the “infidels” is therefore condemned by the jihadists. The allegation of apostasy shall

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show that the legitimate leaders of the ummah are not the same people as the de facto heads of states in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other Islamic countries. Bin Laden (2007) puts this distinction into a simple formula: “There is a great difference between the attitude of a Muslim leader and a hypocritical leader who cooperated with America in the global war against Islam. The former sacrificed his kingdom for his religion, while the latter sacrificed his religion for his kingdom.”15

The jihadi movement repeatedly states that it is loyal to no government or state but to the pristine and literal interpretation of the Quran and Sunna that does not tolerate nationalistic or personal interests, political bargaining and concession-making. AQ tries to demonstrate the religious superiority over the Arab ruling class by establishing a “hierarchy of credibility” (Becker 1967). The authors of the statements are by no means an authority in Islamic jurisprudence but they try hard to gain some reputation at least within the field of Islamic International law, Islamic governmental affairs and concerning the provisions for armed conflict. Because the jihadist’s interpretation of these issues are outnumbered and deviate from other contemporary interpretations of the Quran and Sunna, the authors try to discredit the more canonical scholars that disagree on pivotal doctrinal issues of AQ: jihad and takfir.16 AQ tries to gain dogmatic dominance by transfiguring certain moderate interpretations as (deliberate) misconceptions and thereby demonstrating the own doctrinal, interpretative, and intellectual dominance in regard to the issue of apostasy and jihad. Disagreement with AQ’s fundamentalist interpretation of Islam is considered a “methodological error”. If such error is “deliberate misinterpretation” the one expressing it is half way to becoming an apostate himself.

Denial of secularism/democracy There is ample opportunity to criticise the democratic ideal because, as Winston Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. Jihadists consequently exploit the weak points of democratic systems. Failures in democratic countries that violate its own constitution (torture, extraordinary renditions, or military interventions in breach of international law) are particularly welcomed by the ideologues. They reinforce their message that democracy, together with its sanctum of human rights, is hypocritical and can neither replace nor complement the rule of Islamic

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law. Basically, there are two lines of argumentation against secularism: one reasons in an academic or journalistic manner referring to actual political events, while the other argues theologically. Prominent political issues that can be found in statements concern, for example, the military employment of private contractors (Blackwater/XE), corruption and manipulation in elections, lobbying and regulatory capture of the oil and defence industry (“the government of Halliburton”, alZawahiri audiotape, 11th February 2005). Jihadists pick up on those issues critically discussed in the Western press or among academics. Accordingly, even Western observers can agree to a certain extent with this part of the jihadi message. Although the criticism may be candid, the actual purpose of picking up on these topics may be anything but: reporting and analysing recent political events makes the author appear to be informed, smart, and credible. The recipient of the message might come to the conclusion that if the author is correct in some parts of his analysis, he might be correct in other parts too. Moreover, arguing in the language and mindset of the enemy increases the chance that the Western observer takes the message seriously. It can be suspected that jihadi ideologues mix legitimate and illegitimate claims in their messages in order to camouflage their more unpopular and extreme goals (such as the implementation of strict religious laws). Besides political arguments against democracy, there is also theological reasoning against secular political systems. Jihadists (and also non-jihadi Salafis) prohibit the democratic participation of Islamist groups, even when this group pursues an Islamist agenda. For Bin Laden (2007) participating in democracy means: “Everyone meets in the middle of the road and accepts compromise, which means that the Ba’athists and other parties will abandon some of their principles, and the Muslims also abandon some of their religion.” Zawahiri (2006) explains why some Islamist groups lost their revolutionary momentum: “Entering the elections under the umbrella of secular constitutions to bring the Islamic movement to power, in addition to its violating the Sharia, is also a futile method of achieving Islamic change and mobilizing the Ummah for Jihad against it enemy. It failed in Algeria, failed in Yemen, failed in Jordan, failed in Egypt, and it is today failing in Palestine. […] The lamentable, distressing thing is that the movements which recoil from confrontation have bestowed legitimacy upon traitors like Mubarak, Al Saud, Ibn Hussein, and Ali Abdullah Salih, and abandoned the fundamentals of the religion and became part of the system’s tricks to absorb the resentment of the Muslim Ummah and drain it in the labyrinth without enacting any real change; on the contrary, the American Zionist plan continues while the leaderships of these movements wear out their

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support bases on the merry-go-round of rigged elections. With shouting and hoarse throats, they combat the ruling wolves who rig the elections every time, renew the emergency laws every year, and bequeath power from every predecessor to his successor.”

Another type of critical writing on democracy and secularism show on a religious-legal basis - how principles and paradigms in democracy clash with Islamic law. A famous treatise on this topic is Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi’s “Democracy… A Religion”.17 These fatwa-like writings often go to considerable length and argumentation, but basically they reason that democracy and political participation are heretic innovations [bid’ah] that allow human reasoning to be the source of new laws.

Conclusions Jihadi messages distributed through the internet have become an alternative source of journalism and information for an audience that more and more distrusts the news coverage by the Western mainstream media. Studying the jihadi ideology is more than an intellectual adventure. Mark Sedgwick (2004, 799) accurately concluded: “That their analysis would not get much of a grade in a political science class does not mean that it does not have to be taken very seriously.” Ideology studies don’t have any value for the prevention of imminent threats but the life cycle of the whole jihadi movement depends on the success of its ideology. Radicalisation takes place in training camps, refugee camps, certain madrasas, internet forums or prisons. It is an open question to what degree the ideology causes radicalisation, but it surely is a conditio sine qua non. It constantly assures hesitant or would be activists that they are doing a just and noble thing. Countering the jihadi ideology may consequently be seen as a prospective counterterrorism strategy. Such a program might be of limited effect for two reasons. First: the West is not qualified to educate Muslims about religious issues, for example, under what conditions is jihad permissible and when is it not. “Building moderate Muslim networks” (Rabasa 2007) is a strategy to facilitate reformative Islamic positions. However, this discourse takes place in the Islamic world anyway, since Muslims are eager to repair the damage that a small sect of megalomaniacs has done to the reputation of Islam. Moreover, such support could raise the suspicion that the West is interested in Islamic matters only insofar as it concerns their own security while many people in the Islamic world would like to see the West engaging in a less interest-driven dialogue with Islam.

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Abu Yahya al-Libi comments on such moderation programs with the remark: “Then we are told that this is a moderate Islam, a balanced Islam, the Islam of the twentieth-first century […] while it is none but the Islam of the RAND Corporation and its like. It is the Islam that the imams of infidelity and their modern Crusader seek to reach.”

There might even be the deleterious effect of implementing counterideology, as the following excerpt from Zawahiri’s third as-Sahab interview from May 2007 shows, in which he cites a passage from the study “Stealing al-Qa’ida’s playbook” (Brachman, McCants 2006). “Some Islamic movements had imagined that they could enter into a deal with America: they would condemn terrorism and violence, and describe the raids on New York and Washington as “crimes,” and present a new Islam daubed with secularism, and oppose America with words alone, and forbid the youth from participating in the Jihad against America because Hosni Mubarak didn’t give them his permission! And in return, America would permit them to engage in the Egyptian elections whose details America controls. And here I’d like to read two paragraphs of a study prepared last year by two researchers from the Combating Terrorism Center at the American army’s United States Military Academy: “The U.S. could discretely fund mainstream Salafi figures like Madkhali who are effective in siphoning off support from jihadis and who do not advocate violence (e.g. by paying for publications, lectures, new schools).” They go on, “The U.S. could also fund non-Salafis, but it currently lacks the expertise necessary to determine who is truly influential. Perhaps a better strategy in the near term would be to pressure Middle Eastern governments to allow greater political participation and visibility for groups that jihadis are threatened by. This approach should vary from country to country. For example, in Egypt, it would be the Muslim Brotherhood; in Saudi Arabia, the Shi’a. Again, it is essential that the U.S. hand not be seen.” These are not my words, but are the words of two anti-terrorism researchers with the American army.”

Second: there is no need to counter the political accusations and arguments of jihadi ideologues simply because these allegations are either legitimate (torture, extraordinary renditions, etc) or they are so abstruse that most people and even jihadists themselves do not believe them (e.g. many conspiracy theories discussed in forums). It may be valuable though to distinguish jihadi propaganda into legitimate and illegitimate criticism

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and claims, because the first camouflages the latter. Admitting that some of the grievances of the jihadi movement are legitimate does not mean being apologetic for jihadi fundamentalists. It may in fact persuade potential recruits that it does not take a terrorist attack for the West to become aware of its failures, and that a terrorist attack does not make the West disavow its core values and well approved practices of governance.

Sources and Bibliography Armborst, Andreas. “A profile of religious fundamentalism and terrorist activism”. Defence Against Terrorism Review 2, no. 1 (2009): 51-71. Bassiouni, Cherif, M. “Evolving Approaches to Jihad: From Self-Defense to Revolutionary and Regime-Change Political Violence”. Journal of Islamic Law and Culture 10, no. 1 (2008): 61-83. Becker, Howard S. “Whose Side Are We On?” Social Problems 14, no. 3 (1967): 239-47. Berner, Brad K. The World According to Al Qaeda. New Delhi: Peacock Books, 2007. Bin Laden, Osama. “The way to foil conspiracies on Iraq and the Islamic State”. Audio statement on video from 29th December 2007. Translation and transcript by SITE Intelligence Group. —. “Message to the Muslims in the land of the two sanctities especially and to Muslims elsewhere more generally”. Audiotape, translation and transcript by Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). Brachman, Jarret M. Global Jihadism. Edited by P.; Rapoport D.C. Wilkinson. Vol. 22, Political Violence. London: Routledge, 2009. Brachman, Jarret M., and William F. McCants. “Stealing Al-Qa’ida’s Playbook”. In CTC Report, 25. West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, 2006. Fromkin, David. “The Strategy of Terrorism”. Foreign Affairs 53, no. 4 (1975): 683-98. Harding, Luke “Afghan Massacre Haunts Pentagon”. guardian.co.uk, 14th September 2002. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/14/afghanistan.lukeharding (accessed 14.Dec. 2009) Huggler, Justin “How Our Afghan Allies Applied the Geneva Convention”. The Independent, 29th November 2001. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/how-our-afghan-alliesapplied-the-geneva-convention-618496.html (accessed 14.Dec. 2009). Jackson, Abdul H. S. “Jihad in the Modern World”. The journal of Islamic Law and Culture 7, no. 1 (2002): 1-27.

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Libi, abu Yahya al-. “Moderation of Islam… Moderation of Defeat”. Video statement from 22nd May 2008. Translation and transcript by SITE Intelligence Group. —. “Algeria Between the Sacrifice of Fathers and Faithfulness of Sons”. Video statement from 23rd June 2009. Translation and transcript by SITE Intelligence Group. Neumann, Peter R., and M.L.R. Smith. The Strategy of Terrorism. How It Works, and Why It Fails, Contemporary Terrorism Studies. London: Routledge, 2008. Lohlker, Rüdiger. Dschihadismus. Facultas, 2009. Rabasa, Angel, et al. Building Moderate Muslims Networks. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2007. Sedgwick, Mark. “Al-Qaeda and the Nature of Religious Terrorism”. Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 4 (2004): 795–814. Sloane, Robert D. “The Expressive Capacity of International Punishment: The Limits of the National Law Analogy and the Potential of International Criminal Law”. Stanford Journal of International Law 43, no. 1 (2007): 39-94. Snow, David A., and Robert D. Benford. “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization”. International Social Movement Research 1 (1988): 197-217. Tibi, Bassam. Kreuzzug Und Djihad. Der Islam Und Die Christliche Welt.[Crusade and jihad. Islam and the Christian world]. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1999. Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice”. Science 211, no. 4481 (1981): 453-8. Wiktorowicz, Quintan. “Framing Jihad: Intramovement Framing Contests and Al-Qaeda’s Struggle for Sacred Authority”. International Journal of Social History 49, no. Supplement 12 (2004): 159-77. Worth, Robert F. “Credentials Challenged, Radical Quotes West Point”. The New York Times, 29th April 2009. Zawahiri, Ayman al-. “Realities of the conflict between Islam and unbelief”. Video statement from 20th December 2006, Translation and transcript SITE Intelligence Group. —. “Bush, the Pope of the Vatican, Darfur, and the Crusader Wars”. Video statement from 29th September 2006, Translation and transcript SITE Intelligence Group. —. “Third as-Sahab interview”. Video statement from 4th May 2007. Translation and transcript SITE Intelligence Group. —. “A review of events – The fourth as-Sahab interview with Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri”. Video statement from 17th December 2007. Translation

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and transcript SITE Intelligence Group.

Notes 1. Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg Germany 2. This paper assumes an instrumental value of violence as a means to realise political intentions. If the end justifies the means, then a promoter of violence has to prove that violence actually is an opportune means for the intended goals. However, violence itself can have an “expressive capacity” (Sloane 2007): it can be an indicator of legitimacy for the one who exercises it; if others assume that violence usually is utilised by agents only reluctantly, then the one who uses violence is perceived to have a strong and legitimate motive for doing so. 3. Salafism is a very austere and strict Islamic denomination. Its role model of society is the early Islamic period: the rule of Mohammad and the two following generations of caliphs also called the Rashidun Caliphs or rightly guided caliphs. This kind of Islamic activism can be considered fundamentalist. Like all kinds of religious fundamentalism, it is characterised by three features: It strictly opposes the concessions to modernism and secularism made by their moderate brothers-infaith, it perceives societal pluralism as an existential threat to their religion, and it follows a scriptural interpretation of the holy texts to counterweight profane influences. 4. See recently Neumann (2008) and previously Fromkin (1975). 5. For a thorough description of jihadism see, for instance, Armborst (2009), Lohlker (2009), Brachman (2009). 6. For instance, Bassiouni (2008, 80): “Jihad, like many other aspects of Islam, has its theoretical and practical aspects – both being frequently quite distinct from each other”. Likewise, Tibi (1999, 57) and Jackson (2003, 41). 7. The Hudson Institute, for instance, publishes the dedicated journal Current Trends in Islamist Ideology. 8. Jihadi authors refer to writings from the terrorism study community quite often as Thomas Hegghammer describes in one of his articles posted at the Blog jihadica. http://www.jihadica.com/jihadists-study-jihadi-studies/ 9. The book by Bred K. Berner (2005) with the same title is not considered in this article. 10. See, for instance, newspaper articles by Huggler 2001 and Hardin 2002. 11. The as-sahab Foundation for Islamic Media Publication is the producer of AlQaeda’s media. 12. The transcripts cited in this article are English translation from the archive of the SITE Intelligence Group. 13. “And your agents in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, have captured thousands of the youth and soldiers of Islam whom you made to taste at your hands and the hands of your agents various types of punishment and torture.” (AAZ 2006). 14. “However, the regime issued decrees and legislations, which make it [i.e.

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usury] lawful, and support it, and set penalties for whoever wants to oppose it or avoids paying what they deceitfully call ‘profit.’ It is well known, however, that to take usury is a grave sin and it is one of the acts that removes one from Islam.” (UBL 2004). Also, “Is any Muslim ignorant of the fact that assisting infidels against Muslims is prohibited, or that legalizing the taking of interest is prohibited? This is obviously well known in religion, just as one knows that drinking wine and promiscuity are prohibited […] You permit that which God prohibits and you prohibit that which God allows, and you issue certificates of absolution to whomever you want.” (UBL 2004_12_16, 41). 15. With the latter, Bin Laden refers, for instance, to the Taliban who “sacrificed” their political power for religious (and tribal) loyalty when they refused to extradite members of AQ to the US after 9/11. 16. Takfir is the practice of excommunicating Muslims. This doctrine has been employed by Islamist movements to denounce too profane Islamic rulers as infidels (apostates) and to legitimate violent activism against them. 17. An English translation of the essay is available at Maqdisi’s online archive: http://www.tawhed.net/c.php?i=3

CHAPTER NINE POLITICAL SUBVERSION OR RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE: THE THREAT OF AL-QAEDA IDEOLOGY IN EUROPE FELIPE PATHÉ DUARTE1

Initial Considerations Nous t’affirmons, méthode! Nous n’oublions pas que tu as glorifié hier chacun de nos âges. Nous avons foi au poison. Nous savons donner notre vie tout entière tous les jours. Voici le temps des ASSASSINS. Matinée D’Ivresse —Arthur Rimbaud, 1874

This paper examines Al-Qaeda’s doctrinal motivations and, as expected, the threat these are assuming in Europe. The combat against this growing phenomenon is achieved, primarily, by understanding its matrix. Hence, we assume that the religious irrationalism lies upstream, and that downstream lies a pretentiously political narrative that looks for some streaks of religiousness to justify its profoundly revolutionary and modern way of action. In the riverbed, that is, the action, we have terror and violence as a way to undermine confidence. Consequently, the approach ground has been set: violence and terror which serve as a means of gaining power for a movement whose inconsistent narrative merges modern revolutionary doctrines and religious faith (which, in part, helps to justify the initial violence). In other words, one either performs a rational analysis around the goals or goes forward into the deeply emotional motivations. And so we have a maxim – subversion and religious violence.

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In the first case, notwithstanding the numerous concepts we may find, we will start with Raymon Aron who states that subversion consists of: “Planting the spark or fanning the flame of discontent in people, in inciting the masses against their governments, in provoking or exploiting riots, rebellions or revolts, in order to weaken rival States and to facilitate the spread of certain institutions even more than certain ideas.” (2003: 525)

It is worthy of notice that there is a difference between subversion and subversive war. Subversion does not always lead to subversive war; it precedes or accompanies it. In the second case, we understand religious violence as all violent manifestation, be it individual or collective, whose motive is any kind of religious form. According to Mark Juergensmeyer, we consider religious violence, the symbolic at least, as being at the root of religious imaginary, whether through religious texts, or even the history of some religions (2001: 7). For this reason, we recognise the recrudescence of religious fundamentalism, and consequently of religious violence at a geopolitical level. However, we intend to demonstrate that the doctrines that impel and justify Al-Qaeda’s actions go way beyond religious irrationalism, articulating it with revolutionary ways of subversion, not only in its doctrine but also in its operation. Finally, as a result of this situation, this paper will point out the risk represented by Al-Qaeda’s narrative in Europe. In this sense, we chose to divide this paper into three parts: 1) the gathering of analyses completed by specialists on the motivations of the so-called religious matrix terrorism, and of the conditions for its development – the thesis; 2) the gathering of analyses by specialists on AlQaeda’s “revolutionary” doctrine and its subsistence based on a strategy of political subversion – the antithesis; and 3) as a conclusion, an analysis of the influence of this doctrine in European societies will be performed, considered as more revolutionary than a religious narrative – the synthesis.

I. The legacy of the Cold War is an ideological and geostrategic vacuum, favourable for a recrudescence of ideologies based on religion that use violence in the pursuit of their political aims. In other words, if we now perform a brief retrospective, we confirm that the motivation underlying the most violent terrorist attacks perpetrated since the end of the Cold War

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had, as an ideological matrix, a theoretical construction originating in radical religious interpretations (Duarte, 2007: 129). The recrudescence of religious fundamentalism in the post Cold War period was based on an infinity of aspects. One of the most important aspects was, using philosopher’s Jean François Lyotard concepts, the fall of the great ideological narratives (Lyotard, 1979). However, I could also mention a serious shake on Raymon Aron’s secular religions (Aron, 1955), or Eric Voegelin’s political religions (Voegelin, 1986). Religious fundamentalism appears almost as an identity reaction to a kind of apathy, caused by the apparent absence of certainty and fundamental truths in both the political and religious planes. According to Ernst Gellner in Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, it is likely that a certain feeling of loss of an “origin foundation”, a founder of a certain notion of existence, generates an experience of decadence and impotence, which fosters these religious fundamentalisms (1992). And it’s in this “post-modern” riverbed that contemporary religious violence thrives. Being a radical position, religious fundamentalism easily unites with violence. According to some authors (Juergensmeyer, 2001; Appleby, 1999), this tendency is mainly fostered by dualistic world-views, bearing gaping perceptions of reality. Because these maintain, with relative ease, a model of bipolar tension (friend-foe) by opposing two principles and hierarchically polarising reality at all levels. Thus, in this sense, the fundamentalist tends to declare as an enemy anyone who doesn’t profess his own presuppositions2. The violence used by the fundamentalist is, as a rule, sacralised, and as such, is the driving force behind his claims. For the perpetrator of violence there are divine intentions that place him right in the middle of a holy war, a kind of fight between good and evil. This transcendental dimension of war uses the fundamentalist fighter, who sees himself as an invincible sacred warrior, a mujahedin, a fedayin, a martyr, willing to sacrifice himself, to fight for a God that must inevitably win, even if it means hundreds of deaths. And here we are now, walking towards the “martyrdom of the innocents”, perhaps ruled by the deafening silence of a greater god. Indeed, violence in the name of God, whatever it may be, sounds contradictory, even ridiculous, for every violent action is instilled with a symbolic and contagious benignity. The motivation for the perpetrator of violence is always characterised by an inviolable sacredness, be it secular or “religious”. This motivation always ends up being absolute and superior to the very condition of man. There’s no margin for doubt. The certainty of its ends is unshakeable. Violently, man will set himself free from his executioners and salvation

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will be achieved. There is a strong emotional charge in this concept that, according to philosopher and sociologist Jean Braudillard, easily adopts a character of political and social meta-language, whose “saving” mission renders irrelevant all valid institutions, official discourse, or even references of moral and social nature (2002: 36). This author continues, and I quote, “the radical difference is that terrorists, aside from using the weapons that belong to the system, also have a fatal weapon at their disposal: their own death” (2002: 26). For the warrior who considers himself sacred, sacrificing his own life is a positive act, seeing that he becomes nearer to the deity. In René Girard’s estimation, violence and death are concealed in the roots, and thus in the imaginary of several religions, even if only symbolically (Girard, 1972).3 Death, for the perpetrator of religious violence, is the absolute weapon, and it is triggered in the certainty and consciousness of the resonant superiority of the ideological purpose. It may seem ironic, but there is almost a tragic optimism in religious violence. We are continuously updating tragedy: Orestes, Antigone, Criseis, Hamlet and Iphigenia are our contemporaries. Religion has always provided a partially acceptable justification for violence and terror. Long before the period we are considering, terrorist acts had been perpetrated in the name of Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Hinduism. We just have to remember the Irish Republican Army (majorly Catholic), the Front de Libération Nationale in Algeria (majorly Islamic), any Jewish anti-colonialist terrorist movement, or the Palestine Liberation Organization (majorly Islamic, also). However, notwithstanding the religious base, the rhetoric of these groups was/is eminently secular and political. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we can point to the fight of the Sikh people, who, motivated by the creation of a religious state in the valleys of Punjab, organised in groups such as the Dal Khalsa, the Babbar Khalsa or the Khalistan Liberation Tiger Force which carried out some attacks during the ‘90s. In 1995, an apocalyptic sect, the Aum Shinkirikyo, carried out an attack that could have had devastating consequences. In the same year, Timothy McVeigh, attacked a federal building in Oklahoma City, victimising around seventy people. It is said he intended to avenge the dismantlement of the fundamentalist protestant commune, The Covenant, The Sword and The Arm of the Lord. Also in 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Prime-Minister, was shot and killed by an extremist Jew who strongly disagreed with the peace process in progress at that time. One year earlier, another extremist Jew killed twenty nine devotees, and

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injured more than one hundred and fifty at the Patriarch’s Tomb in Hebron. Nowadays, Hebrew terrorism is characterised by group activities, such as the Gush Emunim (“Block of the Faithful”); o Kach (“Thus”), a radical Israeli party which carried out the 1994 attacks in Hebron; or the Kahane Chai, a faction of the latter group, created in 1991 and forbidden in 1994, included in the international list of terrorist organisations (Duarte, 2007: 121). Hence, at first sight, based on statistical data, and considering the mediatisation of the facts as well as the geopolitical limbo of the ‘90s, we can state there is a strong religious component in post Cold War terrorism. However, through the looking glass, reality is a bit different. And if guided by Alice we enter in Al-Qaeda’s doctrine, we come across a real Jabberwocky. Filtering the apparent nonsense, we can question the complete justification of violence by that religious component. There is a great deal of political subversion in the a priori and a posteriori of qaedist actions. However, contrary to the suggestion implied by the title of this paper, we don’t believe that both the subversive strategy and religious violence should be seen in contrast. Though opposing, they complete each other and they are an indissociable characteristic of Al-Qaeda’s doctrine, especially if we pay more attention to their influence in Europe. But how?

II. After mentioning post Cold War terrorism and the favourable conditions for the development of religious violence, I must now answer this last question, and determine whether Al-Qaeda’s strategic and ideological doctrine is solely based on religious irrationalism, or if it also has a component of political subversion. I now take on the role of Humpty Dumpty. And I hope I don’t fall off the wall. Al-Qaeda is frequently associated with the Islamist movement. Such association is far from being precise. There are many nuances in the Islamist universe, and only a small number follow the violent doctrines praised by Al-Qaeda. The branch we should now concentrate on is Sunni Islam, which, in itself, is also far from being monolithical. Thus, in this branch, and according to a report by the International Crisis Group, (Middle East/North Africa Report N°37 – 2nd March 2005) we can find three kinds of activism. The first, of a more political character, includes movements more or less inserted into the democratic game, and seeks to reform and change through political action. Some examples of this activism are the politicised

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Islamic movements, such as the “Muslim Brotherhood” in Egypt, the Justice and Development Party in Turkey or the Moroccan Parti pour la Justice et le Développement. The second form of Islamist activism may be characterised as having a missionary attitude, because it comprises Islamic conversion missions that intend to assume the role of a guiding light of values, which promotes the Islamic virtue of fighting against the corruption of morals, a result of a weakness of faith. They aren’t searching for political power, but instead, pursue the constancy of the Islamic identity. Examples of these groups are the Tablighi Jamaat and the Salafiyya Movement, both fundamentalist and traditionalist. The third way forms part of the argument of this paper and, according to the report mentioned above, is when the armed struggle appears as a form of Islamic activism, in other words, jihadism. We can distinguish three strategic visions in this line: one, aiming at an internal jihad, another, aiming at an insurrectional jihad and yet another, aiming at a global jihad. In the first case, we have the struggle against governments in countries with a Muslim majority, which, being secular, don’t act according to the sharia, as in the case of Algeria and Egypt. In the second case, the struggle is justified by the illegitimate occupation of the Dar al-Islam territories by non-Muslims, as in the case of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq and mainly Palestine. Sometimes, a nationalist impulse prevails over this religious feeling. Last, we have the appeal to a global Islamic armed struggle, generally aiming at the West, particularly the United States of America and its allies, holding them responsible, directly or indirectly, for the situations that led to the first and second case of armed struggle. Here, the plot comes from Al-Qaeda and the leading actor is the mujahedeen. Without delving too far back into history, we can say that this third kind of Islamic activism consolidated due to four major episodes. The first is strongly marked by the ascent of the jihadist doctrine, mainly in Egypt during the ‘70s. The background for this was an increasing anti-panArabism, the doctrines of Mawdudi and Sayyd Qutb, and the Israeli victory in the “Six Day War”. During this phase, a new “jihadist” culture was assumed, which tended to organise itself and become globally active using Kalashnikovs, bombs, and Koranic verses. The second episode began following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; an international appeal was made against the occupying power. The third phase of consolidation came in the aftermath of this war when, during the ‘90s, an armed insurrection was called for against the

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non-Islamic regimes in countries with a Muslim majority (Algeria, Egypt, Chechnya), and at the outbreak of the first Gulf war and the Balkan war. The last moment of consolidation of jihadism starts with Al-Qaeda’s global appeals and peaks, until now, with the 9/11 attacks. Basically, we can surmise that the emergence of jihadism depended on three major socio-political factors that marked the Muslim world, mainly the Middle-East, at the end of the twentieth Century: 1) the failure of the Western political models and their degeneration into a repressive authoritarianism; 2) the occupation of Muslim land by non-believers (the USSR in Afghanistan, the massacres in Bosnia and Chechnya, Palestine, the American presence post Desert Storm operation.); 3) and based on some authors, the tendency for this factor is due to the clash between modernity and some versions of Islam (Lewis, 2002). Abandoning historic and deductive reasoning, let us now make an inductive effort to try reading jihadism, not by its religious millenarian and irrational character, but rather by its other side: practical, political and close to revolutionary movements. Summing up, and returning to the initial question of this part, in the case of jihadism, it seems simple to associate a strategy of political subversion to an irrational religious violence. And why? Because in its narrative, notwithstanding the religious matter, lies a series of characteristics which are very similar to modern Western revolutionary movements. More precisely: 1) in the qaedist jihadism, a spirit of revolution and change lies hidden; 2) the kind of revolution Qutb assumed as total and permanent; 3) a clear victimisation of the community one is fighting for; 4) an appeal to an ideal past; 5) an ideological structure depending on an “enlightened vanguard”; 6) a hostility regarding liberal democracy; 7) a glorification of purifying violence and a certain amount of nihilism; and, last but not least, 8) a nullification of the individual in favour of the whole. Therefore, we can understand jihadism as being a new political religion that merges revolutionary political concepts and fundamentalist creeds – in this perspective it is not at all senseless to talk about “Islamic-fascism”, “Islamic-bolshevism” or “Islamic-Jacobinism”. During the ‘90s, and up to 2001, one could already perceive a thin ideological line in Al-Qaeda, based on the targets of consecutive attacks and the subsequent declarations by the leader. It stood on the appeal to a defensive jihad against the USA and their allies, due to the occupation of holy places, the sanctions against Iraq and the political and economical interference in the Arab world.4 To these points, we can add he condemnation of the Saudi government for their collaboration with the

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USA and the introduction of civil law, the condemnation of Israel for the occupation of Palestinian territory and the call for revolution against the secular governments of the Muslim world. In 2001, this doctrinal line gains consistency – Al Zawahiri writes the Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, in which Al-Qaeda’s courses and direction are better defined, and the need for an Islamic territorial base in the heart of the Arab world is emphasised. At this point, we can already see an articulation between Al-Qaeda’s political-military strategy and their operative priorities. Thus, according to this book, the above-mentioned territorial control appears as a launch pad for the liberation of other Islamic territories and leads the reconstitution of the Caliphate. Al Zawahiri further mentions the need for the union of all jihadist movements and the long and painful period the fight should assume, taking as an example the almost two centuries of the crusades. He also points out the need for new forms of attack Al-Qaeda should assume to inflict grater loss on their enemy, always praising the principle of martyrdom. The small attack of restricted groups also begins to be stimulated as well as, so-called, individual terrorism. The message of the movement would be passed on to the masses through the declarations of its leaders via the media, propagating the model of a martyr hero and humiliating the enemy with violent and successful attacks. (Keppel and Millelli, 2008: 3) From now on, we can easily perceive that Al-Qaeda is based on the premise of a purely subversive action. Its motive force is a certain form of Islamism, the modification of the current international order (the establishment of the Caliphate in the Muslim world), governing through the sharia and the transformation of Muslim society. As intermediate goals: the withdrawal of Western forces from Muslim places, extending the fight to secular countries in the region and the resulting substitution of their leaderships; basically, to dominate states. Let us wander through the subversion in order to understand Al-Qaeda’s strategy. According to the canons, the subversive phenomenon is developed in two periods and five phases; with poorly defined boundaries, it is hard to characterise. So, we have: 1) the pre-insurrectional period, with the preparatory and the agitation phase – when the structure, clandestinely, becomes organised and launches agitation propaganda, looking for a popular uprising and the challenging of authority; 2) the insurrectional period, which comprises the armed phase, the Revolutionary State phase, and the final phase – in this period, after violence – which led to a general agitation and mistrust; the movements compete, defeating the establishment and, becoming legitimate, set forces in motion that, from the

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bases, controlled the territory (Garcia, 2007: 124). Though timeless, today the subversive phenomenon doesn’t entirely correspond to what has been presented, as a result of globalisation and the mutations of the international political system.5 Nowadays, the five canonical phases may not be followed, and stages may be left out. If we were in the field of Polemology, we could say we were referring to the fourth-generation wars or the post-modern wars (Cooper, 2004; Hammes, 2004). At this point, we can state that Al-Qaeda preconises a doctrine which, in itself, cannot be considered as non-revolutionary, non-secular, nonmodern and non-Western, merging it with fundamentalist precepts of Islam. As a final product, we have a practical line of action that uses terrorism (a subversive manoeuvre of corrosion of formal powers), and justifies violent action in its political-religious syncretism, offering the occasion for instrumental suicide (martyrdom) and nihilist destruction, thus strengthening the effects of the line of action. However, if we try to fit Al-Qaeda’s action in the canonical model of the subversive phenomenon I mentioned earlier, we see that only phases 1, 2 and 3 have been accomplished. Phase 3 is arguable, because, apart from the war in Iraq, the Muslim world has not yet gathered en masse to AlQaeda’s banner. Phase 4, incipiently, may have been achieved in Waziristan. Still, in a global perspective, phases 4 and 5 weren’t reached, partly due to the inexistence of a congruous political programme that supports them. There isn’t a day after in Al-Qaeda’s doctrine. It bases itself in that inexistence, developing the nihilist idea of a permanent state of war and destruction on a large scale, because from the beginning, the Universal Caliphate will never be reached and the leaders are aware of that fact.6 According to Sheik Azzam, founder of the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), which was later to develop into Al-Qaeda: “Jihad must not be abandoned until Allah alone is worshipped. Jihad continues until Allah’s Word is raised high. Jihad until all the oppressed peoples are freed. Jihad to protect our dignity and restore our occupied land. Jihad is the way of everlasting glory (2001).”

It is somewhat ironic to verify that the religious dimension that helps foster the practical action (offering a moral body, justifying destruction, facilitating recruitment, appealing to the concept of martyrdom) is obstructive to the very practical conquest of power. I dare say, that within Al-Qaeda’s doctrine, there is a dangerous game of balance between a “revolutionary utopia” and a “religious nihilism”.

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Final considerations Nowadays, we can identify four kinds of subversion: 1) the lumpen movements of an informal structure, organising itself on the street, not in favour of an ideology, and where recruitment is forced; 2) the clan-based movements, whose structure is defined in accordance with family ties and lines of action similar to the lumpen movements; 3) the popular force movements which have a more elaborate ideology, and base themselves on a cellular structure, perfectly fitting the five phases of subversion; and lastly, we have the global subversion movements – which include AlQaeda (Mackinlay, 2006: 43). In this kind of subversion, the movements are characterised by the transnational stamp of the organisational and recruitment structure, by the fostering of action through the media or through the symbolic dimension of attacks, and by the global reach of the doctrine it preconises. In the case of Europe, the threat of Al-Qaeda’s doctrine includes allowing a strategy of global subversion, mainly based on armed action (terrorism) and new ways of mass mobilisation. Both tactics complement each other. It makes sense, here, to look at Al-Suri, one of Al-Qaeda’s ideologists, who published a long treatise in 2004 (“The Call to a Global Islamic Resistance”) in which, in a very secular manner, a new strategy for jihadism is conceptualised. Based on the precept Nizam, la Tanzim (system, not organisation), this pen-jihadist suggested that Al-Qaeda should be settled upon a reduced central base, “only” providing generic orientations to autonomous cells scattered all around the globe. In this New Al-Qaeda, the central base would only serve as a doctrinal umbrella (Lia, 2007). It seems that Al-Suri carried out his idea, the qaedist global subversion is more and more fluid and dilutes itself in the decentralised jihadist cells, in a home-grown terrorism style; and a group that, surpassed by its own doctrine, almost became a leaderless revolutionary social movement – AlQaeda. It is well known that Europe became a global stage for jihadism as global subversion, be it at the level of action or at the level of doctrine. Thus, fostered by a growing process of violent radicalisation, which, according to Olivier Roy, has nothing to do with religion, we are constantly on the verge of suffering a terrorist attack. Susceptible to jihadism are radical exiles and young second and third generation Muslim migrants (2008: 7). In the first case, we have the example of many radical preachers who

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entered the UK and who, in their mosques, preached violence against Western values, raised money and recruited youngsters for the jihadist line of action. For Reuven Paz, within Muslim communities in Europe, on the outskirts of major cities, there is a tendency to develop a kind of Islamic state within the host state (2005: 3). In these cases, we can see a sheer refusal of integration through the denial of sovereignty and socio-political principles that rule the host state. So, we already have a point of departure for subversion, but in a non-territorial manner; the aim is to operationalise control of human terrain. These voluntarily non-integrated communities, acting as a network, seek to create and spread into other communities; an Islamist and anti-Western environment with their own schools and mosques. Based on da’wa (appeal to Islam), they try a “re-Islamization from below, the long-term infiltration into society” (Sivan, 2003: 4) – the challenge for Islamic insurgents is to transform the da’wa’s capacity for social influence into one of alternate political control (Morris, 2005: 9). Islamism and its most radical form of action, jihadism, is then an antialienating pill for those second and third generation young Muslims. These youngsters, out of place because they lack a feeling of belonging to the countries of origin of their families as well as recognition regarding host countries, become receptive to a doctrine that provides them a compacted reality. They are offered an identity and a notion of belonging. And here, “religious inducement is more compelling to potential insurgent recruits than secular ideology” (Morris, 2005: 8). But, coming back to Olivier Roy, radicalisation doesn’t appear through politics or doctrines imported from the Middle East, but only due to the alienating clash with the liberal society these youngsters live in (2008: 6). And if we add to this a reality which is compacted and offered to them, whose evils come from a global enemy, the door is open for a violent radicalism. But this process of radicalisation isn’t directly connected to religion, because the doctrine put forth is scarcely ideological and largely narrative. We have tended to overestimate Al-Qaeda’s ideology. I remind you that there isn’t a political blueprint in Al-Qaeda, there isn’t a political day after. Therefore, and coming back to Al-Suri and subversion, all we have here are new ways of “enchantment” and mass mobilisation. We have a malleable narrative that, offering an image of a suffering virtual Islamic community, presents Al-Qaeda as the sole force combating the evil that afflicts it, represented by the West. Adding to this, we should mention a centralisation of the narrative on the individual, who feels himself at the vanguard, just like Saladin or Ibn Taymyya, becoming a hero because he fights for the community. In an act of terrorism, everything is redeemed,

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and the path to salvation passes through martyrdom. In this message of radicalisation, we have a conjugation of identity, social dynamics, politics and religion, with a background of discrimination and alienation. It starts by exploring the crisis situation, to which a doctrinal solution is given, followed by a socialisation process, when closed and integrated groups form themselves. Thus, the way is paved for mobilisation and violent radicalisation, which can be achieved in places of Islamic congregation (mosques, charity centres...), or in places where there is a great vulnerability to the reception of these ideas (prisons). The role played by the internet is also extremely important; it illustrates and reinforces the message, serves as a possibility of networking and as a generator of a feeling of commitment. The process of violent radicalisation, after a period of learning and intellectual alignment, will culminate in the subversion tactic, whose armed action might be terrorism or the new concept of asymmetric war, the Swarming, which merges fluidity, mass and surprise7 (Robb 2007: 122). Finally, in the European case, Al-Qaeda’s doctrine reveals itself as a long-term threat. Because if we add the global subversion forms preconised by Al-Suri to it, we will have: 1) a democratisation of jihadist terrorism, which will turn into 2) a do-it-yourself radicalisation, and 3) an uncontrollable rise in the so-called self-starters cells, or 4) the formation of uncontrollable agitations. But this threat reveals itself as growing, precisely by being an avatar of revolutionary movements with profoundly religious characteristics.

Bibliography Appleby, Scott. 1999. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Aron, Raymond. 2003. Peace and War: a Theory of International Relations. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. —. 1955. L’Opium des Intellectuels. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Azzam, Abdullah. 2001. Join the Caravan. London: Azzam Publications. Braudillard, Jean. 2002. L’Esprit du Terrorisme. Paris: Editions Galilée. Cooper, Robert. 2003. The Breaking of Nations – Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century. London: Atlantic Books. Duarte, Felipe Pathé. 2007. No Crepúsculo da Razão – Considerações sobre o Terrorismo pós-Guerra Fria. Lisboa: Prefácio Editora. Garcia, Francisco Proença. 2007. “Descrição do Fenómeno Subversivo na Actualidade. A Estratégia da Contra-Subversão – Contributos

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Nacionais”. In Estatégia. Moreira, Adriano and Ramalho, Pinto (eds). Lisboa: Instituto Português da Conjuntura Estratégica. (pp. 111-182). Gellner, Ernst. 1992. Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London and New York: Routledge. Girard, René. 1972. La Violence et le Sacré. Paris:Editions Bernard Grasset. Guedes, Armando Marques. 2007. Ligações Perigosas – Conectividade, Coordenação e Aprendizagem em Redes Terroristas. Coimbra: Edições Almedina. International Crisis Group, (Middle East/North Africa Report N°37 – 2nd March 2005). “Understanding Islamism”. Hammes, Thomas. 2004. The Sling and the Stone – On War in the 21st Century. MBI Publishing Company Books. Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2003. Terror in the Mind of God – The Global Rise of Religious Violence. University of California Press. Keppel, Gilles and Jean-Pierre Millelli (eds.). 2008. Al-Qaeda in its Own Words. Harvard University Press. Lewis, Bernard. 2002. What Went Wrong – Western Impact and the Middle Eastern Response. Oxford University Press. Lia, Brynjar. 2007. Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al-Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri. London: Hurst Publishers. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. Mackinlay, John. 2006. Globalization and Insurgency. Adelphi Paper 352. Oxford University Press. Morris, Michael. 2005. Al-Qaeda as Insurgency. USWC Strategy Research Project. U.S. Army War College. Paz, Reuven. 2005. The Non-Territorial Islamic States in Europe. Project for the Research of Islamist Movements. Robb, John. 2007. Brave New War – The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Roy, Olivier. 2008. “Al Qaeda in the West as a Youth Movement: The Power of a Narrative”. CEPS Policy Brief, No. 168, August 2008. Centre for European Policy Studies. Sivan, Emmanuel. 2003. “Why Radical Muslims Aren’t Taking Over Governments.” In Revolutionaries and Reformers: Contemporary Islamist Movements in the Middle East. Barry, Rubin (ed). State University of New York Press. (pp.1-9). Voegelin, Eric. 1986. The Political Religions. New York: Edwin Mellen Press.

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Notes 1. PhD Candidate – Portuguese Catholic University, Institute for Political Studies, Lisbon (visiting PhD researcher at the University of Oxford, St. Antony’s College). [email protected] 2. With this template, the enemy can be a regime, a minority, or even a state. In other words, each person or entity that doesn’t represent the values defended and protracted by him. 3. One should also keep in mind that the word “sacrifice” comes from the Latin word sacrifitium, which takes us into the realm of sacred action. 4. We can find that, for instance, in the 1996 Bin Laden “Declaration of War” or in the 1998 “Declaration of Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders”. 5. According to Garcia (2007: 124), there is a line of continuity (asymmetry, unifying ideology, lassitude, non-state power, psychological action), however, new means and methods were added to this line – the transfer of effort from rural to urban areas (limiting the accomplishment of phases 4 and 5), new sources of financing, high information technology, the criminalisation of activities and the casting of power with the new terrorism. 6. Maybe the desire of annihilation is the last trace of transcendence left for someone, who in a secular world of commitments and tolerances, watches the rocking and shaking of his Absolute. The jihadist cannot, for that reason, be defined as a non-nihilist. 7. One just has to remember the Paris riots in 2005.

CHAPTER TEN THE IMPATIENCE OF PRAXIS IN ULI EDEL’S DER BAADER MEINHOF KOMPLEX DAVID SILVA E SOUSA

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Attention to the terrorist events in the late ‘60s and ‘70s in West Germany was recalled at the end of 2008 by the release of the film by Uli Edel, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. This nearly-documental fiction is based on the memories and research of Stefan Aust, who had worked in his early days as a journalist with Ulrike Meinhof and her husband. He dedicated himself to the research of the Red Army Faction (RAF) after its leaders died in prison, in 1977. The first version of his study was published in the early ‘80s and was sold-out for many years. The production of the film raised momentum for the publication of a revised edition in 2008 – under the same title as the film – and eventually a second revised edition was published under a different title soon after, in 2009.2 The reviewed and expanded parts have basically to do with new materials and interpretations of the last days of the group in prison, as it wasn´t quite clear to what extent their privacy had been violated through “bugs” in their cells and at meetings with attorneys. On the other hand, the study takes a cautious approach to the thesis that they might have been killed by authorities in prison rather than the most plausible and generally accepted thesis of collective suicide. It is somewhat puzzling that the film provoked criticism in Germany and in the United States, where it was released in 2009, for “glorifying” the group and its action.3 In fact, watching the film, there’s not much heroism to be found in Gudrun Ensslin’s stereotyped sentences or in Andrea Baader’s macho attitude. The terrorist actions of the group are presented as amateurish, as in fact they were, and the arguments for the scaling up of violence are mostly given by reproducing Meinhof’s written statements – fiction is sensibly kept at bay whenever it comes to political justification in the film. Being an historical film, it presents the emergence of Baader-Meinhof against the background of the “extra-parliamentary

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opposition” in West Germany and the international movement of students against the war in Vietnam and “American imperialism”.4 More interestingly, and besides the historical references, the film also includes elements for the sociological interpretation of the period. The dialogues involving Gudrun’s father, Helmut Ensslin, and the reflections of the Head of the Police, Horst Herold, particularly support the thesis of Norbert Elias that the conflict was a result of a generation gap and the will for existential fulfilment.5 Here is proposed yet another interpretational layer to the film, to be developed around the character of Ulrike Meinhof as a personification of the problematic relation between theory and praxis that was the object of a philosophical dispute between Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, precisely during the agitated years of 1967 to 1969. The dialectics of theory and praxis had been a key topic in Hegel’s philosophy that remained central for Marx – particularly in the Thesis on Feuarbach – and the other young Hegelians, for whom the relation between the two poles should ultimately reply, from a political perspective, to the question about the capacity of philosophy to promote an actual transformation in the social realm. Indeed, the young Hegelians had been concerned with the link between philosophy and social analysis and their materialist approach to dialectics led to a hope of social transformation through praxis. After the First World War, the philosophy of Hegel raised new interest in Germany, both among Marxists (Luckács) and non-Marxists (Dilthey, Croce). The Frankfurt school emerged from this context and those subjects of the young Hegelians were at the core of its thinking.6 From the early days of the Institute for Social Research, the role of theory was a problem. From Max Weber, they understood that the industrial society had developed a system of total administration or, in Weber’s expression, an “iron cage” in which humanity had little if any chance of fulfilling an ideal of spiritual emancipation.7 “Theory” had failed in leading political change in the previous century and now, in the terms of Dialectics of Enlightenment, its best hope was to keep exposing what the modern ratio turned out to be and avoid being contaminated by it. For this purpose, a new method was required: the link between philosophy and social analysis that concerned the young Hegelians eventually assumed the designation of “critical theory”.8 From a dialectical perspective, this sharpening of theory was intended to raise its level of negativity against a praxis that had succumbed to the weberian endzweck rationalität and was too far out to be reached. The goal of the Frankfurt circle would be summarised by Adorno’s expression Flaschenpost, a message in a bottle keeping an open end for hope.9

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The Institute was inaugurated in 1924 and, in its opening speech, the first director, Carl Grünberg, emphatically declared: “I too am among the opponents of the obsolete economic, social and legal order; and among the defenders of Marxism.”10 As the directorship of the Institute passed from Grünberg to Max Horkheimer, the Marxist orientation would become less prominent, but would not disappear. Is his memoires, Leo Lowenthal still classifies critical theory as “a progressive form of Marxism that no longer accepts mechanically the Marxist categories under modified historical conditions”.11 Nevertheless, the focus of critical theory in the negative moment, abdicating from praxis, is a very problematic option from a Marxist point of view. In The Sacred Family, written in 1845, Marx and Engels insisted that the ideas could not be detached from the concrete interests – that theory had to be taken to the proletarians. The subtitle of the book, Critique of Critique Critique, attacked those (intellectuals) who proposed that critical thinking could not be attained by the working class. This was a reply to the other young Hegelians from whom he was splitting. In their last publication, the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, published in 1843-44, they had regretted the indifference of the public towards the anti-liberal measures of the government. After that, they considered that the radicals had made a mistake in trusting the masses and that criticism should be detached from all alliances if it wanted to remain pure.12 Critical theory seemed more in this line of thinking than in that of Marx’s political commitment. For this reason, when the students’ movements in the United States and Europe recovered the Marxist revolutionary ideals, the members of the Institute were accused of abandoning praxis. Leo Lowenthal comments on this in a late interview: “We had not abandoned praxis; rather, praxis had abandoned us. I have often talked about the great trauma represented by the developments in the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. But of far greater significance was the insight that the idea of a proletariat’s revolutionary potential was historically dated.”13

In these terms, it was the absence of the historical subject of the revolution, the proletariat, which was the cause of the disruptive relation between theory and praxis. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had been clear about it. They had reserved a role for the intellectuals – the “bourgeois ideologists” that had attained “a theoretical understanding of the historical movement” – but this was the role of educators of the proletariat, the decisive agent of change. Intellectuals stood for theory, proletarians for praxis.

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This explains the hesitations of Marcuse in defining the role of students in the late 1960s. The fact that “the working class no longer represents the negation of existing needs” came to him as “one of the most serious facts with which we have to deal”.14 Nevertheless, Marcuse was reluctant to grant the intellectuals the status of revolutionary class and, while admitting that the heterogeneous composition of the group was “a nightmare for ‘old Marxists’”,15 he himself held to the proletariat: in one moment he cultivated the hope of the possibility of a more active proletariat in Europe, in the other, he turned to less advanced capitalist systems, whose social configuration still reproduced the class system of the industrial period – “As a new proletariat, the masses of the Third World are, in my view, the most serious threat to the current world system of capitalism”.16 Even knowing that the “world system of capitalism” took its conditions to all parts of the planet – the same condition that had deprived the proletariat of its power of negation in the West – Marcuse refused to accept the end of the struggle of classes: “It has been asserted, and the statement has even been attributed to me, that highly developed late capitalist society, particularly in the United States, is no longer really a class society; that the gap between rich and poor has become smaller and the class struggle no longer takes place; that the system has succeeded in removing or in any case dampening the contradictions that Marx revealed. This is out of the question and I have never maintained it. The fact is that in the last few years the gap between rich and poor has become greater than ever before. The fact is that the contradictions, the inner contradictions of the capitalist system, continue to exist. They are manifested particularly sharply, far more sharply than before, in the general contradiction between the enormous wealth of society that could make a life without poverty and alienated labor really possible, and the repressive and destructive manner in which this social wealth is employed and distributed. Even the class struggle goes forward, although for the time being it does so in a purely economic form.”17

Still in line with the Marxist orthodoxy, Herbert Marcuse portrayed the (bourgeois) intellectuals and students as form without content (the proletariat): “I see the possibility of an effective revolutionary force only in the combination of what is going on in the third world with the explosive forces in the centres of the highly developed world”.18

At most he could allow that: “The role of students as an intellectual class, destined to provide the

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leaders of today’s society, is today perhaps more important, historically, than in the past.”19

Ulrike Meinhof could be seen as representative of this intellectual class. She had been a successful journalist and opinion-maker, writing a column in the leftwing magazine, Konkret, while maintaining an uppermiddle-class life in Hamburg. However, her radical turn towards terrorism, after advocating pacifism throughout the 1960s, implied a theoretical twist that points in another direction. The scene of the attack on the Springer Press building is significant: Ulrike picks up a stone in an initiatic gesture, but dares not throw it; afterwards, she is split from the detainees by a policeman who recognises her as Frau Meinhof, the journalist. Her revolutionary bad conscience returns in the interview with Gudrun Ensslin in prison, where she is accused of not being capable of action. In another scene, already in the group, Gudrun presses her again by saying: “you can write about it later”. This sort of peer pressure was exposed by Adorno in his essay of 1969 on theory and praxis.20 In it, Adorno was laying down his reflections on how “practicism” betrays theory, clarifying his position in the dispute that had divided him and Marcuse in the previous two years. As director of the Institute of Social Research, Theodor Adorno didn’t consent that the rebellious students invaded the building as a form of protest. Marcuse considered the students’ action as legitimate and censored his Frankfurt companion for calling the police.21 Although most of the analysis of Adorno’s position on this matter is centred in this period, his concern for the subject developed much earlier. In the first lecture of his course on moral philosophy in 1963, Adorno warned his students against an impatience to find practical answers for the moral and political challenges of the present: “This impatience can very easily become linked with a certain resentment towards thinking in general, with a tendency to denounce theory as such. (…) This reproach of about the uselessness of theory, this impatient need to hurl oneself into action without delay spells the end of any kind of theoretical work and contains within itself, teleologically, as if it had been assumed from the outset, a relationship to a false, in other words, an oppressive, blind and violent form of practice.”22

In Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, this kind of denouncement of theory is turned against Meinhof. It is present in the prison interview scene, in the reproaches of her advices for better planning, and later in the conflict with Gudrun Ensslin in prison. From this perspective, the film is as much about

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the turn of Meinhof to terrorism, as about the pathos of her intellectual condition and the internal contradictions that emerged from her choices.

Notes 1. Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa. 2. Stefan Aust and Anthea Bell, Baader-Meinhof. The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3. See the summary of critics positions in “Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex” accessed 18th October 2010, http://www.baader-meinhof.com/resources/film/ BaaderMeinhofKomplex.html. See also Ann Hornaday “Stefan Aust on ‘Baader Meinhof’: ‘60s Terrorism Still Echoes Today”, Washington Post, 11th September 2009, accessed 18th October 2010, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/09/11/AR2009091103240.html 4. The relation between the students’ movements in West Germany and the United States of America is documented and analysed in Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany & The United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton Press, 2009). 5. Norbert Elias, The Germans. Power Struggle and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University, 1996). 6. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: a History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press,1996), 41. 7. Max Weber, Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 8. Interviewed by Dubiel, Leo Lowenthal reveals the difficulty of defining the project of critical theory: “(…) I pointed to the Zeitschrift [the publication of the Institute] format to explain the meaning of Critical Theory: that is, it is a perspective, a common, critical, basic attitude towards all cultural phenomena, that never claimed to be a system. (…) Critical theory, then, must be understood as nothing but such a collective denominator. It was an expression, by the way, that we never used with as much enphasis during the first twenty years as may appear to posterity”: Leo Lowenthal, “I Never Wanted to Play Along”, in An Unmastered Past. The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 60. Lowenthal also refers, as the single methodological work, the choice of a common vocabulary to be used in the Zeitschrift (Lowenthal, Reflections, 71). In 1937, Max Horkheimer (in the essay “Traditional and Critical Theory”) and Herbert Marcuse (in “Philosophy and Critical Theory”) made efforts to define critical theory. Marcuse would later publish a collection of essays on the subject: Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: Penguin, 1968). 9. The expression is in the §133 of Minima Moralia: “Even then, the hope of leaving behind a message in a bottle amidst the rising tide of barbarism was a friendly vision (…)”: Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: NLB, 1974). 10. Quoted by Gay, P., Weimar Culture: the Outsider as Insider (New York:

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Harper and Row, 1968), 41. 11. Lowenthal, Reflections, p. 64. He added: “but the basic themes of marxism were never abandoned. (…) What were abandoned were certain economic categories and previsions that were demonstrated to be wrong. That was entirely in Marx’s spirit”. 12. David Mc Lellan, The Young Hegelians and Marx, (London: MacMillan, 1969), 53. 13. Marcuse was arguably the most exposed to this sort of accusation, given his engagement in the students’ debates and the popularity of his One-Dimensional Man – on the attacks to the book from several leftwing factions, see the note 18 in Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 445. A reply to a specific accusation of abandoning praxis is found in Herbert Marcuse, “On Changing the World: A Reply to Karl Miller”, Monthly Review 19 (1967): 42-48. 14. Herbert Marcuse, “The End of Utopia”, in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 70. 15. Herbert Marcuse, “The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition”, in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia (Boston, Beacon, 1970), 8384. 16. Marcuse, Problem of Violence, 85. 17. Marcuse, H., Popper, K., Revolution or Reform? A Confrontation, Precedent, Chicago, 1976: p. 65. 18. Marcuse, Problem of Violence, 95. 19. Marcuse, End of Utopia, 71. 20. Adorno, Theodor W. “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis”, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 259-278, notes 378-383. 21. We’ve had access to the late correspondence between the two in a Brazilian collection of writings of Marcuse: A Grande Recusa Hoje (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, 1999) 87-102. 22. Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) 3-4.

CHAPTER ELEVEN TERRORISM AND TERRORISTS IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S THE SECRET AGENT MIGUEL MORGADO1

“Our task is destruction: terrible, total, general and ruthless.” Catechism of the Revolutionist

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the greatest terrorist threat in Europe came from anarchist groups.2 The most spectacular and notorious terrorist attacks had as targets heads of state and government, as well as other high representatives of state authority (provincial governors, ministers, chiefs of police and secret services, army officers, judges and also heads of industry). The President of the French Republic, Sadi Carnot (in 1894), the Spanish President of the Council of Ministers, António Cánovas del Castillo (in 1897), the Austrian Empress Elizabeth (in 1898), the Italian King Umberto I (in 1900), the American President, William McKinley (in 1901), and the Russian Tsar Alexander II (in 1881), were among their most famous victims. In 1905, there was a simultaneous attack against the French President, Émile Loubet and the King of Spain, Afonso XIII, but both survived it, something that happened quite often. However, the history of terrorist attacks inspired by anarchism is no mere recapitulation of the murders of this or that important politician. Anarchists also aimed at less discriminate targets, like, for example, the bomb attack on the Opera of Barcelona in 1893, which killed more than twenty people; or, in that same city, another bomb attack, this time against a Catholic procession which caused more than forty deaths; or the attack against the Stock Exchange in Paris in 1886, that due to some very fortunate coincidences, did not kill anyone; or in that same city, the bomb attack against the Chamber of Deputies in 1893, which wounded the man who carried it out, Auguste Vaillant; or yet in Paris, the bomb attack aimed at Café Terminus in 1894, which was a part of the general retaliation for the execution of Vaillant and was carried out by Émile

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Henry. Also can be mentioned, is the famous case in London around the same period, of a group of anarchists who were running away from a police pursuit and who were eventually surrounded. They refused to surrender, forcing the authorities to call the army’s artillery, and they chose to be burned alive rather than show the white flag. Clearly, in the anarchists’ minds, the attack against a crowd was not an indiscriminate attack, for that crowd was formed by people who invariably were seen as cooperative with the social and political state of things. Therefore, they were not “innocent”. As Émile Henry, one of the most famous terrorists of the 1890s put it, “the bourgeoisie as a whole lives by exploiting the miserable, and the bourgeoisie as a whole must expiate its crimes”.3 The anarchist terrorists also made innovations in their methods. They took advantage of technological developments, which made possible the use of explosives. This not only made terrorist actions potentially more destructive, but also gave them a deeper aesthetic and moral depth. In more prosaic terms, it may be added that new technology, given its rudimentary state, multiplied accidents, and it was no longer uncommon to read in European newspapers about some anarchist being blown to pieces by his own device due either to his own carelessness or to the incompetence of someone who was responsible for the logistic aspects of the operation. On the other hand, the use of explosives brought a new dimension to terrorism, and, by opening up the horizon of the suicide attack, it made the terrorist a much more complex figure. In addition, one must differentiate these terrorist acts and their justification, from the use of terror as state policy, which, ever since the Jacobin period during the French Revolution, had become one more political possibility in the European context. The anarchists rejected the policy of state Terror and for a very simple and fundamental reason: because their political objective was precisely the destruction of the state and of organised political power as such. This quarrel with the Marxist heirs of French revolutionary Terror would become quite explicit after October 1917. Furthermore, and as we will see, the political objective of a part of the anarchist terrorist movement that was active in Europe during this period cannot be described as a circumscribed and instrumental stage in a straight path leading to the creation of a different political situation. Regardless of whether anarchist terrorism was relatively ineffective compared to the sort of terrorism with which we have to deal at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is no doubt that it created a strong impression in the European consciousness. That impression was so strong that eventually it migrated to literature. In order to be able to grasp

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the psychological effect of panic generated by anarchist terrorist actions during this period, one must study contemporary newspapers or, alternatively, contemporary literature. Several works of this period could be analysed,4 but there is at least one, which placed at the centre of its object the reality of anarchist terror and the person of the anarchist terrorist. When I say “reality”, I mean of course, on the one hand, the complex array of reasons, justifications, nature, purposes, and even metaphysics of the terrorist movement, and on the other hand, the existence and conduct of the terrorist as such. I therefore chose a world famous work by Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent.

II. When one mentions “anarchist terrorism”, it does not mean that both words are synonymic. There were anarchists who explicitly repudiated violence as a tool of social and political transformation. But anarchism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, even at the level of theorising by some of its greatest representatives such as Bakunin or Kropotkin, paved a very short path, which linked the necessity of revolution and social transformation with an inclination towards violence. For example, in the writings, which Bakunin prepared with Nechaev during the days when both were still brothers in arms, this connection is very clear.5 In the context of anarchist terrorism at the end of the nineteenth century, one should not waste any time on the question of what qualifies an act as being “terrorist”, nor with searching for the different perspectives according to which the famous aphorism – “today’s terrorist is tomorrow’s statesman” – has been considered absolutely true. It is useless, not because that particular discussion is, in the abstract, devoid of sense, but rather because the statements left behind by anarchist terrorists are not ashamed to use the ‘T’ word for the simple reason that it is the most accurate they could find. There is absolutely no doubt that the terrorists accepted the fact that they really were “terrorists”, and they did not hesitate to depict their actions as “terrorist”. What is a revolution properly understood? What is the distinction between the revolution that will bring the emancipation of mankind and the one-sided, partially bourgeois, revolts known to European history, such as in 1789 and 1848? Apparently, anarchist terrorist violence does not aim at the breaking down of the command-obedience relation, which sooner or later would lead to the collapse of the order-enforcing forces. Terrorist violence has a different aim, an aim, one might add, not as political as the one just mentioned. It is not the purpose of violence to

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cause the political rupture of established power. The anarchist terrorist does not intend to undermine the common citizen’s blind obedience – and therefore tacit consent – to the powers that be. In fact, it goes much beyond this limited objective. Authentic revolution replaces all forms and structures of social and political life. Only then, only after that initial destruction, is to be expected the construction of a new order. Now, that task of destruction, in real terms, is of the revolutionist’s choosing. He must combine his feelings of furious protest with the requisites for an effective negation of the existing order. In Principles of the Revolution, Bakunin writes: “We have to finish with that idealism which prevents action according to its deserts; it has to be replaced by cruel, cold and ruthless consistency.”6 However, as Voegelin adds, “the true revolutionary does not have plans for reconstruction”.7 The foremost task is purely destructive; the order that will follow must flow from the new principles and the new spirit, which share nothing with the old corrupt oppressive order. Between those two worlds, the old and the new, there is no common measure that would allow us to conceptualise the aspirations created in the actual moment. The revolutionist’s aspiration is essentially to destroy everything that may hinder the arrival of the new world. While describing the Russian nihilist movement, Herzen said: “The annihilation of the past is the procreation of the future”.8 In the above quoted Principles of the Revolution, Bakunin wrote: “They will call it terrorism! But we have to remain indifferent to all cries and not engage in compromises with those who are destined to die!”9 Voegelin sums it up: “The revolutionist’s destructive existence is shown in all its nakedness.”10 Although Voegelin does not mention this, it is important to realise that this particular anti-utopian impetus is deeply entrenched in Marx, of course, and in the revolutionary syndicalism of Georges Sorel. Sorel, in Reflections on Violence, quotes from Brentano a letter from Marx written in 1869 in which he accuses his English friend, Beesly, of being a “reactionary” in spite of his presenting himself as a revolutionist. Beesly had written an article on the future of the working class, and for Marx “whoever produces a program for the future is a reactionary”. Evidently, this admonition is a direct result of Marx’s insistence on the “scientific” nature of his conception of socialism along with the concomitant “idea of technological continuity”. However, Sorel helps us understand in a more thorough way the specificity of this “reactionary”. He even sees in this particular point an area of agreement with Marx, and denounces so-called “Marxists” for straying away from the master’s teachings. Sorel says that the accusation of reactionarism is accurate because one simply has to

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consider the stuff out of which utopias are made. For Sorel, it is obvious that these utopias are created in the minds of men on the basis of the “past and often of a very distant past”.11 Voegelin introduces yet another important idea. The commitment of the revolutionary individual to the cause of total destruction is, in Voegelin’s view, “the intramundane counterpart to the spiritual ‘death to the world’ and to the sanctification of life in preparation for redeeming grace in death”.12 The commitment to destruction is therefore more than a political imperative; it becomes a first-order existential impulse. It becomes more difficult, then, to conciliate Jean Baudrillard’s observation according to which “it is a mistake to see terrorist action as obeying a purely destructive logic”, and that terrorism is all about “the challenge and the duel”, with the intrinsic logic of nineteenth century anarchist terrorism.13 Not only the disposition of “hating the world”, but also of “being dead to the world”, in its immanentised version, appears as one of the fundamental traits of the life of a revolutionary terrorist. That is why the existential commitment of the anarchist terrorist implied more than physical sacrifice – risk of death or imprisonment, renouncing comfortable existence. To be sure, self-sacrifice was consciously accepted. Boris Savinkov, himself an organiser of terrorist attacks against important personalities of the Tsarist state at the beginning of the twentieth-century, made some remarks about two of his own companions in subversive action. He said: “[For them], terrorist action was beautified mainly by the terrorist’s self-sacrifice”.14 Quite often, self-sacrifice was inseparable from the heroic act. But the existential commitment implied, above all, personal moral sacrifice. The anarchist terrorist was not bothered by the fact that he became the detestable one, or to put it more accurately, the execrable one. He was not bothered by the fact that he became the one who commits every fault and suffers every admonition, even if we include moral categories derived from outside “oppressive civilisation”. This step towards personal moral sacrifice is necessary and it is implicit in the approval and practice of murdering innocents, for example, or other admittedly criminal acts. Joseph Conrad published The Secret Agent in 1907, but the action takes place in the 1880s15 at the time when the anarchist terrorist threat was at its peak.16 The scenery is supplied by the gigantic and modern London, the capital of England, which represents the fatherland of liberal conservatism, or anti-radicalism and scruples for legality. Conrad is not dismissive of English scruples for legality, nor does he despise English devotion to individual liberty, quite the contrary. However, he is disturbed by a certain collective unconsciousness, as regards the dangers that

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threaten English civilisation, which is probably derived from precisely that moderation. In The Secret Agent, the character who most perfectly incarnates the anarchist terrorist is the little man, the incorruptible Professor, who always keeps his hand in his pocket, grabbing a detonator. He prefers being blown to pieces by his own explosive device than getting caught by the police. At the end of the book, the narrator describes him thus: “He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction. He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable – and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.”17

Invisibility is one of the reasons for his being a “force”. The terrorist acquires that force because he is able to lose himself among the human mass that inhabits the great city. At any moment, he may show himself as what he is: a source of terror for others. He is in himself, in his very existence, a time-bomb. This is one of the crucial and new aspects brought by the anarchist movement. The Spectator magazine ran a piece on 14th April 1883 that tried to explain that terrorism was no longer about the possibility of dying at the hands of another man. It was about “impersonal randomness, which showed people that they were already living as potential statistics, they were already living as anonymous numbers in a crowd”.18 The new terrorism radicalised the process of depersonalisation of man. It is no coincidence that the city in which Conrad’s action takes place is London, the gigantic London, whose blanket of anonymity covers everyone. London is the “monstrous town (…) a cruel devourer of the world’s light”.19 The fact that the professor spends his time perfecting the detonating technique, a product of scientific thought, is not unrelated to the fact that the target suggested by the foreign (Russian) diplomat to the secret agent is the Greenwich Observatory.20 The Greenwich Observatory is the symbol of the prestige, or modern idolatry, of science. Vladimir, the Russian diplomat,21 affirms it explicitly: “The sacrosanct fetish of to-day is science.” That is no longer the case, as one may presume, with past idols such as “royalty” or “religion”.22 From the point of view of terrorism, then, these latter are no longer relevant targets. They are empty now, and therefore dead. Their destruction does not hit society in the heart. For that reason, Vladimir ridicules the traditional targets of anarchist terrorism such as heads of state. An attack against a scientific institution, or against

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science, would have a completely different meaning. To repeat the usual attacks, as it were, would be to invite the production of the usual meanings: “exasperation” or “social revenge”. According to Vladimir, that is no longer “instructive”. Terrorism has exhausted its ability to convey terrorising meanings to public opinion. Now it must overcome itself. That means that is has to become “purely destructive”. If anarchists are willing to be coherent, then they have to deny all “social creation”. Is there a social creation other than science, along with the prestige it holds, that better sustains modern civilisation? Is there any other social creation whose breakdown would hit more immediately the lives of everyone? If for no other reason, then because of the “mysterious” general belief that “science is at the source of material prosperity”. On the other hand, the madness of an attack against science would show the “absurdity” of such an intention to be “incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad”. This is how terrorism affirms itself and becomes true to itself. That which cannot be rationalised or explained is terrifying. With that target in sight, terrorism is no longer a manifestation of “class hatred”. It finally becomes an authentic civilisational threat. The terrorist ideal would be attained “if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics”.23 But it should be noted that the absurdity is also revealed in the throwing of the bomb itself, that is to say, in the use of science against science, of technology against technology. Conrad leaves no doubt that the Professor is an anarchist terrorist. He puts in his mouth the following assertion: “My devise is: No God! No master.”24 This is of course the most widely known motto of anarchism. The professor is the perfect terrorist for he is the man “absolutely identified with his revolt” that Bakunin tried to introduce in the world.25 But that revolt with which his existence is identified is little more than negational destruction; his existence asserts itself through the readiness to die and the ability to inflict indiscriminate death. Conrad describes a conversation that the Professor has with Ossipon. Ossipon is one of the other revolutionaries in the book, but he has a very different attitude as regards the task of destruction and the challenge to the powers that be. He prefers to smash women’s hearts than the exploitative classes. In that conversation with Ossipon, the Professor mentions that he is seeking, more than anything else, the perfect detonator. And he goes on to make a severe criticism of the more conventional type of revolutionary man. It is surprisingly consistent with the anarchist logic of revolution that we suggested earlier in the essay. The Professor says: “But you, revolutionists (…) you plan the future, you lose yourselves in reveries of economic systems derived from what is; whereas what’s wanted is a clean

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sweep and a clear start for a new conception of life. That sort of future will take care of itself if you will only make room for it.”26 He dedicates himself to the development of the perfect detonator, for that endeavour, of all revolutionary attitudes is, in truth, the most consistent with the Bakuninean conception of revolution. Let us recall what Bakunin wrote in his famous Confession: “Our mission is to destroy and not to build: other men will build, better than us, more intelligent and younger than us.”27 It is not up to the revolutionary individual to build the future utopia; his task is rather to destroy with efficacy present society. Negation, in the Hegelian sense of the term, is everything in Bakuninean thought. Therefore, destruction is the beginning of creation. One could say the same about the anarchist thought of people like Kropotkin or Chernychevsky and above all Nechaev. But to come back to Conrad, it may be said that the detonator is paradoxically the most excellent tool to build a new society, and therefore is a truly political and revolutionary device. However, when he describes his own existence, the Professor does not hesitate to say that “there are few people in the world whose character is as well established as mine”. He adds that this accomplishment was all due to “force of personality”.28 More importantly, he acknowledges all individuals who are not with him in the struggle as “inferior”. The character of all of them is “built upon conventional morality. It leans on the social order”. But his character, on the contrary, “stands free from everything artificial”. In its most fundamental form, the dependency shown by other people’s character, and which makes them inferior, is that others “depend on life which, in this connection, is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex and organised fact open to attack at every point; whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident”.29 It goes without saying that the dependence on life shown by others, and a sign of their weakness, is also, due to its absence in the terrorists’ character, a sign of the Professor’s superiority. In other words, the terrorist is “dead to the world” and the world is dead to him. His superiority is rooted right there. His death is so complete that he is not even alive for the anarchist organisation, the International Red Committee. The Professor has no great consideration for the Committee anyway. He sees it as the other side of the coin of oppressive society that must be destroyed. He confronts Ossipon and tells him that, “I’ve the grit to work alone, quite alone, absolutely alone. I’ve worked alone for years.”30 Hannah Arendt used several times the following formulation: “The

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extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. The latter is never possible without instruments.”31 Of course, she was not thinking about the phenomenon of terrorism, but she gives us a good synthesis of the logic of violence dramatised by Conrad here. This isolation does not merely show a sacrifice of comfort and delights afforded by life according to social conventions; it also shows the personal moral sacrifice already eluded to.32 Vera Figner, a member of the Russian anarchist terrorist group, The Will of the People, is a good witness of Conrad’s insight. Concerning the conditions for joining the group, Vera Figner explained that “all members solemnly declare to dedicate their strengths to the revolution, and for the sake of it to forget all family ties, all personal sympathies, love and friendship; to give their lives without changing anything; to not having anything of their own, and to renounce personal will”.33 But above all, it is the thought and example of Nechaev that allow us to understand better the personality of Conrad’s character, the Professor, even if one assumes that Conrad never read The Catechism of the Revolutionary. Nechaev’s terrorism was pathological to such an extent that Bakunin himself eventually broke with him, after several years of intimate and loyal revolutionary cooperation between both. But as soon as they parted ways, Bakunin immediately warned his companions that they should repudiate Nechaev, since he was a: “devout fanatic, but, at the same time, a very dangerous fanatic, an alliance with whom can only be nefarious for everyone […] Little by little he became convinced that to found a serious and indestructible society it would be necessary to start from Machiavelli’s politics and fully adopt the Jesuits’s system: for the body, only violence, for the soul, only the lie. […] he came to identify completely the cause of the revolution with his own person”.34

However, the most revealing moment of repudiation comes immediately afterwards. Bakunin says: “It was with great grief that I parted ways with him, because the service to our cause demands great energy, and it is very rare to find energy such as his.”35 Terrorism is one of the most explicit practical translations of that revolutionary “energy”. Revolutionary zeal needs “energy” to actualise its impetus. Now, that energy can be found in some individuals for whom the borderline between revolutionary action and crime pure and simple becomes rather fuzzy. In his dialogue with Ossipon, the terrorist Professor answers with scorn Ossipon’s suggestion that the explosion which had occurred in London the day before, caused by some man who had blown himself to pieces –

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neither speaker knows yet that the explosion was accidental –, was not far from being a criminal act. The Professor replies: “Criminal! What is that? What is crime? What can be the meaning of such an assertion?”36 The separation of the individual from all kinds of institutions and conventions is a crucial element in the struggle against the forces mobilised by present order. To Ossipon’s observation that the duty of the Police would be to enter the coffee shop where they both were and shoot to kill, the terrorist replies in accordance. But he adds that such a thing will not happen because “for that they would have to face their own institutions”. Those are the institutions of order, legality and respect for conventions, amongst which we find the consideration for the dignity of each individual, whether criminal or not. The terrorist doubts that it would happen for “that requires uncommon grit. Grit of a special kind”.37 This passage shows not only the dilemmas faced by any society in its struggle against terrorism, but also the moral or existential leap which the terrorist cannot refuse to make, here defined as the result of a peculiar exercise of courage. It is not surprising to hear the same character say immediately afterwards that: “to break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in, in its very temple”.38

The order of civilisation would crumble if its constitutive scruples for legality were to be put in question.

III. Although one can discern a certain agreement among the commentators that The Secret Agent does not offer, nor could it offer, a reliable historical portrait of the anarchist movement, there can be no doubt that the depiction of some relevant characters in the book39 allows us to infer that Conrad was well acquainted with the literature on anarchist terrorism.40 Conrad’s work is packed with undisguisable irony which by unavoidably creating some distance would tend to forbid an approach such as the one I am trying here, that is to say, an approach that ties The Secret Agent to the intrinsic logic or spirit of anarchist terrorism at the end of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, some passages from Conrad’s work suffice to lead this exercise of confrontation with the sources of anarchist thought as well

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as with the historical record of terrorist action in Europe in that period. Conrad’s acquaintance with the anarchist movement is to be noted in particular when he separates the anarchist terrorist from the man who dreams about utopias. We have seen that this is a fundamental element in Bakunin’s doctrine, and in Conrad, it becomes alive in the person of the Professor. In The Secret Agent, the Professor is the only real terrorist; but there are other anarchists. Michaelis is the theoretical anarchist, the builder of utopias, who prefers the written word to the use of dynamite. In the past he had been arrested during a terrorist attack, the objective of which was the release of other anarchist prisoners from the hands of the police. However, as Conrad shows us, Michaelis was arrested, not for his deeds, but because he had in his possession compromising objects. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. After his release from prison, he kept himself busy by writing a book in which he explains the happy future world that will arrive after the revolution. The Professor tells Ossipon about the visit he paid him and, after criticising Michaelis’ deficient intellectual talents, he lets Ossipon know that he read bits of Michaelis’ manuscript. Unsympathetically, the Professor describes the contents of the manuscript as “the idea of a world planned out like an immense and nice hospital, with gardens and flowers, in which the strong are to devote themselves to the nursing of the weak”. The Professor continues, emphasising his irony, but this time more violently: “The weak! The source of all evil on this earth! (…) I told him that I dreamt of a world like shambles, where the weak would be taken in hand for utter extermination.” Michaelis’ humanitarianism has to surrender its place in the anarchist’s mind to the thought germinated in the context of struggle and violence. There is no place for utopia, no place for the dream yet to be lived out, but only for the total and difficult task that awaits the strong. The Professor goes on: “The source of all evil! They are our sinister masters – the weak, the flabby, the silly, the cowardly, the faint of heart, and the slavish of mind. They have power. They are the multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress. It is! Follow me, Ossipon? First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and dumb, then the halt and the lame – and so on. Every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom.”41

The horizon of total emancipation demands total destruction. It demands the destruction of those who would be presumptively better

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served by emancipation itself. However, what is really in question is the emancipation of Mankind, and not the humanitarian recovery of the remains of conventional civilisation. Mere mankind simply “does not know what it wants”.42 As J. Hillis Miller judiciously points out, the object of anarchist terrorist violence cannot be only the symbols, the works and vestiges of decadent civilisation; it must also be the persons in so far as “history is incorporated in them just as they are in stones and in inscriptions”.43 In other words, because they hold and incarnate civilisation itself, concrete persons are inevitable targets of terrorism. They are never collateral damage. They are never innocent civilian casualties. That distinction simply does not make sense for the terrorist mind. Neither the poor, nor the damned of the earth, can escape the unredeemable civilisation “taint”. The world yet to be is not for them. Thus, one understands that the Professor, as a character, is the logical extension of the principles of anarchist terrorism to their ultimate consequences. Anarchist terrorism is neatly described by the words of Zhelyabov, one of the perpetrators of the attempt to kill Tsar Alexander II. In the statement he made during his trial, which would render him the death penalty, Zhelyabov told the court that dreamers had converted to being positivists; from propaganda they had now turned to action, from words they had now turned to war.44 The moment had come for propagande par le fait, in which violence or terror, more than anything else, holds incommensurable rhetorical power. But the Professor has already overcome the moment of propagande par le fait. For him, the fait is everything. It should not seek further justifications. The only propaganda is terror, not, to be sure, in order to persuade the masses as propagandists usually claim, but rather in order to destroy what is otherwise unsalvageable. Conrad confirms this step in our reasoning. The Professor’s purpose is not only to “destroy public faith in legality”. Violence is no mere instrument in provoking the suicide of factical order. Violence is necessary to provoke terror for in a petrified world only terror can move the immense flock of sheep. Undeniably, his greatest fear was that the multitude would be so unconsciously involved in the practices and routines imposed by factical civilisation, in a sort of collective somnambulism, that not even terror could move it. The terrorist’s greatest fear is that the multitude that is his target may not be fearful.45 It is here that one witnesses the proud independence of the Professor breaking down. He may cause death and destruction, including his own, but he does not entirely control the effect they produce. That is why his “power is dependent on the social body he wants to attack”.46 Ossipon still asks the Professor what is left after the extermination of

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the weak. The Professor replies: “I remain… .” He does remain because he is the “force”, because he has resisted the “oppression of the weak”, because he knows that the “theology” of the “hope of the weak” “has invented hell for the strong”.47 He remains because his morality is not conventional, and because an existence devoted to the destruction of all conventions is an unceasing test of strength. That is why he does not doubt that he is the “force”. He is the “force” which is considered a “crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost”.48 He is the force to commit impassively the crime condemned by convention. In this particular sense of emancipation from all conventions, one could say that the terrorist has to be an anarchist. This idea is reinforced by reading The Catechism of the Revolutionist, a pamphlet that until some few years ago was thought to have been jointly written by Nachaev and Bakunin. We do not know whether Conrad knew the Catechism, but some parallels are remarkable. Repeatedly, the Catechism calls our attention to the fact that “the revolutionary man is doomed from the start”, something which captures with great accurateness the notion of isolation that we met in the professor’s existence. Like the man with the special detonator, Nechaev’s revolutionist “should not expect any compassion from this society”. The revolutionist does not even have a name; “he has broken all ties with public order and the civilised world, with all morality”, for moral is only what “contributes to the triumph of the Revolution” and vice-versa. He is “the ruthless enemy” of the civilised world, and he thinks only about destroying it. But in order to better accomplish his mission he should “try to seem totally different from what he really is”. Only thus will he be able to penetrate all social circles and to access the most privileged positions. Only thus will he be able to lead society to its consummate destruction. Society’s destruction is not an abstraction: the revolutionist should “elaborate a list of people” who are condemned to die, according to an order of priority. Some must die before others. He only knows “one science: the science of destruction”. His cares and scientific interests can only have one purpose: “to bring about the destruction of this abject society, in the swiftest and assuredly possible mode”. All feelings, all ties, all affections, all pleasures, must be repressed and sacrificed to the north and south of the revolutionist’s life: revolution. Revolutionary “passion” is his “second nature”. This passion has a monopoly on the revolutionist’s soul; all other passions are eradicated. It is for that reason that he can devote himself to “the coldest calculation” and free himself from all forms of enthusiasm and personal hatreds.49 The practical result of this iron discipline is that the revolutionist, being “strict towards himself, should be strict towards others”. One

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criterion alone defines “solidarity” among revolutionary comrades: the interests of the revolution. But revolutionary work is lonely. Each revolutionist should only count on himself. Now and again, he should have “at his disposal second or third rate revolutionists, that is to say, the noninitiated”. Those are not above the status of pure instruments. They exist to be used. Finally, banditry and the men who practise it are accepted as good revolutionists.50 Be that as it may, it is useless to “think of what will be”, and therefore the revolutionist’s work is not to write fairy tales, created through more or less scientific means. The urgency is on accomplishing the destruction of “what is”.51 It is as if the Professor had overcome the first stages of development of revolutionary consciousness. These principles are characterised by what we could call humanitarian consciousness. In my interpretation, Conrad, through another character, explores that initial moment of fully revolutionary, and therefore, terroristic existence.

IV. Stevie, Winnie’s brother, is a half-witted young man. In turn, Winnie’s life is devoted to protecting her brother from his disabilities. She is his safety against his own fears. With that purpose in mind, Winnie married Mr. Verloc, the secret agent, the double agent who belongs to the underground anarchist organisation and, at the same time, works in secret for the, presumably, Russian embassy as an agent provocateur. As the reader soon finds out, Verloc is in fact a triple agent, since we find out from Inspector Heat of the London police force that he was also being used by the security forces as a source of information concerning subversive actions being carried out by anarchist groups. For that reason Verloc was considered to be dangerous and precious. In addition, the book informs us that Inspector Heat is personally acquainted with the terrorist Professor, a fact which dilutes the idea that there is a clear borderline between the side of order, where the police rules, and the side of disorder where terrorists dwell. Comparing with the actual history of the anarchist movement, Verloc seems to replicate the duplicity of the famous Azev, who was at the same time leader of revolutionary Russian terrorism, involved in the preparation of multiple and notorious attacks, and also a privileged informant of the infamous Okhrana, the secret division inside the Tsarist secret police which was created to deal with the emerging and growingly effective terrorist threat. But this parallel faces one big difference that changes everything. In Conrad’s novel, Verloc wants, above all, comfort and security compatible with his own natural laziness.

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Stevie winds up playing a central role in Conrad’s book. This is true even in the most elementary sense. It is he who accidentally blows himself up when, persuaded by Mr. Verloc, he is about to deliver a bomb to the Greenwich Observatory. Stevie is mentally retarded, but he is capable of the most generous feelings. Conrad gives us a hint of why Stevie let himself be persuaded by Verloc to do that terrible deed. He was persuaded by a combination of a “state of innocence” and “the conviction of being engaged in some humanitarian enterprise”.52 He is considered to be in a “state of innocence” precisely because he is half-witted. And being in that “state of innocence” he may be seen as the dramatisation of the formation of the revolutionary consciousness in its pure state, that is to say, without the interference of other human passions, such as the desire for power, vanity or villainy. In one of the scenes described by Conrad’s narrator, Stevie witnesses a horse being whipped by the cabman. His compassionate reaction to the horse’s suffering is immediate and spontaneous. Stuttering, but with great conviction, Stevie protests against the cabman, telling him that “that hurts”. The cabman replied provocatively by whipping the horse once more. Stevie wanted to leave the place, but his sister needed Stevie to get in the carriage. At the end of the short journey, Stevie is alone with the cabman, who explains to him the harshness of his life, with a wife and four children to support. The cabman was no longer the arrogant and cruel person he seemed before. He speaks his mind saying, “this ain’t an easy world”. To this Stevie replies, “Bad! Bad!”. The cabman admits that it is “‘Ard on ‘osses”, but “dam sight ‘arder on poor chaps like me”. At that moment, Stevie says, “Poor! Poor!”53 The horse’s physical suffering, which appeared first, becomes in Stevie’s mind the surface of a more complex problem in which the person apparently responsible for the animal’s suffering is after all one of the major victims of all this misery. Physical suffering is now seen as complexified by social injustice, which converts both horse and its owner into helpless victims. Thus, both deserve Stevie’s compassion. The brief explanation of the whole situation by the cabman allows Stevie to compare the vulnerability of man and horse with his own vulnerability. Compassion arises from fear. But Stevie’s compassion itself undergoes a metamorphosis. For with the help that comes from indignation, which in turn breeds new feelings, Stevie’s compassion is mixed with hatred towards the nebulous and remote origin or cause of all that suffering. In the humanitarian stage of the formation of revolutionary consciousness, compassion and hatred appear as two sides of the same coin. Stevie, the innocent who cooperates with terrorism, is also seduced by the negation of misery and the social

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structure that he hates. Properly speaking, he has no ideological convictions; he is painfully unattached to his surroundings. However, his “rage”, the narrator tells us, “is innocent but pitiless”.54 Later, when he is alone with his sister he uses another word to describe that terrible situation: “Shame!” The world was bad. It was a “bad world for poor people”.55 At this point of the narrative, Stevie had already replaced his initial compassion, grounded on fear, by sheer indignation. Conrad needs to offer the last piece of the puzzle, as it were: how does one go from indignation to hatred towards the social structure and its political agents seen as the cause of suffering? While talking to his sister, Stevie realises that he is powerless, and thinks that the Police is the institution charged with the task of protecting people from suffering. But his sister teaches him that the Police is not there for that at all. Talking to a perplexed Stevie, his sister, perhaps reflecting her familiarity with her husband’s underground activities, explains that the Police is there “so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have”. The narrator explains that Winnie avoided using the term “to steal” so that her brother wouldn’t be “uncomfortable”.56 In his own way, Stevie realises that the Police is a mere protecting structure of those who do not suffer. Social and political order is a terrible mask, which tries to disguise the subjection of some and the privileges of others. Now the cause of evil has been finally identified. With the appropriate encouragement, he would soon know his enemy. The ruling order was radically wrong. We have seen how the Police is, as a social and political institution, integrated in the development of the consciousness of anarchist terrorism. But the Police by itself plays in The Secret Agent a rather central role. One should recall that the reason the diplomat Vladimir encourages an “incomprehensible” terrorist attack, is to serve the design of his master government. Russia lives in times of terrorist panic and it had already lost one Tsar, Alexander II. As has been said, the Okhrana had been created to deal with the anarchist and nihilist terroristic threat. Now, Vladimir wants England to change its policy of tolerance and political asylum towards anarchist refugees. That change of policy and the use of police repression could only come from a public wave of indignation caused by some “incomprehensible” act for the simple reason that bourgeois England “is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty”.57 It is not unfair to say that Conrad’s narrator agrees with Winnie that the ability of London Police to maintain a just order is extremely limited. It is also very clear that the Police is unable to understand the disproportion between its task and the problem at hand. It is very

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symptomatic that the book concludes with the terrorist Professor free in the midst of the multitude, despite the Police knowing perfectly well who he is and what his intentions are. From a deeper point of view, Conrad suggests that the Police is unable to generate the good for the sake of which it was created, that is, order and security. It can only act to repair the surface of things. But to deal with the surface of things presupposes the adjustment to some reality that artificially leaves out the origins or causes of disorder. Nevertheless, if Conrad wants to corroborate the idea that the Police is good for no more than to protect the rich from the dangers which come from society at large and threaten their comfort, then as an institution the Police is little more than a repressive, and therefore, classist, agency. And yet, this putative provisional alliance between Conrad and anarchism sounds a bit far-fetched. There is at least one alternative interpretation to this seeming point of agreement between the author and the terrorists. Maybe Conrad is suggesting that modern society places the repository of order in one specific institution that is explicitly repressive, while it should care more about cultivating and preserving alternative sources of order. Maybe Conrad is calling our attention to the fact that the idea of security essentially as defensive protection is precarious for it can be challenged by anyone who is willing to spread danger. As soon as one no longer shares common social conventions, the Police and the idea of security that it promotes appear as useless, or rather as an obstacle. It is not difficult to understand that as things are the “basis of social order is very unstable”. Far more than petty crime would ever be able to do, it is anarchist terror that puts this stark reality in plain sight.58 In this regard, the anarchist terrorist has a coherent purpose: the disorder of terror is at the service of the destruction of the preceding disorder. Conrad’s irony is not aimed at anarchist deliria only; it is also aimed at the illusions of the guardians of a kind of order that is more apparent than solid and real.59

Notes 1. Institute of Political Studies, Portuguese Catholic University (Lisbon). 2. In the case of Russia, one should be more accurate and mention anarcopopulism. A clear example is provided by Nikolai Ishutin’s secret terrorist organisation, which was divided into cells and was active between 1864 and 1866. Ishutin’s organisation was founded on the revolutionary theories of Russian writers, above all of Chernyshevsky. Its objective was to terrorise members of the Tsarist state apparatus and the great landowners. It was that same organisation which in 1866 led an unsuccessful attempt on Tsar Alexander II’s life. The history of this phenomenon in Russia cannot be properly understood without including the

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rise of the nihilist movement. One the founding moments of this movement, which included writers and philosophers, was Turguenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, in particular the tragedy that the book tries to describe of its main character, the “nihilist” Barazov. Unfortunately, a thorough discussion of the relation between Russian anarchism and the “nihilist” movement exceeds the far more modest purpose of the present article. 3. Quoted by Olivier Hubac-Occhipinti, “Anarchist Terrorists of the Nineteenth Century” in Gérard Chaliand, Arnaud Blin (eds.), The History of Terrorism: From Antiquity to Al Qaeda, English translation by Edward Schneider, Kathryn Pulver, Jesse Browner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 129. 4. Obvious choices would include Dostoyevsky’s The Devils and G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: a Nightmare. 5. Again, one should highlight the difference between anarchism’s apology of violence, on the one hand, and the logical necessity of violence in relation to the consolidation of the revolution, as was upheld by Bolsheviks, on the other hand. See Leo Trotsy’s defence of terrorism as an inexorable logical consequence of the revolutionary will in, Défense du terrorisme (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Critique, 1936). 6. Quoted by Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (London: University of Missouri Press, 1997), vol. VIII, p. 291. 7. Ibid. 8. Quoted by Albert Camus, L’Homme Revolté, (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 212. 9. Quoted by Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. VIII, p. 292. 10. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. VIII, p. 251. 11. Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence (Paris: Marcel Rivière et Cie., 1972), pp. 168-169, n. 2. 12. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. VIII, p. 293. 13. See Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, English translation Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 25-26. 14. Quoted by Yves Ternon, “Russian Terrorism, 1878-1908” in Gérard Chaliand, Arnaud Blin (eds.), The History of Terrorism, p. 158. 15. Ian Watt suggests 1886 as the exact year in which the plot takes place. See “The Political and Social Background of The Secret Agent” in Ian Watt (ed.), Conrad: The Secret Agent (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 229-250. 16. England in the 1880s, the background of Conrad’s book, witnessed the following terrorist attacks within its borders: the assassination of the Secretary of Ireland and his deputy (1882), the attack on Victoria Station in London (1884), the attack on Nelson’s Column (1884), the simultaneous attack on Westminster Hall, the Parliament Chambers, and the Tower of London on 24th January 1885, the attack on The Times’ headquarters (1885). 17. The Secret Agent (New York: WM. H. Wise & Co, 1924), p. 311. 18. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 25. 19. The Secret Agent, “Author’s Note”, p. Xii. 20. It should be noted that Conrad was inspired by a factual event, which involved an explosion in Greenwich Park on 14th February 1894. At the time, only the

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bomber was killed. 21. The diplomatic representative of tsarist despotism collaborates with the disorderly impulse of anarchism. For Conrad, “the old despotism and the new utopianism are complementary forms of moral anarchy” (V. S. Pritchett, An Émigré in Ian Watt (ed.), Conrad: The Secret Agent, p. 134). 22. The Secret Agent, p. 33. 23. Ibid., pp. 32-34. 24. Ibid., p. 306. 25. See Albert Camus, L’Homme Revolté, pp. 218-219. 26. The Secret Agent, p. 73. 27. Bakunin, Confession. Bakunin’s text appears in Jean Préposiet, Histoire de l’anarchisme (Paris: Tallandier, 2005). This quote appears on p. 241. 28. The Secret Agent, p. 67. 29. Ibid., p. 68. 30. Ibid., p. 70. 31. Hannah Arendt, On Violence, p. 42. 32. It is no coincidence that last great act in The Secret Agent is precisely Mrs. Verloc’s suicide. 33. Quoted by Préposiet, p. 414. 34. Ibid., p. 422. 35. Ibid. 36. The Secret Agent, p. 71. 37. Ibid., p. 72 38. Ibid., p. 73. My emphasis. 39. Under Western Eyes is another work by Conrad which would confirm this impression. 40. Conrad abominated anarchism and anarchist groups in general. In The Secret Agent this attitude is revealed in a subtle way. Mr. Verloc, the secret agent, sold two kinds of products in his shop: subversive political literature and pornography. See Stephen Skinner, “‘A Benevolent Institution for the Suppression of Evil’: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and the Limits of Policing”, Journal of Law and Society, vol. XXX, nº 3, 2003, p. 426, n. 48. 41. The Secret Agent, p. 303. 42. Ibid., p. 305. 43. J. Hillis Miller, “From Poets of Reality” in Ian Watt (ed.), Conrad: The Secret Agent, p. 190. 44. Quoted by Yves Ternon, “Russian Terrorism, 1878-1908” in Gérard Chaliand, Arnaud Blin (eds.), The History of Terrorism, p. 150. 45. See The Secret Agent, pp. 81-82. 46. Alex Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 44. 47. The Secret Agent, p. 305. 48. Ibid., p. 309. 49. In Nechaev’s The Catechism of the Revolutionist. 50. Ibid. 51. The Secret Agent, p. 306.

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52. Ibid., p. 266. 53. Ibid., p. 167. 54. Ibid., p. 169. 55. Ibid., p. 171. 56. Ibid., p. 173. 57. Ibid., p. 29. 58. See Stephen Skinner, “‘A Benevolent Institution for the Suppression of Evil’: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and the Limits of Policing”, p. 435. 59. See Ian Watt, “Modern Criticism: General Trends” in Ian Watt (ed.), Conrad: The Secret Agent, p. 73.