The World Trade Center and Global Crisis: Some Critical Perspectives 9780857458643

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
The World Trade Center and Global Crisis: Some Critical Perspectives
An Empire of a Certain Kind
September 11th and After
From Nine-Eleven to Seven-Eleven: The Poverty of Interpretation
Ground Zero Point One: On the Cinematics of History
Humanitarianism, Terror and the Transnational Border
Arab Americans and the Criminalization of Dissent
“My Son is a Fanatic” or How to Have Things Both Ways in a Heritage Debate
Just Wars, Civilisation and Empire in Postmodernity: Perspectives from South of the Rio Grande
September 11 and October 7: From Human Tragedy to Power Politics
The New Leviathan and the Crisis of Criticism in the Social Sciences
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

The World Trade Center and Global Crisis

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 2

GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun Volume 3

CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill Volume 4

EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin Volume 5

STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer

The World Trade Center and Global Crisis Critical Perspectives

f Edited by Bruce Kapferer

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

www.berghahnbooks.com

Paperback edition published in 2004 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2004 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-84545-000-0 Printed in Canada on acid-free paper.

This volume of Critical Interventions was originally published in Social Analysis, vol. 46

CONTENTS

f The World Trade Center and Global Crisis: Some Critical Perspectives Bruce Kapferer 1

An Empire of a Certain Kind Marshall Sahlins

5 September 11th and After Keith Hart 11

From Nine-Eleven to Seven-Eleven: The Poverty of Interpretation Jonathan Friedman 18

Ground Zero Point One: On the Cinematics of History Allen Feldman 26

Humanitarianism, Terror and the Transnational Border Michael Humphrey 37

Arab Americans and the Criminalization of Dissent Ibrahim Aoude 46

“My Son is a Fanatic” or How to Have Things Both Ways in a Heritage Debate Michael Rowlands 52

Just Wars, Civilisation and Empire in Postmodernity: Perspectives from South of the Rio Grande John Gledhill 59

September 11 and October 7: From Human Tragedy to Power Politics Leif Manger 71

The New Leviathan and the Crisis of Criticism in the Social Sciences Bruce Kapferer 79

Notes on Contributors 86

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Some Critical Perspectives

f Bruce Kapferer

The World Trade Center disaster is an event of such significance that it exhausts interpretation. This is not because of the enormity of the event in itself. Numerous humanly caused destructions of just the last hundred years dwarf it in scale, and the attention now addressed to it may over the next year appear disproportionate. But events are never significant in the imagination of human beings independently of the way they are socially constructed into significance in the context of the social, political and cultural forces that somehow are articulated through a particular event, and thrown into relief by its occurrence. Undoubtedly, much of the significance that attaches to the World Trade Center catastrophe relates to the character of the conflict it defines, and the several paradoxes the event gathers up in its prism:

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of the strong against the weak, the powerful as victims, the cycle of revenge, the generalization of suffering, the vulnerability of technological potency, and so on. In many ways, the World Trade Center horror was an event waiting to happen, and when it occurred the event itself became a catalyst and impetus for the changing and redirection of global realities. This forum was in the making before the World Trade Center destruction had happened, and as part of a new regular feature in Social Analysis. The overall objective of the forum is to focus social science discussion on contemporary events, in ways that draw upon a diversity of perspectives and expertise. The aim is not to present brief statements of the journalistic what-really-happened kind, but to locate current events within the problematics of critical approaches in the humanities and social sciences, both in a way that may provide specific insight, and in a way that may have general implications for orientations within a variety of social science and humanistic disciplines. Originally, the focus of this initiating forum was to have been on the crisis involving the Australian government surrounding the Tampa incident which raised larger questions concerning the redirections of state power, sovereignty and territoriality in the context of a growing crisis of refugees in the larger political and economic environment of globalization. The current situation of refugees is tantamount to a new kind of human migration creating a world demographic shift of potentially unsurpassed political, economic and cultural consequences. It is a movement substantially different from earlier migrations or translocations of populations in human history either in ancient or modern times. No sooner was the decision made to focus debate around Tampa when it was overtaken in the most dramatic of ways by the World Trade Center and this is now the key focus of this forum.

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However, on quick reflection, this later event magnified dimensions already at the heart of Tampa, and far more poignantly and encompassingly drew together a variety of forces dynamically at work in the shaping of global realities. The issues that Tampa raises are by no means reduced as the contributions of Michael Humphrey, Ibrahim Aoude, Leif Manger (all of whom have extensive empirical research experience in the realities that have produced crises like the Tampa incident) should make evident, and in effect are expanded in the shadow of the World Trade Center disaster. Michael Rowlands makes this clear in his reaction focussing on the situation, particularly confronting Muslims, in the post WTC context of Blair’s Britain. The statements presented here are necessarily brief and highly selected and focussed. They open with Marshall Sahlins’ allegory on the hubris and fate of ancient Athens. He carries forward that long tradition of critical history with a vital moral for contemporary developments that is clear in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian Wars or of those in more recent contexts of Empire such as Edward Gibbon’s remarkable Decline and Fall. Sahlins’ cautionary tale was written in response to President Bush’s State of the Union Address. From the past in the present, the comments then move to a variety of reflections on current developments surrounding the World Trade Center attack in relation to the larger political and economic orders in which we are currently placed. Keith Hart, who has a longstanding interest in processes of globalization and for whom the WTC event marks the emergence of radical new forms, considers some of the several directions social and political movements might go in the aftermath of the attack on the twin towers. Jonathan Friedman extends on Hart, evaluating some of the social science and journalistic responses which have been most pronounced regarding the forces underlying the WTC event. Allen Feldman explores more closely the media construction of the event and the

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character of the historicizing and narratizing of the event. He does so from the standpoint of his own well-known perspective on discourses of violence. One of the more alarming reactions to the event is the demonization and singularization of Islam and the unashamedly resurfacing of a largely Western exclusionary and prejudicial practice that appears to confuse an ideologically dominant discourse concerning human rights. Humphrey, Aoude and Rowlands are highly pertinent here. Gledhill and Manger both write from their positioning within their fieldwork locales, peripheries now made central by the WTC attack. Gledhill engages his knowledge of reactions in Mexico to reflect on the implications for Empire. Manger contrasts his experience of Muslim responses to those encountered at the American Anthropological Meetings which alerts us once again to the deep ambiguities within the anthropological enterprise. Together with all the contributors to this Forum there is an assertion by Gledhill and Manger of the importance placed by anthropologists on contextualization and the dangers of a shift to surface reactions—a failure of a key anthropological project. Kapferer’s comment closes on the import of the WTC for reawakening the humanities and social sciences from a critical complacency. He asserts that the forces that may underline a global crisis that events like the WTC mark reach deeply into the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, risking a critical role which was often their foundational spirit. The contributions as a whole are intended to stimulate debate and readers of the journal are invited to make their own contribution in reaction to the arguments here or to suggest other points of critical focus for the forum pages of this journal.

AN EMPIRE OF A CERTAIN KIND

f Marshall Sahlins

Rallying the Athenians after a second year of war with the Spartans, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles warned his countrymen that they were not only in peril of losing their empire but of suffering “from the animosities incurred in its exercise.” “For what you hold,” he told them, “is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny. Perhaps it was wrong to take it, but it would be dangerous to let it go.” Tyranny abroad was the work of the first and (some would say) the greatest democracy known to history. But then, the same sort of contradiction between freedom and subjugation inhabited Athens’ domestic politics, where immigrants, slaves and their descendants, as well as women, were denied many of the democratic privileges enjoyed by the minority of the population, the full male citizens.

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The Athenians developed an empire of a distinctive kind—and distinctively disposed to brew up a volatile mixture of attraction and humiliation among the people dominated by it. It was not like the European colonial empires of modern times which physically imposed their own state on other territories and societies. Gained by invasion and maintained by occupation, such imperial powers were actually sovereign over the subject peoples, governing them with all the necessary means of administration, regulation and compulsion. But the Athenian empire was domination without administration. In many ways it was an empire of signs—signs of power: magnificent, draconian or both at once, that brought other states more or less voluntarily into submission, perhaps for their own advantage and protection but surely on pain of their destruction. Athens did not directly rule the others, but everywhere she could she intervened in local politics, often by force or by show of force, to create proxy democracies that would be like and compliant with her own. Imperialism as a democratic mission. Many of the tributary cities were nominally “allies,” culturally bound to Athens by common heritage (as Ionian Greeks) and politically bound in a League of which she was the hegemon. Securing the sea routes and the resources of trade, the empire was the political condition of the great commercial enterprise that made Athens the richest and most populous city-state of the Hellenic world. In turn, the wealth the Athenians drew from the empire went into the displays of high culture and brute force by which they kept it under control. The marvelous and the murderous: an empire of domination without administration works largely by demonstration-effects of its power. On the one hand, Athens was a spectacle of culture that functioned—to adopt a Hobbesian phrase of governance—“to keep them all in awe.” Such was the politics of this glory that was Greece: the magnificence of her architecture and art, the

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brilliance of her theater, the glittering processions and ceremonies, the Academy and the Agora, the gymnasia and the symposia. “Our city,” boasted Isocrates, “is a festival for those who come to visit her.” Subject cities notably visited her with their annual tributes at the time of the principal religious festival, the City Dionysia, which was also the theater season. Even those who never saw Athens could know her superiority by the reputation of her writers and philosophers, her politicians and her athletes. Almost inevitably, then, her greatest enemy, oligarchic Sparta, opposed her by a strategy of cultural negation: adopting a material fundamentalism and a puritanical moralism that denied the values Athens knew as civilization. A mere collection of old-fashioned villages, Sparta, commented Thucydides, could show no measure of her fame in the poverty of the remains she would leave for posterity; whereas, the ruins of Athens in time to come would make her power seem twice as great as it actually was. On the other hand, those who were not awed by Athens’ glory, who did not acknowledge her superiority or revolted against it, would feel her sting—again by way of demonstration. In the empire of signs, force too is a sign of force, perhaps the most effective if not the most economical, aiming to induce the fear and obedience of the many out of the brutal example made of the few. So argued the bellicose Cleon, urging the Athenians to respond to the revolt of the allied city of Mytilene by exterminating the lot of them. “Punish them as they deserve,” he said, “and teach your allies by a striking example that the penalty of rebellion is death.” In this case, a counter argument (to the same exemplary effect) that it would be unwise to kill the innocent common people, who were everywhere Athens’ natural democratic allies, limited the Athenians to the slaughter of the thousand or so Mytilenian aristocrats they held responsible for the revolt. But in the famous case of

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Melos, a Spartan colony that would not submit to the Athenians, offering instead to remain neutral and friendly to them, the outcome was much less fortunate. Your friendship, the Athenians told them, would only be “an argument to our subjects of our weakness.” This was the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian war, well after the Mytilene affair, when demonstrations of Athenians’ might and resolve were taking on more and more strategic value. So now, delivering an ultimatum to the Melians, they in effect said, you’re either with us or you’re against us. If states maintain their independence, it means they are strong, and if “we do not molest them it is because we are afraid; so that beside extending our empire, we should gain in security by your subjection.” Counting on the justice of their cause and the feckless hope that the Spartans or the gods would save them, the Melians refused to surrender, and were wiped out. All the men were killed, all the women and children sold into slavery. Not that they hadn’t been warned of Athens’ will to power. “Of the gods we believe,” the Athenians told them, “and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.” Thus driven by a desire of power after power, the Athenians in the end overreached themselves, and they lost everything. They had gotten to the point where it seemed they would collapse if they could not expand. “We cannot fix the exact limit at which our empire shall stop; we have reached a position in which we must not be content with retaining what we have but must scheme to extend it, for if we cease to rule others, we shall be in danger of being ruled ourselves.” So spoke Alcibiades in winning the approval of the Athenian assembly for the grandiose Sicilian campaign that ended in complete disaster, and set the course of empire toward decline and defeat. But already at the beginning, nearly fifty years before the Peloponnesian war, when the Athenians, in beating off the Persian menace, discovered their own destiny as a sea

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power, they set in motion a geopolitics of expansion that was almost a formula for spinning out of control. Increasing rule of the seas meant developing the commercial power that would deliver the necessary money, materiel and manpower; as conversely, increasing commerce meant developing the maritime and military strength necessary to secure it. Democratic Athens became a predatory power— and a victim of the ideology that it could only secure its own freedom by dominating others. Athens’ burgeoning population and business soon made it dependant on critical energy imports from barbarian (i.e., non-Greek) lands situated at the limits of its military force: the rich food grains of distant Sicily, Egypt and the Crimea. Placed at the center of a sphere of domination that was thus moving outward in many directions, Athenian interests, costs and dangers were all subject to geographic multiplication on the order of the square of the radius of an expanding circumference times 3.4159. To meet its difficulties, Athens could put pressure on fellow Greeks, as by turning allies into tributaries, or she could find new barbarians to conquer. In either case, the empire that brought well-being in the homeland spread humiliation and resentment abroad. Caught in a vicious cycle of expansion and repression, Athens could be generally detested in the same degree she became glorious and admired. The Peloponnesian war was a testimony to this cycle of domination and resistance—and over time, exaggerated it. As opposed to the incidents that set it off, the war’s “truest cause,” as Thucydides said in a famous passage, “was the growing power of the Athenians and the fear this inspired in the Spartans.” If the war then required the Athenians to further exploit their “growing power,” it also offered their subjects new possibilities of revolt and (Spartan) liberation. Cleon’s warning to the Athenians in the fifth year of the conflict was even stronger than Pericles’—“your empire is a despotism and your subjects

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disaffected conspirators”—and events did not prove him wrong. At the end of the war, as the Spartans under Lysander closed in on their besieged and starving city, the Athenians, it is said, mourned for their loss and still more for their fate, as they feared they would be dealt with as they had dealt with so many other peoples. All Greece rejoiced to see this city fall and those they had driven out of their own cities now restored to them (Xenephon). Thucydides tells us that he did not set out to write a history merely in order to please the immediate public. He dared to hope his recounting of the Peloponnesian war would “last forever”—inasmuch as human histories of this kind were sure to happen again. So he would be content, he said, “if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which, in the course of human things, will at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.”

SEPTEMBER 11TH

AND

AFTER

f Keith Hart

We are connected at last, humanity that is. World society is a reality. It has come home to roost in America. The reduction of the World Trade Center to rubble marked this in the most vivid way possible. The world is one. Boom. That unity is violent. Boom. The sudden shock of recognition that America is in the world, not apart from it. The curious thing about the first decade after the Cold War is that, even as America took over the world, Americans, who come from all over the world, became more insular, more separated from it than before. John Locke once wrote: “In the beginning all the world was America,” meaning in a state of nature. Well, now all of our world is America again, but this time it reflects the age of money and unequal property that succeeded the state of nature in Locke’s scheme. The task of establishing civil government, successor to the age of money, awaits us. After the catastrophe, a time for rationality. But reason works better backwards than forwards. Rationalization of

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the past is more effective than attempts to project a rational future. Today’s terrorism has a specific origin in the covert operations of the US government under Reagan during the 1980s. Following the defeat in Vietnam, the Americans fought the Cold War through Third World proxies trained to use terror as a means of subduing civilian populations: in ex-Portuguese Africa, Unita and Renamo (supported by the outlaw South African regime); in Central America, the Contras; in Afghanistan, the Mujaheddin, and as we all now know, Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the IMF opened up the rest to the predations of corporate capital and to the drain of debt interest. When the Berlin Wall fell, Bush the Elder orchestrated the Gulf War for domestic consumption by television and then everything went quiet for a decade. The interventions in former Yugoslavia were minor policing operations in comparison. The Clinton years, in retrospect, now seem like a belle époque. Wall Street contrived the biggest boom in economic history, the internet connected us in a single network, and the last checks on American military power evaporated. The ‘bobos’ of Manhattan turned inwards to enjoy life at the center of the world, while the rest of America was absorbed in itself. The cracks in all this were already beginning to show—principally as a collapse of internet stocks and then of the telecoms boom—when Hollywood’s perennial images of spectacular destruction were enacted for real on September 11. So now we have an unlimited war on terrorism, waged against the same Islamic fundamentalism that the CIA once encouraged in the Mujaheddin. This Republican regime relishes the opportunity to range worldwide without consultation, and without even paying lip service to international law. After 1945, the USA decided to build up Western Europe and Japan as its junior partners in a new project of collective empire. The rules of this collective were set by

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the American reaction to Suez: the appearance of joint decision-making and participation, but only one active policeman allowed. This was supposed to be different from the European imperialism whose replacement by nationstates was supervised by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. It is celebrated as such by Hardt and Negri in their bestseller, Empire. It was established practice as recently as Kosovo. Yet now American columnists boast of their country’s freedom to act as it likes, a freedom prepared for by countless international treaties left unsigned. At home, Bush the Younger’s appeals to ‘the nation’ have produced a stampede to conform; anti-terrorist legislation and judicial practice promise to overthrow hard-won civil liberties; and Americans try to come to terms with estrangement from a world that resents their careless wealth and unfettered power. In the name of anti-terrorism, the satellite governments introduce their own versions of internal repression; border controls and surveillance in general are stepped up; and, while only the British have volunteered to be the Yankee imperial bag-carrier, no-one else has mustered serious criticism of the Americans’ conduct of the Afghan war. The immediate aftermath of September 11 thus looks like a regression. For some time now, it has seemed that the old corporate bureaucracies were in retreat, when faced with the rise of a global network society. Even the capitalist corporations have gone through a frenzy of downsizing and outsourcing during the last decade, in a drive to take on a more flexible network form. State capitalism, the attempt to manage accumulation and markets through national bureaucracies, has been eroded by a tide of electronic money flowing across borders with virtual impunity, while the ability of corporations to dictate terms to national governments is growing every year. Criminal markets for drugs, arms and bootleg copies of everything dominate trade in much of the world. Now we have seen a band of terrorists, employing the techniques of informal economy

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and network society, produce the most dramatic public theatre in memory. And how does the Bush regime respond? With B52s bombing a country into a stone-age to which it had already returned. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was a universal symbol of the people’s triumph over bureaucratic power, this is the counter-revolution, contrived by a ruling elite threatened for a decade by increased freedom of social connection and reduced popular fear of central power. What is new is the unilateral assumption of this function by the American government. We might call it ‘state capitalism in one country.’ But the rest of the world’s unpopular regimes know that it shores up their own powers of rule, even if they are not being given a token role in the action. It is convenient for the rulers of our unipolar world to focus attention on cultural politics abstracted from history—on the struggle between good and evil, liberal enlightenment and religious bigotry, ‘the American way’ and a recalcitrant Islam. Our task should be to expose the social contradictions that this ideology conceals. For this is a capitalist world and capitalism is not standing still while the media hang breathlessly on every minor development in Afghanistan. What democratic forces are emerging to confront a corporate capitalism whose hegemony has never been more universal than now? This question entails another. How might we break up the idea of a monolithic America, that rhetoric of national unity on which Bush depends for popular support, in order to identify the forces within American society ready to oppose their own government and corporations? This means refusing to equate the US ruling élite with the American people and their instinct for democracy. Knee-jerk anti-Americanism leaves out of the global struggle against neo-liberal capitalism many of the elements that are best placed to play an effective part. We must distinguish between the American state and the American people, even if today in an atmosphere of perceived national crisis many Americans are reluctant

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to do so. Against Bush’s version of America as lawless world-bully and institutional expression of corporate capitalism, there is another living tradition representing America as a self-sufficient federal democracy, with weak central government, offering a home for the world’s oppressed peoples. The fight is on to save the commons of human society, culture and ecology from the encroachments of corporate private property. This is no longer principally a question of conserving the earth’s natural resources, although it is definitely that too, nor of the deterioration of public services left to the mercies of privatized agencies. The information age has raised the significance of intangible commodities. Increasingly we buy and sell ideas and their reproduction is made infinitely easier by digital technologies. Accordingly, the large corporations have launched a campaign to assert their exclusive ownership of what until recently might reasonably have been considered shared culture to which all have free and equal access. Across the board, separate battles are being fought, without any real sense of the common cause that they embody. The napsterization of popular music, harbinger of peer-to-peer exchange between individual computers, is one such battle pitting the feudal barons of the music business against our common right to transmit songs as we wish. The world of visual images, of film, television and video, is likewise a site of struggle sharpened by fast-breaking technologies affecting their distribution and use. In numerous subtle and not-so-subtle ways, our ability to draw freely on a common heritage of language, literature and law is being undermined by copyright. People who never knew they shared a common infrastructure of culture are now being forced to acknowledge it by aggressive policies of corporate privatization. And these policies are being promoted at the international level by the same American government whose armed forces now seem free to run amok in the world.

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In the case of the internet, what began as a free communications network for a scientific minority is now the contested domain of giant corporations and governments. The open source software movement, setting Linux and an army of hackers against Microsoft’s monopoly, has opened up fissures within corporate capitalism itself. The shift to manufacture of food varieties has introduced a similar struggle to agriculture, amplified by a revival of ‘organic’ farming in the context of growing public concern about genetic modification. The pharmaceutical companies try to ward off the threat posed to their lucrative monopolies by cheap generics aimed at the Third World populations who need them most. The buzzword is ‘intellectual property rights,’ slogan of a corporate capitalism determined to impose antiquated ‘command and control’ methods on world markets whose constitutive governments have been cowed into passivity. The largest demonstrations against the neo-liberal world order, from Seattle to Genoa, have been mobilized to a significant degree by the need to oppose this particular version of global private property. The events of September 11 have temporarily diminished this movement, especially in North America, just as they have added to the powers of coercion at the disposal of governments everywhere. In this sense, the global movement for greater democracy and less inequality has suffered a reverse. A large proportion of the activists resisting the corporate takeover of world society belong to the western middle classes. This is so whether we are talking about the internet, software, cultural products, food, drugs, pollution, arms control or the exploitation of cheap labour. Europeans make their own distinctive contribution, but many of these movements have their source in America. The Free Software Foundation is American. The American courts tried Microsoft. Napster was an American invention. American farmers are fighting rents imposed on food vari-

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eties by corporate monopolists. American consumers resist being made the guinea pigs of drugs companies. Of course, these activities can be and are represented by corporations, their lawyers and political stooges as ‘unAmerican.’ But they are an expression of what is best in America: its democracy. It is a widely shared and justified belief that the age of money, whose culmination we are witnessing today, is not in the interest of most human beings; that the American government and giant corporations (half of them American, a third European) are indifferent to that common interest of humanity. The rest of the world needs Americans to join them in the struggle for decent human standards in social life. They bring tremendous resources of technology, education and economic power to that struggle, but above all they bring their country’s liberal political traditions. It would be a pity if the effect of September 11 were to obscure that possibility of global democratic solidarity, leaving the world stage to Texas oilmen and Muslim fanatics, with their mutual conspiracy to divide and rule.

FROM NINE-ELEVEN TO SEVEN-ELEVEN The Poverty of Interpretation

 Jonathan Friedman

Witnessing Since September 11 2001, there have been a limited number of reactions beyond the initial shock which some might say was the result of media coverage, the actual horror of seeing two planes crash into the Twin Towers. The fact of witnessing the event must be understood here, and the proof of its significance is that the attack on the allimportant Pentagon which could not be seen directly, did not provoke the same kind of immediate response. The actual incident is worth consideration since quite a bit has been written and said about it.

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“I watched the scene over and over again! I couldn’t stop watching it. It was horrible and fascinating at the same time, unreal yet real!”

What is the nature of disbelief? This could not happen. It was unreal. It was more than a shocking experience. There was an enormity of the event that is difficult to ingest. Is this the nature of the extra-ordinary? Were we not well prepared for this in a certain sense, the disaster films had certainly rehearsed us for it. Children’s questions come to mind. What is it like for a plane to penetrate a skyscraper and emerge on the other side? Why doesn’t the building just fall over? Imagine a plane coming in through offices, right through the glass facade. Were people hit and thrown out of the other side? How fast was the plane travelling? What was the impact like for the passengers? Must we work this out in the imagination to come to terms with it emotionally? It is important in any case not to confuse this immediate reaction with that which has been produced by the media, and by intellectuals who have sought to interpret the event. The latter consists in linking the event to either motives or intentionalities, to reasons that are not necessarily immanent in the event itself. The immediate response would naturally be to know what the immediate intentions were, assuming that this was not a mere accident. And an immediate next step is why do three commandeered planes attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (a fourth plane may have been aimed at the White House). Well, there is someone out there who does not like something in our country.

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Interpreting Among the major reactions that have occupied the media and intellectual discussions are the following. One reaction is a combination of fear and anger, driven by a strong emotion to defend the country from its enemies. It sanctions counter-attacks, and invests itself in eradicating the terrorists who have done this thing and who would destroy our world. This is perhaps the secondary reaction of people who do not see themselves as living in the “belly of the beast,” who think well of their country and have invested in something they want to preserve. Another reaction is the strained converse of the latter. It is critical of the United States as an imperial power, a power that has too often demonstrated the kind of arrogance that might incite this kind of action. Within this reaction, there are a great majority who condemn the action itself while finding a reason to engage in something other than retaliation. But there are also those who think that the US in some sense deserved what it got. The field of this reaction is complex and partly self-contradictory. A third reaction is the real antithesis of the first one. It understands the attack as an act of righteousness by a civilization that has been dishonored by Western hegemony. It speaks in terms of jihad, in terms of the loss of the Caliphate at the hands of that Western agent, Mustapha Kemal, in terms of the necessity of instituting a new world order, one based on sharia. While not always expressed directly, as in the words and texts of certain extremist or fundamentalist organizations, it exists as a background text that can be elicited when needed. One should note here the possible importance of Wahabism, a sect originating in Syria, but which became at the turn of the century critical in the formation of the Saudite dynasty. Wahabism is based on an alliance between warriors and priests.

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I shall not, in this short space, dwell on all these reactions, but shall limit myself to one that is closest to home, the second response, one characteristic of liberal-left intellectuals and media people. The structure of this response is interesting in itself. It contains the following propositions: 1.

2.

3.

The West is the “bad-guy.” The United States in particular is an arrogant superpower today with no major enemies after the downing of the Wall. The US exploits the rest of the world, and is the single most important perpetrator of global inequality and excessive poverty. This exploitation and inequality is the root cause of the hate that has grown up against the United States in particular, and against the wealthy Western World in general. While no citizens of any country deserve to die as a result of this, we should understand that it is the long term effect of the arrogance of power.

Now a number of discourses can be deduced from these basic propositions. One, voiced early on by Chomsky and many others is that the attack on Americans is nothing compared to what Americans have done elsewhere in the world, the tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of people that Americans have killed in various military actions and undeclared wars and campaigns of starvation. And of course there is the crucial issue of the state of Israel, supported by the United States in its war against the Arabs, and more specifically, its occupation of Palestinian territory. It is interesting to note here that while for Western supporters of the Palestinians, Israel is an outpost or a lackey of American imperialism, for many Arabs, the United States is itself a Jewish controlled state, thus reversing the perspective on power. Another is that while it is understandable that people should react to being attacked, mak-

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ing war on terrorists and on Afghanistan is no solution. Alternative solutions range from negotiation to a Marshall Plan for the world’s poor. The conditions that are assumed to be the cause of this attack must be changed. There are common themes here, and one in particular, that seems to lie implicit in all that has been written and said. Supposing that the West, and especially the US represent imperial power, what is asked for is that they be morally accountable imperial powers. In other words, empire is OK as long as it is moral, and this implies that it is truly engaged in reducing inequalities within the world, in respecting cultural difference, that it should struggle to be a non-empire. This is a moral rather than a political perspective on the world. The United States has been a shameful and arrogant empire, supporting all the wrong kinds of people and politics. There is a strange paradox in this. Empire is apparently OK perhaps, but it does need to be reformed. Intellectuals are nervous about the world. In their post-nationalist fervor, they are perhaps more positive to empire, to some form of global governance, although most of them would prefer a true global government rather than the Washington consensus. In any case, global power is proper and necessary but it must serve the Good itself. So the West should be more understanding of the evil of its ways: to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances (Said, New York Times, 16-7-01).

But there are strange bedfellows around this time, some who have gone much further in their critique, pinning the

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blame not only on arrogant power, but on imperialism and expansionism itself. How can all our meddling not fail to spark some horrible retribution … Have we not suffered enough from Pan Am 103, to the World Trade Center [the first bombing], to the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salem—not to know that interventionism is the incubator of terrorism. Or will it take some cataclysmic atrocity on U.S. soil to awaken our global gamesmen to the going price of empire? (Buchanan 18-9-01, citing an earlier speech.)

And right-winger Buchanan goes to the limit with his argument: “Either America finds an exit strategy from empire, or we lose our republic” (Buchanan op. cit.).

Is there a difference here between liberal-left and extreme right? Perhaps, but in this case it is in the isolationism of the right. And the opposite of isolationism is the Empire of Good. There are some who believe that the US is the only source of evil in the world, and that therefore European states represent something closer to the good with their missionary rhetoric of aid and good deeds. Look out here for the total hypocrisy that is revealed when comparing this to the complex motives that lie behind it all. The project of empire is alive and well in Europe as well. It is also alive, but not well, in certain quarters of the Muslim world, in the form of post-Ottoman blues, a kind of subaltern desire for an empire of sharia. And when I say this I am met often by a knee-jerk reaction that is molded by the inversion of Western ideology. How can you say such a thing? You must be a reactionary. Nothing bad can come from the so-called oppressed of the earth. This is one of

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the reactions from the globalization quarters—the liberalprogressive wing of the new global governance-imperial position. This is the position that is emerging in the vacuum left by the left—a moral-globalism that would have the wise rule the world.

And on the Other Voices? Is this a clash of civilizations? In an ideological sense there is evidence that the Islamic groups involved in terrorist activity are closer adherents of Huntington than Western liberals who have lambasted his work as both reactionary and wrong. Of course the relation cannot be understood in terms of regional conflict, especially since much of the Islamist discourse is produced within globally dispersed networks whose main centers are in Europe and the United States. Dealing with the issue of networks, of course, does not detract from the ideological production of religious and regional conflict, for such are the terms of the discourse. It is said that the relation between the Jews and the United States is crucial since the kingpin in much of the discussion is Israel. Many of the pronouncements from Islamic extremists adopt the “elders of Zion protocols” and interpret the US support for Israel as a Jewish conspiracy. The existence of a Jewish State on Arab soil is a clear denigration of integrity that must be met. And if this is all linked to a larger scheme of Jewish world dominance, then we have a logic of violence all ready to go into operation. The structures of the network are clear enough for those interested. Musa Abu Marzuk, executive officer of Hamas, arrested in 1995 in the United States, had lived in that country for fifteen years, had connections to most other major terrorist leaders and was involved in a multimillion dollar laundering operation. Bashir Nafi who was

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deported in 1996, had been working for WISE (World Islamic Studies Enterprise) attached to the University of South Florida. The head of WISE, Ramadan Abdullah Shallah was professor at the University of South Florida from 1991 to 1995 when he surfaced in Damascus as head of Islamic Jihad. Investigation of the organization revealed a deep involvement in terrorist organization. The point for an anthropologist, even assuming that I am wrong, is that there is a tendency in intellectual reactions to repress the intentionality of those involved in the events, by translating their actions into a metonymic expression of world poverty and injustice, or even worse, making them into the dumb ventriloquists of American arrogance. This is not to deny the fact that the US, but Europe as well, of course, have been leading actors in the past one hundred and fifty years of imperial expansion. There may well be tendencies in the current global alliances for the emergence of empire, for the political institutionalization of world order, but this is, historically, always a late stage in the pulsating history of imperial organization, and it is usually an expression of a demise of hegemony that is realized subsequently. Intellectuals who insist that everything following the attack on the Twin Towers, and perhaps even the attack itself is part of a conspiracy aimed at the establishment of total US power, are living the fantasy of their own fear, in this new age of uncertainty, a fear that things might really be much worse in the not so long run, that their own well-being might be in jeopardy. And in all of it, to commit the atrociously antiethnographic act of reducing the perpetrators to mere mindless puppets is, not so paradoxically, to purify the imperialist mentality which they would see fit to demolish.

GROUND ZERO POINT ONE On The Cinematics Of History

f Allen Feldman

The title is already a theory of disaster, of its epistemology and its historiography, which I address as a cinematics of history. I want to examine the imaginary of disaster, the fantasies the disaster of Sepember eleventh both draws upon and has authorized. I view these fantasies as formations of collective memory, and therefore of collective forgetfulness. Thus, they conserve the memory of disaster, but in particular forms that comply with the contours of power and hegemony, in particular forms that divorce the disaster from a multiplex and open-ended history. Thus, I am interested in exploring how disaster is pathologized through cultural narration. Such an approach challenges any polarity between structure and event, any view that the attack on the WTC was a sensationalistic diversion from deeper structural inequities of an economic or geopolitical charac-

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ter. Rather, the pathologization of disaster through residual and available cultural narratives implicates the disasterevent in depth structures of historical perception and agency. Ground Zero is what WTC as the target of the attack is being called in New York: Zero as a spatial construct demarcating an emergency zone, but it is also a temporal periodization; Zero as terminus, as eschaton and Zero as origin point, as arche. Ground Zero is also sheer negativity, a wound of absence, a deletion in the urban landscape, an erasure of up to 3000 lives and of the incomplete stories of their ending; it is a site of disappearance of architecture and persons and is also called the frozen zone as a site of stasis. We are reminded of the French phrase of Roland Barthe, “the degree zero,” the horizon line of a perception or practices, an origin grounded, not in positivity but in discontinuity and break. As the building collapsed inwardly upon itself, American historical consciousness has incurred a new fold, delineating an inside, and outside—a demarcation of epochs and identities: terrorist/victim, freedom/fundamentalism, justice/vengeance, civilization/barbarism. Ground Zero is also part of the tradition of American exceptionalism, our removal from the ordinary process of history; the unending search for a fresh start that wipes away the past; the reinvention of identity such as the nationalization of the WTC dead, the embarking on a new crusade; the introduction of a second act in American lives now gone, a second act of retribution. But one cannot write or theorize from ground zero; it is sheer absence that organizes a multitude of presences; thus, the position of 0.1 marking the space and time from which I can think about ground zero, the remove from which we can correct the panoptical exhaustiveness of media clips of the building endlessly collapsing. These clips are replayed over and over, being grafted to the nervous systems of the many New Yorkers who compulsively

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watch these scenes without achieving visual resolution or transparency. For in its sheer repetition, media realism inadvertently confesses it cannot encompass the event, but merely mark a boundary of the indiscernible, a memory, not of what happened but a memory of its experiential and perceptual resistance.

Video/Televisual The attack momentarily split video, a sensory prosthetic, from television, a cultural form of story telling and fact setting. The post-split narrative restoration corresponded to a post-traumatic numbness from which some of us are still trying to awake. On September 11, I would propose that collective memory was momentarily suspended like a stopwatch. Reality shattered referential time and space, and yet an image sequence was created, deeply anchored in a residual cinematics of history. However, in leaping its frame, in shifting context from the optical to the material, from cinematic time to architectural death, from the eye to the body, the erector set mentality of the attacks of September 11 stopped the clockwork instruments of collective everyday narration. From this stasis emerged a flood of undigested visions and effects; these images and events were traumatic to the very degree that we can only negotiate their reality by forgetfulness, that is, by reframing their picture shock and encapsulating their assault on the collective nervous system, by endowing them with a Darstellung, a mode of presentation. A perfect example of narrative failure of the splitting of video and TV can be found in an early BBC commentary that occurred immediately after the initial WTC plane crash. Three minutes into the BBC coverage of the first assault, the second plane emerged from the middle of the

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right hand screen and penetrated the South Tower behind the smoke of the first building. The commentators were busy debating whether the first crash had been an accident or an intentional act. The two BBC commentators were that engrossed in monitoring the first assault with speculative narrative that they talked themselves right through the second plane crash without noticing it, although their eyes had been glued to the enlarged video screen showing both buildings in smoke. The optics of the commentators were so encased in their narrative frame that a blindness, an optical unconscious was generated for a confused viewing audience. As the smoke of the second crash filled the screen the BBC commentators later reported rumors of a second plane without realizing that their own video tape had already captured the event and that they had already eye-witnessed the second attack. At one point on that dreadful morning, these same commentators questioned a reporter on the street and mis-spoke tellingly by asking: “Any word yet of futilities?”

Narrative Numbness Narratological numbness is not the inability to tell the story, but rather the recourse to axiomatic story forms and emplotments that primarily restore our belief in our ability to narrate, to suture an experiential wound with a logos that forges an interventionist memory, a memory that both shows, screens and eliminates, and thereby denies disaster itself as open-ended historical experience. Narratological numbness, a prescribed form of remembering and forgetting was both the media’s and government’s response to September 11. Its first primitive form of numbed narrative was that of traumatic repetition, the logic of the stopwatch applied to the video loop of the dying buildings. This was an attempt to

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master the vertigo of the paranoid space of disaster through the temporal control of video replay in which the building burst into flames and fell down time after time, the buildings fell in time after time. This repetition cinematically and incrementally trained the viewer’s gaze by reinserting narratological time into the scene of temporal and spatial anarchy and stasis. It was as if the audience was being given temporal therapy by witnessing a mechanical sequence of events, over and over, which restored the linearity of time, which had been suspended with the assaults. In an axiomatic essay written forty years ago, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann identified the social experience of historical and natural disaster with unique moments of de-reification, the momentary suspension of social utilities of time and space and embodiment, the interruption of the thing-like functioning of society that could allow the horizon-line emergence of another historiography with emancipatory potentials.1 Writing in the early 1960s they could not recognize what Jean Luc Goddard made us understand twenty-five years later in his film trilogy, Histoire du Cinema, that our historical experience of the twentieth century is entangled with our cinematized memory of modernity. And this cinematic memory, which likely, informed the selection of the twin tower as target as well as the response of the audience of victim-bystanders, has already inserted certain narrative closures, directions and foreshortenings into the witness experience. The sequence of narratological and historicizing forms was familiar. The disaster threw New York outside of time and space, thus, the return to order was recapitulated in the ontogenesis of historiography. At times the narratological emplotments followed each other in sequence, and in other instances they constituted an overlapping stratigraphy of discourse with no necessary continuity between them. Initially, there was the cosmogony myth, the circular replication of the ur-traumatic event that brings history and

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identity into being, the building standing yet dying and the building destroyed. This visual monument preserved the memory of the original inscription of trauma on social consciousness. This was followed by the epic and metonymical stitching together of dispersed and disjointed stories within which all tales, divided between death and survival, had more or less equivalent significance similar to the narrative logic of the Medieval chronicle. This was followed by the emergence of theodicy, under which events could be hierarchically ordered within a dualist homology informed by the identification of evil. Bush’s Civilization/Barbarian dichotomy as a motor of theodical history is an emplotment that hearkens back to Herodotus and his stories of the Greeks and Persian wars. This was closely followed by the wedding of history to patriarchal law, as Bush identified the wanted poster of the American Frontier as a core text of that civilization he defended. This sequence encapsulated a gendered movement from feminized bereavement and social empathy to the masculine hierarchy of the lawgiver versus the lawbreaker, and the executioner versus the punished. Of course both men and women identified or remain indifferent to these positions. Since this sequence introduced prosecutorial history as intrinsic to the nation’s political geography, we slipped from the crusader-have-gunwill-travel motif to symbolic ethnocide. Bush, stressing his Texas gutturals, mutters on air that he could not care less whether the perpetuators are apprehended alive or draped over an American military saddle. Bush also identifies the Barbarian with evil, and thus South Asian-Americans are killed, beaten, profiled and harassed, subjected to the most elemental terror and submitted to compulsory visibility through physical and verbal violence. In the twelfth century, when the Pope called for crusades to recapture Jerusalem from the Arabs, the first military actions in this campaign were devoted to the killing nearby of Jews and Gypsies, and their expulsion from

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Western European cities. Ongoing displacement of the initially targeted adversary is a core characteristic of the crusade narrative. Crusader narratives are stories of deferment; the grail is never found; Jerusalem never conquered or never held; and thus these substitute near-objects are needed to sustain the crusader in an immediate state of purity. The next inception of narrative numbing logically would be the forensic; the medicalization of the crisis, the penetration of self and society by alien toxins. The alienness of terror is somaticized in the form of chemical warfare; the intimacy of the attack means that nothing will return to normal for our very bodies are no longer our own. Medicine, like terror, is a social grammar that penetrates beneath the surface to reveal what lies beneath. Medicine’s truth-claiming occurs below the symptom; everyday life in the face of terror now becomes a misleading symptom which conceals and contains the hidden truth of infections, infiltration and penetration.2 Underneath the overtly nationalist reaction to the attack lies the vertigo of transnationalism as the facilitating structure of covert aggression. With the attack on the WTC, globalization as a form of terror symbolically entered the American scene as an invisible disease process penetrating the corporate and individual American body.

The Duplication of the Monstrous The last numbing narrative was actually an anticipatory image that allows us to place the disaster in the wider cultural history of New York. Not all the meanings of the WTC attack lie below in the dust and rubble; this was a tragedy of altitude, of air and height, of death coming from above, of buildings piercing the sky that were pierced from the

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sky. The New York sky line was once described as “an assault against the sky.” There is a imaginary disaster history of the New York skyline in which the eschatological destruction of the city has been rehearsed in a series of Hollywood, science fiction and disaster films, Planet of the Apes, Escape from New York, Independence Day, to cite a few recent examples. In most of these films, New York’s destruction and desertion is crucial to the reaffirmation of American national identity. The first and foremost of these dystopic tales is of particular relevance to the cultural dichotomies of the barbarian and civilization that have been injected into the September 11 disaster. I refer to the image of King Kong balanced on the tip of what was then the world’s highest building. Kong grasps the pinnacle of the Empire State fending off the attacking planes; King Kong who fought against urban industrialized civilization and lost. Here the figures of the monster and of the monstrous building are conjoined: the monster of primitivity and the barbaric, and the monster of civilizational progress. Kong originates on a hidden tropical island inhabited by prehistoric beasts: he is the recipient of sacrifice from racially stereotyped and masked tribesmen. Kong is the icon of the primitive and the barbaric who fully comes into his identity in his encounter with the equally monstrous Empire State Building. To master New York Kong climbs the Empire State Building. Susan Buck-Morss locates important parallels to this imagery in the Soviet ideology of construction: King Kong was perceived in Soviet ideology as symbolizing the masses who are required to be sacrificed as sensory beings, in order to erect the new architecture of revolutionary production.3 Physical selves are diminished in the collective life of what Buck-Morss calls the cosmocratic building. Individual bodies as workers are sacrificed to the cosmocratic body of the edifice. The making of the monument, as that which preserves the memory

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of civilizational achievement, is thus simultaneously, the making of a tomb, and the death of the individuals who animated the building as a living organism. These images of individual worker sacrifice were also associated with the construction of modern New York; the deaths that occurred in the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway and commuter tunnels as well as the skyscraper—workers’ bodies lay buried in the foundations of many of these edifices. Thus, today, two forensic campaigns are being waged; beside the search for Bin Laden and his cells there is also the post-mortem engineering investigation that is looking at how the building killed its inhabitants under specific conditions of stress; how the building itself was transformed from abode into an instrument of technical aggression.

The New Prosthesis The ruins of the World Trade Center is history at a perceptual degree zero. The broken buildings and bodies have melted into a new cyborgian Frankenstein creation which now functions as a cultural prosthesis, a device for historical perception. One which required up to three thousand sacrifices to bring into existence, three thousand sacrifices nationalized by George Bush as the price paid for freedom and thus demanding duplication in Afghanistan and other parts of the world so that the realm of sacrificial freedom can be enlarged—the new American imperial project is the proliferation of ground zeros. For as I learned in Northern Ireland, the replication of ground zeros is the sure consequence of retributive and retaliatory violence, violence that reenacts and rehearses an original assault and transgression.4

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There is resonance here with the saturation bombing of Afghanistan. Mass aerial bombing, as I have asserted in my essay on Desert Storm, is a mode of compulsory visibility.5 The military panopticon makes adversaries and others appear during and after the setting off of explosive devices. Saturation aerial bombing, in Afghanistan as in Iraq, is a new Orientalism, the perceptual apparatus by which we make the Eastern Other visible. Afghanis are being held accountable for the hidden histories and hidden geographies that are presumed to have assaulted America on September 11. The WTC is now so much dust and debris that resists optics. Our bombs seek to penetrate the historical dust that external American geo-politics and internal popular isolationist ideology has accumulated. Dust is more than a climatic ecological condition; it is an emblem of the impenetrable history that lies at the source of the death of so many people: that to which American exceptionalism is blind. Afghanistan has been made to embody our historical dust, our historical blindness, the obscurity in which we could not see our deaths, that otherness that becomes the natal site of the ‘Terrorist Other.’ Addicted to, yet dissatisfied with the media realism of the building’s death, we seek in bombing the satisfaction of making the terrorist visible, to subject terrorism to our dust-clearing smart bombs. To the same degree that the WTC resists optical penetration and comprehension, we seek to see the terrorist other than in the mode and mask he has presented himself to us, the burning and collapsing building. We displace our need for a transparent explanation of the WTC attack onto our panoptical bomb sights/sites that have turned Afghanistan into a open-air tomb of collateral damage.

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NOTES 1. Berger, P. and T. Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York, 1967. 2. See Seremetakis, C.N. “Toxic Beauties: Medicine, Information and Body Consumption in Transnational Europe.” Social Text 19, no. 3 (2001). 3. Buck-Morss, S. Dreamworld and Catastrophe; The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, 2000. 4. Feldman, A. Formations of Violence; The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago, 1991. 5. Feldman, A. “On Cultural Anesthesia: From Rodney King to Desert Storm via ex- Yugoslavia,” in Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. C.N. Seremtakis, Chicago, 1996.

HUMANITARIANISM, TERRORISM AND THE TRANSNATIONAL BORDER

f Michael Humphrey

Is the legacy of political violence, terror and trauma being used to bring people together or to separate them? Are the consequences of globalization enhancing or undermining the prospects for the development of global ethics and global citizenship? The growing hostility towards increasing numbers of asylum seekers in the West, and the impact of the ‘new terrorism’, suggests that the 1990s optimism about the expansion of human rights law, the global media-engendered humanitarianism and humanitarian intervention by states, on behalf of human rights victims, is very fragile. Firstly, victims only made visible through global media can too easily be robbed of their victimhood, and secondly, the expansion of human rights law and its application in inter-

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national forums—truth commission, regional human rights courts, international criminal tribunals—is being readily challenged by new transnational legal instruments on crime and terrorism. The change in the international status of refugees illustrates the collision between the protection of individuals and the protection of state interests. The refugee has changed from being an issue of human rights tied up with Cold War politics, to an issue of border control, to the fight against international crime (people smuggling) and terrorism. The figure of the refugee, the individual deprived of citizenship and dependent on the goodwill and moral responsibility of strangers (international community of states) has become the touchstone of global ethics. The refugee is par excellence the symbol of the cost of the international system of nation-states based on a hierarchy of exclusion. Giorgio Agamben in his concept homo sacer (bare life) identifies the refugee as the test case for human rights. He states that the “very figure who should have embodied the rights of man par excellence—the refugee— signals instead the concept’s radical crisis.” As Hanna Arendt noted much earlier, the so-called ‘sacred and inalienable rights of man’ reveal themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state. In the West the growing number of refugees arriving at the borders looking for asylum has put the international system of refugee protection in crisis. These states argue that the 1951 UN Refugee convention was never designed to be a migration solution for displaced people, and now has become exploited by asylum seekers and ‘people smugglers’ as a way to secure permanent migration. As the number of refugees has increased so there has been a shift from humanitarian responsibility towards refugees to state security, and the question has become: how can the tide of refugees at the border be stemmed?

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In Australia the international refugee crisis has taken the form of ‘boat people’ arriving on remote parts of its northwest coastline. These are the most recent ‘boat people,’ largely from war torn countries in the Middle East— especially Afghanistan and Iraq. Earlier waves of ‘boat people’ had come from Indo-China in the 1970s and 1980s and then China in the 1990s. Until August 2001, the Australian government had sought to deter future ‘boat people’ through harsh asylum policies. They used ‘temporary protection visas’—three year visas which conferred no rights on families for reunion—and mandatory detention of all ‘boat people’ in remote camps until their asylum status was determined. In August 2001 Australian asylum policy towards the boat people changed to keep them out. The catalyst was the ‘Tampa’ incident. The ‘Tampa’ was the name of a Norwegian ship that had rescued asylum seekers from a sinking boat at the request of Australian sea rescue authorities. Once rescued, the Australian government then refused to accept the asylum seekers on Australian territory, demanding that they be returned to Indonesia from where they had set sail. The Australian government resolution of the stand-off involved moving the ‘migration’ border by excizing out-lying islands (Christmas Island, Nauru, Cocos Islands, Ashmore Reef) and persuading Pacific Islands (Nauru and Manus Island) to detain and process the ‘boat people’ for development aid. It became clear in the Australian election that followed the Tampa crisis that the figure of the refugee, stripped of compassion, had been made the border condition of Australian citizenship and entitlement. The PM John Howard made the relationship between sovereignty and exclusion explicit in the new asylum policy in his statement: “We have the right to determine who comes here.” Exclusion has long been a central principle of sovereignty in Australia because of the importance of immigration in

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shaping the Australian nation-state. In the 1880s, Chinese exclusion acts established a racialized border, one shared with the United States and Canada who enacted similar immigration legislation at the same time. While the ‘refugee’ is a non-racial category, in practice it refers to unwanted refugees largely from the Middle East, especially Afghanistan and Iraq. The cruel irony in the present shift in Australian asylum policy is that the refugee, defined as an excluded category, is being doubly excluded by being made the border condition in Australia. The key elements of the exclusion strategy are containment and repatriation. This is not, however, merely an Australian project, but one shared with the North. The project involves the erection of a transnational border based on harmonized asylum and migration policy. These policies include asylum legislation (border protection), politicized aid tied to commitments to detain and process asylum seekers, and, political and even military intervention to resolve long-term conflicts and thereby eliminate the ‘push-factors’ for migration. The erection of the new ‘transnational border’ forms part of a wider global process of enlargement and containment through ‘hierarchical integration or asymmetric incorporation’ of different states and regions. The logic of the transnational border is to get other states to help police the North’s border at a distance. And if they fail to do so, the other option, post-September 11, is to defend your own borders at a distance through military action. The Australian legislative solution of ‘border protection’ was designed to make it much harder for asylum seekers to cross the border. Their aim was to prevent asylum seekers reaching its territory in order to deny them the right to make asylum claims under Australian jurisdiction and legal system. The second prong of the strategy was containment. This was the ‘Pacific solution’ which involved paying development aid to Pacific island states

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willing to detain and process the unwanted ‘boat people.’ Integral to the implementation of these policies was a political discourse that justified the ‘border protection’ laws and ‘Pacific Island’ solution as a ‘national security’ measure. The claims of asylum seekers were undermined by describing them as ‘illegals’ who had paid ‘people smugglers’ to get to Australia. The key elements of Australia’s new asylum policy, containment and repatriation, were in fact the guiding principles of EU asylum and migration policies developed over the 1990s. The Dublin Convention (1990), the Treaty of Amsterdam and European Council (Tampere) Common Asylum Policy (2000) had all aimed at the harmonization of EU asylum and migration policies to create a common border. In 1998 the EU adopted ‘Action Plans’ on asylum and migration aimed at containing refugee flows. Originally introduced under the Austrian Presidency of the EU in July 1998 as a “Strategy Paper on migration and asylum policy,” the ‘Action Plans’ were later implemented by the EU High Level Working Group (HLWG) on Asylum and Migration. They proposed a ‘concentric circle’ approach to migrant policy. The first circle was the EU, ‘fortress Europe.’ The second circle consisted of the states aspiring to join the EU—that is, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE countries). The third circle encompassed the former Soviet Union (CIS), Turkey and North Africa. The designated role of these states was to enforce European border laws at their own borders. The fourth circle was the “Middle East, China and Black Africa” where EU policy sought to eliminate “push factors” for migration and refugee flows. Development aid was offered to these countries for their cooperation in preventing emigration. The HLWG specifically targeted six countries in the ‘fourth circle,’ producing the largest refugee flows into Europe: Afghanistan/Pakistan; Albania (Kosovo); Morocco; Somalia; Sri Lanka; Iraq. These countries were approached

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to control emigration for aid and to ‘guarantee repatriation’ of nationals whose claims for asylum were rejected. The solution to the problem of identifying documentless asylum seekers was the mass finger printing of these populations, a job given to the EU Multi-disciplinary Group on Organised Crime. Australian asylum policy has not merely adopted these EU strategies directed at containment and repatriation of refugees; the Australian government has been directly involved in EU multilateral forums developing asylum and migration policy. It participates in the EU HLWG, and has been the Chair (November 2000-2001) of the important Inter-Governmental Consultations (IGC) process, described by one commentator as a secretive forum. The DIMA position paper “Background Paper on Unauthorised Arrivals Strategy,” describes its initiatives in the ICG as seeking “to engage ‘donor/destination’ countries on illegal migration and people smuggling.” The other element in the erection of the transnational border was the criminalization of refugees. In Australia, political discourse about the ‘boat people’ has stripped refugees of their human rights by referring to them as ‘illegals’ who pay ‘people smugglers.’ Their criminalization has been extended post-September 11 by the suspicion that they might be terrorists, especially those from Iraq and Afghanistan where the majority of ‘boat people’ have come from. Australia’s focus on catching and prosecuting ‘people smugglers’ to stem the refugee flows, parallels developments in EU asylum policy and UN conventions on transnational organized crime. From the 1980s the refugee issue shifted from being a human rights issue to an immigration control issue, and then by 2000, to a question of transnational organized crime. In its meeting in 2000 the G8 (Group of eight Industrialized Nations) made a commitment “to fight against the dark side of globalization; transnational

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organized crime which threatens to damage our societies and our economies.” The threat to state sovereignty was seen to come from the growth of transnational crime, including trafficking in drugs and weapons, abuse of new technologies to steal, defraud and evade the law, money laundering, as well as the smuggling of people. The EU proposed a draft convention on the Smuggling of Illegal Migrants which was considered by the UN Commission on the Prevention of Crime and Penal Justice in 1998. The outcome was the 2000 UN ‘Convention on Transnational Organised Crime,’ which distinguishes between ‘trafficking’ and ‘smuggling’; the former refers to the exploitation that occurs after arrival (bonded labour, prostitution) while the latter refers to assisted illegal border crossing. Under the ‘Smuggling Protocol’ “the migrant is viewed not as a blameless victim, but rather, is partly complicit.” The 2000 UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime sponsored by the EU and the G8 states has effectively trumped the 1951 Convention on Refugees. The arena of international law has been used to establish competing law between the protection of individuals and the security of states. The ‘new terrorism’ of September 11 has permitted the criminalization of whole countries as targets for military intervention. The ‘new terrorism’ and ‘refugees’ have combined to create the military-humanitarian option to contain refugee flows. Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq, three of the six countries targeted by the EU as major refugee-producing countries, have also been identified as directly or indirectly involved in ‘terrorism.’ In practice, militaryhumanitarian intervention is an extension of the ‘safe haven’ policy initially put in place at the end of the Gulf War to restrict the flow of refugees from the north and south of Iraq. A very different kind of ‘safe haven’ policy was adopted towards the Kosovo refugees who were given temporary ‘shelter’ in North America, Europe and Australia.

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Military-humanitarian intervention is now an option when tied aid for population movement control fails. In Australia, the ‘border protection’ policy has coincided with military participation in the ‘war against terrorism’ in Afghanistan. In other words, military-humanitarian intervention has been added as an instrument in Australia’s refugee containment and repatriation strategies. By joining in the war to overthrow the Taliban government in Afghanistan the Australian government expects to simultaneously eliminate the ‘push’ factors for Afghan refugees and the transnational terrorist sanctuaries of groups threatening to export the ‘new terrorism.’ DIMA has made clear this connection in statements to the effect that Afghan asylum seekers will now not be accepted as refugees, and those previously granted TPVs on the basis of persecution by the Taliban will be reviewed; and this at the moment when the UNHCR is asking for greater humanitarian assistance for Afghanistan from the combined disaster of drought and twenty years of war. The ‘new terrorism’ with the threat of weapons of mass destruction has actually opened up the possibility of using military intervention as a legitimate strategy to guarantee the security of the more affluent world—that is, defending your borders at a distance. This new military-humanitarian intervention inverts the 1990s perspective of humanitarian intervention. Then the justification of humanitarian intervention occurred to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide and contain their effects on neighboring countries. Clinton called Kosovo the “first human rights war.”

Conclusion The erection of the ‘transnational border’ through the harmonization of strategies of asylum and migration contain-

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ment reveals a crisis in global ethics. We may imagine that technologies of communication may produce moral connections between strangers, but this assumes a universality of meaning is being produced through globalization. This is not the case. The real potential for the development of an enduring global ethics and justice which can be a real defence against ‘terrorism’ is through international institutions. As Scarry (1999: 302) notes, “the work accomplished by a structure of laws cannot be accomplished by a structure of sentiment. Constitutions are needed to uphold transnational values.” However, this new global ethics mediated by terror and trauma is not just about asserting national sovereignty over individual rights through international law. The criminalizing of refugees seeks to redefine global citizenship based on exclusion from territorial access and therefore rights. It is a Western biopolitics which excludes noncitizens from the legal protection provided by international humanitarian law. The category ‘refugee’ and ‘criminal’ (even terrorist) converge because they define those to be excluded. One effect of the US declared ‘war on terrorism’ will be to reinforce the privileged power of exclusion reinforced through mediated fear and UN conventions on criminality, but not a common humanity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Scarry, E. “The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons,” in Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysberg to Bosnia, ed. C. Hesse and R. Post. New York, (1999): 277-312.

ARAB AMERICANS AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF DISSENT

f Ibrahim Aoude

George W. Bush depicted the events of September 11 in uncomplicated terms: EVIL. Good, in the end, shall triumph because God is on America’s side. Civilization, through its destructive military forces, shall go to Afghanistan and rid the world of the Taliban regime and ‘the evil one.’ America has entered into a global conflict with Terrorism. To appease the Arab world and the Islamic countries, Bush declared that “this is not a war against Islam.” His administration also declared that it would seek a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, on the home front, hate crimes against Arab Americans and Muslims escalated. Individuals who were neither Arab nor Muslim, but who happened to look ‘for-

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eign’ were also violently attacked and three men were even killed in separate incidents. The clarion call to fight terrorism created a domestic atmosphere of hatred against, and suspicion of Arab Americans and Muslims. Bush’s visit to a mosque shortly after the September 11 events, and warnings not to attack Arab Americans and Muslims, essentially fell on deaf ears in an environment where the US Justice Department mainly targeted and arrested foreign individuals based on their national origin or religious beliefs. The media also were complicit in drumming up the hysteria against foreigners from the Middle East residing in the US. Rounding up Middle Easterners was supported on the grounds that their detention was either because of visa violations or because they engaged in suspicious activities (such as having taken flying lessons). The media supported the Justice Department’s disingenuous denial that individuals were not detained because of their national origin. The media also made light of the fact that the Justice Department denied detainees legal representation, or refused to release information about the detainees even to their next of kin. The federal government and the media justified those violations on the grounds of national security and the ‘war on terror.’ What is distressing, too, is that a majority of Americans are in support of government actions curtailing freedoms protected by the US Constitution. It was a sad commentary on the depth of the democratic and civil rights tradition in the US when Congress passed the Patriot Act (the anti-terrorism law) with hardly any debate knowing the public support it enjoyed. In such an environment that is conducive to racism, Arab and Muslim Americans feel that they are under siege. The various Arab American and Muslim American organizations are under pressure from the media and the government to ‘cooperate’ with the authorities in ‘fighting terrorism’ by giving information on ‘suspicious’ persons or

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activities. About twelve hundred individuals have been detained thus far, and the net is being widened. Up to five thousand more individuals have begun to be interviewed by law enforcement authorities, and the federal government asked colleges and universities to provide it with information on foreign students. Even more disturbing was the seizure and closure of charitable funds, such as the Holy Land Fund which the federal government claimed channeled funds to Hamas (a political Islamist organization fighting Israeli occupation) in Palestine. These actions discourage donations to charitable foundations throughout the Middle East, especially in Palestine where they are most needed as a buffer against hunger and the deteriorating health conditions of the population. The relationship between domestic and foreign US adventures is being managed through the ‘war on terror.’ Even though the war in Afghanistan is not finished by a long shot, the US is contemplating other targets to pursue in its ‘war on terror.’ Iraq is high on the list, and the Administration has all but decided on ‘hitting’ Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense, is the foremost proponent of the Iraq strategy. Arab Americans are being intimidated, by the sheer heaviness of the public environment, not to speak against such a foolish action. Terrorizing the mind and spirit of Arab Americans is reminiscent, not only of the environment that existed in the US immediately before and during the internment of Japanese Americans, but also of the environment extant in Europe immediately before and during World War II. Then, as now, specific groups of people were targeted and discriminated against by state institutions. It is not difficult to see how it is conceivable to extend the provisions of the existing laws (or even to pass new ones) to apply to citizens of Arab (or Muslim) descent. The hysteria and high level of national chauvinism that now exist could be easily tapped for the passage of such laws. Regardless of how

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much American society and government decry Japanese internment or the McCarthy era as ‘blots on our history,’ the fact of the matter is that the McCarthy era occurred in the early 1950s, roughly a decade after the Japanese internment in World War II. Also official attacks against Arabs and Muslims residing in the US, and the intimidation of Arab Americans are taking place currently. The response against terror has been overwhelming. It is interesting to note that Americans of all colors have come together, as witnessed by the display of American flags and donations to the victims of terror. The media also reported that youths in the inner cities no longer regarded the police as enemy. It is as though all inner city contradictions have melted away in the face of the tragedy. One wonders, though, how long that affinity with the police will last. But the political and economic élite did not find unity of purpose when it came to economic policy to counter the effects of September 11. In the first few weeks after the tragedy roughly one hundred thousand employees were laid off in the airline industry alone. The fifteen billion dollars bailout of the airlines completely forgot about the laid-off workers, its sole concern was to keep the airlines which had been experiencing great financial difficulties before September 11, afloat. In addition, the economic stimulus package that the US House of Representatives passed, included precious little for workers, and gave so much to big corporations, including reimbursing taxes that these corporations have already paid since 1986. The Democrats who control the Senate compromised with the Senate Republicans on a number of provisions within the stimulus package. However, the Republicans remained intransigent on a number of critical issues, such as more unemployment benefits to laid off workers, that the Democrats could not sell out on. Consequently, Congress recessed for the holidays without passing a stimulus package.

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The lack of any significant grassroots protest against such an economic stimulus package that passed the House, speaks volumes regarding the brainwashing of the American people with what some called ‘free market fundamentalism.’ It is because of this kind of fundamentalism that the people did not protest the fifteen billion dollars bailout of the airline industry that passed Congress earlier. The ruling class has been able to control working class Americans through a capitalist ideology in which the ordinary American has been totally immersed. This capitalist ideology resonates well with an overwhelming majority of Americans since they have been able to reap the benefits of empire for decades after World War II. This ideology has become a material force in its own right. Under the guise of fighting ‘terrorism,’ the US is quickly being transformed into a police state. By definition, a police state exercises its policing of the entire population, and not only Arabs or Muslims. At this time, Arabs and Arab Americans are the most vulnerable among us, and are being used as an excuse to have the American public, blinded as they are with chauvinism and veiled by their ignorance of the world, agree willingly to all these police measures. Earlier, the ruling class used the excuse of ‘crime’ to pass laws such as the ‘three-strikes-and-you-are-out.’ These laws may be used against anyone branded as ‘criminal’ by the ruling class, including workers fighting for better working conditions or against capitalists in general. The ‘war on drugs’ is also another example that went hand in hand with ‘fighting crime’ to terrorize, especially inner-city youths. The contradictions between wealth and poverty have not disappeared. In fact, the gap between the two has widened in the past decade because of the process of capitalist globalization. The seeming ‘truce’ between the inner city youths and the police is simply a mirage that, upon close scrutiny, can only be recognized for what it really is—noth-

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ing substantive. The youths protesting the inequities and inequality deeply imbedded in American society undoubtedly will come in the line of fire of the Patriot Act. Branding the youths as ‘domestic terrorists’ or some other appealing term for those shrinking numbers of citizens who might still have a stake in the system, is not far-fetched as some might think. Social and political movements in the US also may be easily labeled ‘terrorist’ and dealt with accordingly. The US is announcing in no uncertain terms that the ‘war on terror’ will take many years. As this war wears on, and as world events unfold not as planned by the US, the US economy could turn devastating to the fortunes of those dispossessed of the American dream. The anti-war movement conceivably could grow to encompass not only a few from the intelligentsia, but more of those as well as many individuals and anti-capitalist people’s organizations. Before September 11 the incipient people’s movement has been growing in the US, mainly as a response to the marginalization of workers. It is still disparate and not well organized. But it is there and could only grow. Democratic space for its growth is the most favorable environment possible. Consequently, a police state is the most unfavorable condition for its growth. Taking advantage of the September 11 tragedy, the ruling class is moving swiftly to try and nip the people’s movement in the bud. It is incumbent upon the people’s organizations to educate the public about what the future will surely bring, if we allow the most vulnerable among us to be deprived of their civil rights and freedom.

“MY SON IS A FANATIC” OR HOW TO HAVE THINGS BOTH WAYS IN A HERITAGE DEBATE

f Michael Rowlands

There were sixty thousand applications for British citizenship (i.e., nationality applications) made last year in the UK. The immigration service keeps records of the origins and conditions of all asylum applications which form the basis on which adjudicators make decisions about rights of appeal and permissions to stay. Moreover, all refusals of asylum applications should be made on the basis of whether conditions of origin would imply a significant risk of persecution if they were returned. Much of the contro-

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versy over these decisions comes from the nature of the evidence used by the Home Office, and by adjudicators to decide on the likely risk of persecution of detainees if they were returned to country of origin. Hence the details of the reports are made up largely of the personal statements of the applicant, and reports made by experts on evidence of torture or persecution, and on the political conditions they are likely to encounter if returned. Certainly, as part of this documentation, certain assumptions are made about the motives of the claimant to want to stay in Britain. In particular, intention to stay for economic reasons is deemed reason to reject the application made on the basis of asylum. But a whole range of provisions has been passed recently to encourage applications to stay, by those with superior technical skills to contribute, given that a recent survey showed that the majority of migrants coming into the UK were superior in technical and educational skills than the majority of the UK population. But since the events of September 11, attention has shifted to documenting the adequacy of persons and their motivation in wanting to stay and become a British citizen. The adequacy of these conditions has been questioned in particular, on the basis of whether they can ‘fit in’ and how loyal such new citizens are to the responsibilities of being British. Whether you are a Muslim or British first in your loyalties was one of the challenges first hurled at British Muslims after September 11. In a recent poll of five hundred British Muslims, commissioned by the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, whilst the majority thought the atrocities committed in New York were unjustified actions, the majority were also opposed to military action against ‘fellow Muslims’ in Afghanistan. While the majority also disapproved of British Muslims going to support the Taliban in a ‘fight against America,’ nevertheless over a quarter of those sampled approved. The report concluded: “It seems British Muslims have not been persuaded by the British Prime Minister’s often repeated assertion that this was not a war

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against Islam.” Since then there have been several reports of British Muslims fighting in Afghanistan. Two cases of British Muslims being killed have been reported, and, maybe six or more of those presently imprisoned as Taliban/Al Quaida fighters in Cuba are said to be British. Moreover, some of those British Muslims interviewed, belonging to a fundamentalist organisation called AlMuhajiram, when asked whether there was any contradiction in the fact that, as British citizens, they might be called upon in Afghanistan to fight British soldiers (these interviews were conducted between 11-14 November) replied: “Whenever Muslims are under attack I will always fight for them and I will always give my life and I want to give my life.” “I’m a Muslim who happens to live in Britain.” “I could be anywhere. So this idea of me being disloyal to the Queen or government—this ain’t applicable. We don’t recognise that. My allegiance is to Allah and the religion he brought down, Islam.”

While these are certainly minority views, considerable anger was expressed in other interviews that, while Muslims in Britain have condemned the atrocities committed in the name of their faith in America, nobody listens to their pleas not to bomb innocents in Afghanistan. The sense that something called the ‘West’ is waging a war against Islam, despite vigorous protestations to the contrary by Bush/Blair, etc., seems to be the growing perception amongst a significant number of British Muslims. Moreover, British Muslim has been exposed as a term which we can no longer take for granted as a description of a minority within a multicultural setting. The cases of young British Muslims leaving to fight in Afghanistan, even though there was little information on who and how many

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were involved, provoked a tirade in the press and the media, including descriptions of their actions as traitorous, and demanding to know what punishment would be meted out on their return. As it turns out, a number of British Muslims do appear to have fought for the Taliban and probably died (and since they were fighting in support of a legitimate government, presumably they were no more traitorous than those in the International Brigade who fought in the Spanish Civil War, since war had not been declared formally in either case). The implicit question raised was about their level of Britishness which clearly was not sufficiently profound in them to at least raise doubts or a sense of guilt as to their actions. An absence of a sense of Britishness or even the inability to see there may be a contradiction in being a British citizen fighting for the Taliban, led to demands for what in France and other countries with more assimilationist immigration policies would be unproblematic imposition of a loyalty test. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary responsible for immigration affairs, has questioned why Immigration service records contain only information on conditions of origins of applicants, when none is recorded on what they know about Britain, the country they wish to make their permanent home. He has suggested recently that all future migrants may be required to attend citizenship and English language classes. Others have argued he should go further and set up an American style citizen test, i.e., a selection of questions to be answered on the country’s history, constitution and laws. We therefore have a growing division, based on the view that one is either a Muslim first and British second or vice versa. Whilst the former appears to be a classic case of conflict over religion versus nationalism as state ideology, the latter is couched in terms of the duties of citizenship and responsibilities in the public sphere versus private belief. Whilst the former cannot escape the reification of ‘West’ versus ‘Islam’ as exemplification of these extremes,

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the latter revisits the assimilationist argument that cultural diversity can only be managed within an argument of how to achieve diversity in unity through language. Edward Said’s writings on the conundrum of the exile could have a certain relevance here. In his 1998 essay, “Between Worlds,” he recalls the tensions of a western-educated Palestinian Arab caught between colonial English and Arabic resistance, belonging to a tiny Protestant minority in a majority Sunni Muslim majority. “To be at the same time Wog and Anglican was to be in a state of standing civil war.” Muslim elders and other community leaders in Britain have in the main proclaimed their loyalty, first to be British citizens, to condemn those leaving for Afghanistan, and yet to assert the view that the deaths of innocents on any side is against their religious beliefs. But there is a significant minority of British Muslim youth who clearly take a more radical stand in their support of Islam, and in their perception that being a Muslim is a transnational identity. It is important to realize therefore that the divisions are not simply a matter of being either Muslim or British. Like Said’s contrapuntalism, this can reveal the creativity of these tensions: “I began to think and write contrapuntally, using the disparate halves of my experience as an Arab and as an American, to work with and against each other.” Sharing the same ‘irreducibly secular world’ should promote the assimilationist compromise that while a common language of rights and obligations are adhered to, transnational support for other states based on religious adherence would not be compromised. But it seems these postSeptember 11 events have altered these perceptions in two significant ways. Firstly, the state is not simply adhering to a test of loyalty based on the social contract, but is asserting that an expression of common identity based on shared heritage should form part of the test. Should British or American citizens speak the same language or have a sense of shared

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history in order to belong? Secondly, and in contradiction to this, being Muslim in Britain seems to have little to do with identity, but rather a coincidence or a contingency that should not affect the transcultural ties that create a sense of community. In other words, rather than a continuation of a debate between secular rights and religious ideals, the language in both circumstances seems to have shifted to that of ‘heritage’ in the sense implied by Lowenthal as a revealed faith. When the Taliban destroyed the sixty foot statues of the Buddha, Matsurra, the Director General of UNESCO, called them ‘bad Muslims’ for destroying the general heritage of future generations. As doctrine, heritage is therefore mandatory; it cannot be shed but has to have some of the elements of a legacy. Blunkett’s test is therefore not a matter so much of the immediate arrivals and their willingness to belong, but their willingness to bequeath the inheritance to future generations. If mutual identity demands mutual allegiance, then the test comes in being deprived of the legacy; how vulnerable the children of migrants will be to a sense of cultural loss, to being rootless and bereaved. But a dogma of roots and origins has implications for the creation of ideas of common heritage. Nostalgia for a Britain of lost empire, for example, would scarcely do so; Blunkett’s test has presumably not only to stress more quiescent commonalties but also provide the resources for more individualised versions that will encourage diversity in unity. However successful this might be, it undermines Said’s creative contrapuntalism by basing a test of loyalty upon a sense of belonging, rather than on the state insisting that regardless of religious affiliation, all citizens inhabit an “irreducibly secular world, with a common language of rights and ideals.” Said dismissed Huntington’s 1993 prophecy that post cold-war global politics would be dominated by the “clash of civilisations” as a “crudely articulated manual in the art of maintaining a wartime status in

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the minds of Americans and others.” The simplistic articulation of “Muslim rage” to those supposedly resentful of western modernity makes, he argues, political and economic problems appear timeless and intractable. But the legacy of the West is now articulated by many as seriously vulnerable to cultural loss and denial. Cultural revivalism and restoration as heritage can be and has been articulated in the past through the defence of freedom, values of liberalism and social reform in periods of crisis, most notably in the defeat of fascism and communism. One of the effects of September 11 therefore has ironically been the defeat of a rationalism that claimed a superiority of a way of life through the consumption of its products alone, in favour of a neo-liberalist fundamentalism that takes the Huntington thesis quite seriously and interprets it as the clash of heritage.

JUST WARS, CIVILISATION AND EMPIRE IN POSTMODERNITY Perspectives from South of the Rio Grande

f John Gledhill

My periods of fieldwork in Mexico bizarrely always seem to coincide with an international crisis: first the Malvinas, then the Gulf War and now September 11th 2001 and its aftermath. Local responses to each of these episodes were, however, different. Beyond a horror of war in general (a legacy of the country’s own revolutionary wars), sympathy for the Argentine position and hostility to Britain was not pervasive in 1982, a salutary reminder that ‘Latin America’ is not a unit of identity for most people. The Gulf War, in contrast, provoked a stronger reaction against the United States in the region in which I was living at the time, with neighbours glued to their televisions willing Saddam to

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strike a blow against what most saw as an imperialism motivated by the United States’ insatiable desire to control oil. In addition to reflecting the discontents of a pervasive transnational migrant experience, this reading of the crisis resonated with other historical anxieties, then becoming acute as an aggressive neoliberal administration cast doubt on the future of the country’s own oil industry, nationalised in the 1930s. Immediate reaction to September 11 was different again, because this time violence touched Mexicans in a direct way. Perhaps the most poignant image of this was a video sent home to his children by one of the Mexicans who died working on the upper floors of the World Trade Centre. It included a shot of an aircraft passing at a distance, accompanied by his commentary expressing pride in having secured work in such an interesting and cosmopolitan place. The shock waves amplified as friends and relatives began to hunt for the most anonymous of the employees of the twin towers, the undocumented workers whose centrality to the infrastructure of the command and control centres of the global city achieved a rare if transitory visibility as a result of the tragedy. The nature of the act—its cold and premeditated horror—also made it exceptional for most people. This did not inhibit school kids and some adults from circulating jokes that seemed to celebrate a ‘blow against the empire.’ But Mexicans could not really escape the idea that this event had touched them as well. Sympathy for the US people in general was genuine enough, without eroding a consciousness that Mexicans, Puertorriqueños and other Latinos were most likely to be used as canon fodder in any military reprisals.1 In Argentina, in contrast, already on the verge of economic and political meltdown, the events could be resymbolized in a more metaphorical and detached manner. Thousands of citizens fulfilled their compulsory obligation to vote by carefully assembling white powder and photos of Bin Laden to accompany spoiled ballots.

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Yet whatever their initial reaction, many of those with whom I talked in the provincial city of Zamora (a place with strong migratory traditions and ongoing transnational ties that include all social classes) expressed increasing ambivalence about the larger significance of September 11 as the ‘war against terror’ got underway. Shortly after the bombardment of Afghanistan began, I met four brothers in the mestizo town of Cohuayana, six hours away on the coast, making their annual pilgrimage to Mexico to honour the memory of their late mother, who ran a popular restaurant. All had done unusually well for themselves in their long sojourn in the North. They were not simply emigrados who had chosen the path of naturalization, but (unusually even in this category) spoke fluent English. One was now an independent agricultural entrepreneur, leasing 140 hectares in Bakersfield, California, sown in cotton with US government subsidies. Yet George W. Bush would probably not have felt that their conversation with me passed the loyalty test. They were not only troubled by the humanitarian cost of the bombardments (referring explicitly to the cynicism of the phrase ‘collateral damage’), but strongly questioned the underlying motivations of the global campaign on which the government of their adopted country had embarked. Inter alia, they possessed a lively interest in the economic and geopolitical factors that might stimulate US military action on the borders of the former Soviet Empire. Although Mexico does possess a Muslim community2 (whose leaders were quick to respond publicly to the crisis) and families of Middle Eastern origin (in particular Lebanese) figure within the élites of this and other Latin American countries, Mexicans (or Mexican-Americans) of the kind I have just described strongly identify themselves with a ‘Western’ cultural tradition that involves a radical ‘othering’ of the indigenous peoples who occupy their

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homeland space in significant numbers. ‘Indians’ have their own ‘ways of being and thinking’ and will never be truly assimilated or changed. As far as they are concerned, the hijackers of the planes and people of Afghanistan possess the same kind of inscrutable ‘otherness.’ What Mexicans would term ‘fanaticism’ does hold some fascination, along with martyrdom, in a way that can be read in terms of local cultural history. To be prepared to die (and to sacrifice innocent others for a cause) grants a kind of moral standing, but it is not one that most Mexicans readily feel able to embrace. Their own positive examples are of men who are careless of death in their defiance of the powerful, even if their deaths are futile, but if the levels of ‘collateral damage’ provoked by their defiance are significant, they become darker (if still slightly ambiguous) figures. Another type of case that haunts the popular imagination concerns crimes of the state: for example, the pilot who agrees to crash the plane carrying the dissident politician sacrifices his own life in return for a prosperous future for his children. Mexico does have its own historical episodes of what is retrospectively constructed as ‘fanaticism,’ especially that associated with the violence of Church-State conflict. Yet this experience is also central to the tendency of most people to emphasize that their country does not have ‘wars’ today (despite an escalation of many other forms of violence, insecurity and impunity). In short, ideology has come to be viewed as a bad reason for killing people, while more instrumentalist conspiracy theories of the practical workings of power are profoundly popular in local imaginaries of the state (among some intellectuals as well as ‘ordinary’ working people). I make no claims that a few vignettes of conversation within a region characterized by a specific history can be elevated into a ‘view’ that could be attributed to a national population. Nevertheless, if we consider the mainstream

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commercial media to be still at least partly responsive to the sensibilities of their publics, it is perhaps significant that the two main Mexican TV channels did attempt to gather what data they could on the human costs of the bombardments and mortality rates in the Afghan refugee camps. Overall, anyone who had witnessed the previous reporting of the Malvinas and Gulf Wars on Mexican television (a television then strongly controlled by the ruling Party of the Institutional Revolution as far as domestic matters were concerned) could not fail to be struck by a noticeable loss of critical reporting and, indeed, information of any kind in the present crisis. Yet the effect of tightening control over global media on a viewing public not predisposed to accept the kinds of categories that resonate with the domestic politics of the United States and its allies is inevitably to heighten disbelief. Abandoning CNN (to which many have access in both English and Spanish through cable and satellite), what Mexicans ‘saw’ on national television was an escalation of the use of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to quasi-nuclear levels (despite earlier undertakings by the Bush administration to exercise restraint) and a disguising of civilian casualties on a massive scale. They also ‘saw’ a global superpower relying on such weapons and the use of Afghan proxies to limit its own casualties. The message that the overthrow of the Taliban regime was likely to bring benefits to most Afghanis was internalized without much further thought (beyond, perhaps, a passing reflection on the position of women in indigenous communities in Mexico) but remained secondary to the feeling that this was not the way to do it and was simply a secondary rationalization for acts that had other motivations and went further than Afghanistan. Few people of my (reasonably broad) acquaintance saw the ability of the United States and its allies to physically obliterate parts of the world that offended them as a

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recipe for future international security. Interest in the situation of the Palestinians remained strong as information about Afghanistan dried up. Mexicans seem impressed by the sheer size of the Muslim world and anxious about the likelihood of an overwhelming use of military power heightening the prospects for further and even more lethal terrorist action. In this sense at least, many Mexicans and other Latin Americans can think about the subjectivities of the perceived enemies of ‘Western civilisation’ in terms of their own sensibilities and historical experience, even if this does not diminish feelings of alterity. The war against terrorism seems likely to have a more direct extension into Latin American space as the Bush administration hastens to dismantle the remaining legal barriers to direct support for the elimination of the Colombian guerrillas. Paramilitaries of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC, themselves earlier reclassified as ‘terrorists’ by the Bush government) are crossing unimpeded into the former demilitarized zone held by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). After withdrawing from the population centers previously under its control—ostensibly in order to diminish possible civilian casualties from either army or paramilitary action—the FARC now finds itself obliged to pursue the tactics of ‘terror’ (ranging from kidnapping of politicians to bomb attacks), thereby exposing the increasing difficulties facing advocates of ‘protracted people’s war’ in the military and political conditions of the twenty-first century. Yet many Colombian social movements that reject the armed struggle of the FARC share its diagnosis of the involvement of the United States in the country’s affairs as an extension of classical capitalist imperialism, a view which resonates with the Mexican interpretations of US hidden agendas already described and with the Zapatista subcomandante Marcos’s famous analysis of the post-Cold War era as a renewed struggle to carve up the world’s remaining natu-

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ral resources (many of which are concentrated in zones occupied by indigenous people).3 Mexican media and academic commentators are, however, rather more prone to analyze the way US foreign policy is driven by domestic political agendas (without failing to note Bush’s personal entanglements with global energy interests, ranging from the Bin Laden family to Enron, the latter being of particular interest to Mexicans given the company’s involvement in plans to privatize the country’s own electricity supply industry). There is, however, also another kind of emergent critique (from within both Catholic and secular intellectual circles) which might bring us closer to an understanding of why the war against terror is not simply ‘America’s new war’ (to use CNN’s terminology) or a simple reassertion of the kind of imperialism that characterized the era of modernity, but something still more menacing in its implications. This critique turns around the simple idea of a superior morality that should be demanded from the bearers of ‘civilized values.’ It is, we should note, perfectly compatible with a strong identification with ‘the West’ as the privileged bearer of such values, though when this idea is translated to Latin America, it is important to stress that ‘the West’ is not necessarily represented by the liberalism of Northwest Europe and North America, but can also be related to Catholic Iberian traditions that to some extent challenge the former set of ideologies (while remaining deeply ethnocentric).4 The rhetoric of Bush and Rumsfeld certainly provides fertile grounds for such a critique. Many here now suspect that any menace to global security posed by religiously grounded fundamentalism does not emanate solely from Islamicist militants and that the problem posed by Bush and the forces behind him runs deeper than exploitation of the opportunities presented by September 11 for domestic and geopolitical gains of a rationally calculable kind.

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This perspective runs deeper in its ability to question the consequences of the forms of global hegemony that have emerged within the condition of postmodernity. At first sight, even Bush appears to be constrained by the positive side of late twentieth century globalisation. The choice of the US base in Guantánamo, Cuba, as the site for the incarceration and ‘processing’ of Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners appears to have been motivated by the search for a space in which the international framework of human rights could be set aside. Here a ‘civilized’ government could inflict ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ with impunity, as an exemplary measure apparently deemed appropriate for those who proved utterly recalcitrant to the ‘normal’ modes of biopolitical regulation characteristic of our era. Yet the treatment meted out to the prisoners did, in fact, immediately provoke a domestic legal challenge. Nevertheless, the US approach to humiliating and degrading the ‘enemy’ was soon to be imitated by the Israeli occupying forces in the West Bank refugee camps, apparently in full consciousness that it would increase levels of hatred.5 This suggests that the message of such ‘exemplary measures’ is not really directed at their victims, but towards a public sphere that remains less attached to the values that supposedly enlighten ‘the civilized’ than more optimistic commentators imagine. Furthermore, a second look at the overall pattern of developments suggests that efforts to call superpowers to act in a manner consistent with the higher universal morality that they claim to advance is problematized by the way these same principles are incorporated into the current structures of global power—seen as a decentered system in which NGOs and supranational agents of an emergent ‘global governmentality’ project play an increasingly important role. It is true, perhaps, that the decentered system that Hardt and Negri (2000) dub ‘Empire’ (and argue is quite different from classical capitalist imperialism) offers new challenges

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to, and potential checks on, the forces of capitalist globalization and the geopolitical objectives of the United States or any other bloc. Yet the capacity to hegemonize within this new configuration of forces and powers is greatly increased by its appropriation and ‘domestication’ of the central themes of the ‘progressive’ battles against high modernity (such as multi-culturalism, for example).6 This is not so much a question of only paying lip service to principles (pure simulation) as a matter of implementing them in a way that is constrained by other ‘bottom line’ aspects of the package. One example is the way democratic rights in the electoral field (respect for the citizen’s vote for the party of his or her choice) lose much of their meaning if other dimensions of the transformation of local society create growing poverty and insecurity and reduce the possibilities of any party offering itself for election on a platform that touches the roots of these everyday existential dilemmas.7 Another is the way a cultural politics of recognition of the rights of black and indigenous people in Latin America tends to abstract celebration of ‘cultural difference’ from questions of everyday class prejudice, police brutality, income inequality and control of resources. Indeed, politicians of all hues have found it convenient to add ‘multiculturalism’ to the long list of areas where selective patronage becomes a powerful tool for manipulating social movement leaderships and local NGOs. The precise vision and expectations of those responsible for the events of September 11 remain somewhat obscure, but the nature of the response could be seen as a process already in gestation over the previous two decades (from the invasion of Panama through the Gulf War to Kosovo). That process consists in the building of new means to legitimize the selective use of violence in the policing of an international order adapted to a truly global capitalism, a framework that can present armed intervention as a humanitarian act, even one that furthers the achievement of social justice

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and political freedoms. What many Latin Americans are rightly questioning (from a variety of ethical and ideological positions) is how far the means can possibly promote such enlightened ends in the longer term. There are scant reasons for thinking that the political arrangements established in Afghanistan will ultimately prove any more satisfactory for the survivors of the conflict than those established in previous theaters of intervention, and it might also be doubted whether their economic futures will be a great deal brighter. But even if the outcomes improve in this sense, the costs seem incredible. We may never know how many people died in the Afghan war, directly as a result of the bombing or indirectly as a result of displacement, cold and hunger, but we were told that the bombardment of the Tora Bora mountain region was followed by a sifting through of pulverized human genetic material for DNA traces of Osama Bin Laden. Neither use of overwhelming military might, nor meting out exemplary punishments to individual bodies, seem likely to do anything other than magnify the hatreds born of continuing social polarization in global capitalist development. As Empire now looks to extend the range of its operations, the legitimacy of such acts of extermination may be subject to greater challenge, but opposition is inevitably weakened by the way the increasing cycle of violence provokes increasingly terrifying kinds of responses on the part of those who challenge it by violent means. The war against terror both produces and marginalises the terrorist, thereby marginalizing many other voices of opposition in the process. A striking feature of the present crisis was the deadly seriousness with which a number of imperial spokespersons invoked the concept of ‘Just War’ as a prelude to the attack on Afghanistan (as a response to an attack on ‘civilization,’ rather than simply the United States). The Vatican itself proved unwilling to endorse such a concept in the twenty-first century, but it is worth recalling what happened in an age when Popes were more compliant. In coastal Brazil, for

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example, Portuguese declarations of ‘Just Wars’ of pacification were often as much about extermination as enslavement, even of erstwhile indigenous military allies and missionized Indians (Monteiro, 1999: 1005–8). Today, the descendants of this massacre are once again numerous enough to demand restitution, with the support of the Catholic Church and the transnational movement of indigenous organizations and NGOs. But now that Empire has no real frontiers, this is not a history anyone should be prepared to relive, even if the penalties for protest within the spaces claimed for actually existing ‘civilization’ become increasingly severe.

NOTES 1. Talk about undocumented migrants being invited to enlist in the US armed forces in return for citizenship, a discourse with a long and partially grounded history, began comparatively early in the run-up to military action, though many people also chose to come home, some because they lost their jobs, others out of anxiety about possible future dangers. 2. This is, interestingly, especially strong in the southern border state of Chiapas, better known for its indigenous movements. 3. The Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle (1997), available in English on-line at http://www.zapatistas.org/neo/. 4. I should note, in passing, that these ‘traditions’ are clearly not static. Indeed, the growing importance of religion in politics everywhere, so surprizing to those wedded to the inevitability of progressive secularisation, seems less of a puzzle for those who locate it within the condition of postmodernity itself. 5. The Guardian, 12th March 2002, “A Long Hot Wait Fuels Palestinian Anger.”

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6. Although their own positive position is unashamedly utopian, Hardt and Negri offer an extremely useful critique of postmodernist and postcolonial critical theorizing in this regard, noting that advocates of these positions are, in effect, fighting an anachronistic battle against high modernist ideologies that are no longer central to a world in which hybrid and plural identities can not only be successfully managed, but turned into a source of profits (see, for example, Hardt and Negri, 2000: 155–6). 7. In Brazil, for example, the progressive shift of what was once the most radical party of the Left, the Partido dos Trabalhadores, towards a social-democratic ‘third way’ politics has now been capped by an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party, whose leading figure is a paternalistic evangelical industrialist.

REFERENCES Hardt, M. and A. Negri: Empire. Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2000. Monteiro, J. M. “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Coastal Brazil in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas: Volume III, part I, ed. F. Salomon and S. B. Schwartz. Cambridge, (1999): 973–1023.

SEPTEMBER 11 AND OCTOBER 7 From Human Tragedy to Power Politics

f Leif Manger

The attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on September 11 will, of course, remain a landmark in modern world history. But so will October 7, when the Americans started bombing Afghanistan. The first event produced reactions around the world that were mostly humanitarian in tone. People were shocked, and no one had any problem sympathizing with the human suffering involved in the attack. The second event started a series of reactions that were political in nature. The American reaction brought us all back to the realm of power politics, and by that the understanding of September 11 also started to change. Let me illustrate with a few personal vignettes from an autumn full of travels.

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I landed in Mumbai on the morning of October 8, only hours after the American bombing of Afghanistan had started. What still rings in my ear from those few hours in the airport there was the humming of “The war has started. The war has started.” What type of war? Isolated bombing? A regional war involving India? A world wide war? Within hours I flew on to Hyderabad and could ponder on those questions. But another question arose. Apart from the geopolitical threat to the region, there was the issue of what effects the bombing would have on the Hyderabadis, Muslims and Hindus alike. Increased tension, was the answer. Tension that led to Muslim riots in the old city after prayers the following Friday, challenging the right of the Americans to kill innocent Muslims in retaliation for the September 11 victims, and hurt American pride and prestige. Tension that led Hindu newspapers to accuse the BJP government of being soft and undecisive in their dealing with Muslim terrorists in India, referring to Kashmir of course, but also to the need to control Muslims in a city like Hyderabad, with its history of Muslim-Hindu riots. Ten days later I went to Thailand, and spent time also in the south where I could observe how the Muslim Malay minority reacted. The criticism against the Americans was now more focussed. Being in Thailand, the expression of the public anger was more subdued than in Hyderabad. But the message was clear. In public rallies the arrogance of American foreign policy was pointed at as a root cause for the September 11 incident. Demands for proof for who were behind the attacks was lacking, said the speaker. Why should anyone trust the Americans and their claims that they had such proofs? Chances were that the Americans used Usama Bin Laden in order to make yet another step forward in their quest for total world domination in the post-1989 world. Would it not be a just cause for Muslims to resist such a quest for a hegemony?

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An impression that was even stronger in November, in Washington, during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. American media reported on the removal of civil liberties from people who might be implicated in terrorism, i.e., Arab-looking people and Muslims in general. Anthropologists working on Afghanistan told the AAA meetings about their hopelessness in trying to modify American public opinion. Bring us Bin Laden, dead or alive, Bush had said. Everyone had heard that. Someone also claimed he had said that Americans had no problem with Muslims as such. That Islam was a religion of peace. But few people had heard that. But the concern of liberal American anthropologists was not only how Muslims were being treated, but an increasing feeling that what was going on was a systematic attack from ultra-conservative forces in the Bush administration, led by John Ashcroft; an attack that meant the introduction of policies no-one in their right mind would have suggested under “normal times.” Now everyone in America seemed to agree. And it was called “patriotism.” “Adolf ” Ashcroft must be stopped, said Ralph Nader, evoking images from the McCarthy era in an attempt to rally liberal forces to resistance. “Well, if he hadn’t split the environmental vote, Bush and Ashcroft wouldn’t have been there in the first place,” murmured staunch Democrats in the audience. Organizing liberals in America against current trends seemed difficult indeed. And back home in Norway? As I returned home in between trips I also experienced that in Norway nothing has changed. On the political level, Norwegian support of whatever the Americans do is to be expected. They saved us in World War II. Our government expresses a feeling of ‘moral dilemma.’ But nothing more. No action. Not until the Norwegian Olympic Committee made a contract to buy underwear from a company with some links to the oppressive regime in Burma. Then our Prime Minister could act

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upon his moral principles. No Norwegian athlete should wear that type of underwear. But when our representative in the International Olympic Committee hinted that there might be a problem to have the Olympic Games in the USA, since the Olympic Charter says no Olympic Games should be held in a country ‘at war,’ he was hushed down. But, pathetic politicians aside, other things also started to happen. Norwegian police started checking immigrant milieus for terrorists. Informal forms of transferring money from migrants in Norway to their home communities in Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan were interpreted as support for terrorist networks. Individuals looking like ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslims,’ born in Norway by parents who have lived here for thirty years, reported that they felt they were held responsible for September 11. And Norwegian public opinion is asserting that these people must be checked. Sounds like Ashcroft’s America? Perhaps. But Norwegian opinion is more concerned with the fact that Ashcroft’s maternal grandfather comes from Norway. Actually, from the little municipality where I was born. Which should make us all proud. International migration is not all that bad, after all. But, irony aside, the situation is serious. Once again war is established as an instrument to achieve certain aims. And since the aims are not clearly defined, they change in the process. A just pursuit of the individuals and groups responsible for September 11 is becoming muddled with American aims at greater control over forces of globalization that are not advantageous to the American nationstate; with American aims at getting access to the oil reserves in Central Asia; with conservative American aims at controlling those at home who complicate the pursuit of ‘the American Dream,’ be they Arabs, Muslims, homosexuals or supporters of women’s right to abortion. We see that September 11 has become a symbol interpreted in all these directions. In America, that is. Israel is developing its own understanding of the post-September 11 world. Also, in

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Palestine, war and military power are defining the rules of the game, playing into the hands of Hamas. Which certainly might improve Sharon’s hand, in the short run, securing Western support, or at least Western indifference, since he is also dealing with ‘terrorists.’ And now we see things escalating between India and Pakistan. The terrorist attack on the Parliament in Delhi certainly triggered a reaction that indicates that the Hindu pressure against the government seems to have worked. If Americans can deal with terrorists the way they like, Indians can do the same. India is also a democracy that sees a central institution attacked by Muslim terrorism. What is going on? First of all, I think that the two dates of September 11 and October 7 are important, not only for what happened on those days, but perhaps mostly for what choices they opened up and for what choices were made. September 11 was a shock. No doubt about that. But it was not only a shock to Americans; it was also a total shock to Muslims around the world. A small minority of Muslims had highjacked Islam, and in the name of their religion carried out atrocities that were as unthinkable to them as they were to the people watching the collapse of the Twin Towers themselves. However, the political dynamism that could come out of such a changing world opinion was never given a chance to develop. The chance to focus on religious tolerance as an answer to the atrocities was never developed. October 7 brought us back to a more familiar landscape, a landscape in which the Americans, when threatened, release their military power to teach their adversaries a lesson. A landscape characterized by power relations with which Third World people, Muslims and others, are very familiar. Many of them have experienced that while the Americans talk about democracy and freedom they support oppressive local regimes that deliver dictatorship and oppression to their people. Many of them know from personal experience that, when America has to

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choose between pursuing freedom and democracy, and pursuing its own strategic interests, the answer gives itself. And once again they were right. The US-led alliance to deal with ‘evil’ is an alliance in which any oppressive regime can join and be rewarded. One reward we hear little about is the new leverage to deal with internal opposition. Labeling opposition groups ‘terrorists’ is a method now for dealing with political opponents without being constrained by demands about human rights and other liberties that the world community has been busy to establish in a preSeptember 11 world. To people on the ground, therefore, the alliance is not a credible tool in the battle for freedom. Rather, it appears as a strategic tool for the Americans in their quest for global domination. In this sense, we can indeed talk about a postSeptember 11 world order; a world order in which ideological goals such as democracy and freedom must yield for strategic aims. On one level, the enemy is no longer communism but terrorism. The Afghan-based Islamic groups that were supported by the USA when they were fighting the Soviet communists ‘Empire of Evil’ are now the carriers of ‘evil’ themselves. Not only Muslims see the tragic irony in this situation. But there is a difference. Communism is a political ideology. Terrorism, everyone knows these days, is represented by Muslim groups, thus linking the enemy to members of a particular world religion. The way events are unfolding might well prove Samuel Huntington right. We might indeed end up in a clash of civilizations. Westerners pitched against Easterners. Christians against Muslims. Jews against Muslims. Hindus against Muslims. We know it is wrong, but the force of naming and labeling, combined with political power, takes us in a direction we want to avoid, contributing to the creation of what we basically seek to avoid. Clearly, there is a need for analyses and debate of the complexities involved, a task that is not easy in a media world

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asking for colourful metaphors and quick solutions; and, even more seriously, when public opinion that confuses willingness to analyse complex issues with lack of patriotism. ‘Democracy’ and ‘freedom’ should not be reduced to a rhetoric that serves to hide the misuse of power in a pursuit to eradicate ‘evil.’ And it is even more scary when every time people with power say ‘evil’ it sounds like they say ‘Muslim.’ Does anthropology have a role to play in this type of situation? Let me end with a final personal story from last autumn. The September 11 attack happened during the first of my two lectures for first-year anthropology students on “Regional Ethnography of the Middle East.” A student had picked up the news in the break, and I remember vividly the total confusion we all felt. Nothing of what the student said made any sense, although the description that we got turned out to be very accurate indeed. Obviously, real world events took center stage, but I continued the lecture, telling students about patrilineal kinship, honor and shame, cultivators and pastoralists on plains and in mountains, in oases and deserts and traders and craftsmen in the urban bazaars, the origin of world religions and the relationships between men and women. All to provide a basis for a second lecture, one week later, about how all these things that together form ways of life in a region are being played out in the contemporary world of authoritarian regimes, in failed experiments of building viable nationstates, of corrupt oil economies, of local, regional and global conflicts. Obviously, the lectures tried to show students how our work as anthropologists should not be left as descriptive ethnographic texts to be remembered at the exams, but should form a basis for our understanding of what goes on in the world. In an ironic way, these particular lectures turned out to be attempts at providing young students with a perspective that could make them begin to comprehend some of the complexities involved in that dra-

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matic event when the twin towers collapsed. I hope they remember some of it! Not because the lectures were particularly good. I do not think they were. But because anthropology is a discipline that, through its insistence on fieldwork and close contact with “local” people, and through its comparative perspective, might have a message that is worth while listening to in these difficult times. The message goes something like this. The world contains more viewpoints than those represented by the West; more than those represented by the powerful and those reflected in the media. If anthropologists can make such alternative voices heard, we are already contributing in a positive way. The contribution is related to that missed chance after September 11, to develop a climate of religious tolerance, and to formulate political strategies based on intentions of peaceful co-existence across lines of difference. Big issues indeed, but issues on which anthropologists should have something to say.

THE NEW LEVIATHAN AND THE CRISIS OF CRITICISM IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

f Bruce Kapferer

The WTC event raises major issues concerning the current state of the social sciences and most especially anthropology. The last twenty or so years have seen major redirections in the course of anthropology as a discipline. Many of these have been necessary and stimulating. Nonetheless, there appears to be a retreat in anthropology from a challenging and critical role that had become one of its most important stocks in trade. This retreat is shared with other disciplines across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences, and I think is connected with the decline of the liberal institution of the university and the erosion of its radical functions, connected with transmutations in political and economic institutions worldwide linked with glob-

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alization. Of course, universities have always been tied to dominant political and social interests, but following the disasters of two European world wars and decolonization there was a brief moment when universities were placed in a more resistant or at least a more ambivalent role to other institutions of political and economic power. The universitycentered anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the 1968 protests are cases in point. The world wars had effected a weakening of many states in the north (reflected in the loosening of their colonial grip), combined with massive processes of institutional adjustment and reconstruction in the aftermath of the wars. The presence of two superpowers and the complexity of alliances involved, contributed to the illusion of state power, when in fact many states were politically and economically weak, all of which lent potency to resistant voices. The conditions were such to allow for the strong presence of socially critical university-based communities. But this has been threatened with the growth of state power, albeit in transmogrified form which involves a redefinition of sovereign territorial base, coupled with a deterritorialization of those state orders in dependent or subordinate relation. The WTC event throws this process into relief as it has also imparted agency of a marked ideological kind to an extension, perhaps transmutation, of the simultaneous dynamic of state reformation and deterritorialization. Here state and corporation are in peculiarly interdependent tension, corporate forces assuming organizational directions once exclusive to the apparatus of the state while the latter assumes key dimensions, for example, of a managerial kind, once characteristic of the corporation. What might be described as a new Leviathan has taken shape, manifest in both the current apotheosis of the dominant US state order and in the developing structure of the European Community. The new Leviathan exceeds the form that Hobbes and various others imagined, and was

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certainly prefigured, as De Tocqueville outlined, in the political experiments of the New World. One feature of the new Leviathan is the appearance of the state as thoroughly emergent from within the body of the people, and established on the ground of their individual will. The uneasy contract between state and society of the Hobbesian kind has been transcended, the one is the other: a relatively new dynamic is apparent—indicated in Foucault’s notion of governmentality (a significantly different ‘rewrite’ of the Gramscian notion of hegemony). The state (the reference is to the north American and western European forms) and the population it comes to encompass are now complicit, enabling a redefinition of notions like democracy (the state is now ‘naturally’ democratic, to be guided by the opinion poll rather than upset by the ballot box). Nationalism and its particularly ethnically marked essentialisms were prefigured, but currently overcome in the more inclusive presently dominant political formations. There is a distant similarity, perhaps, with ancient or medieval modalities of empire which embraced diverse ethnicities, and did not essentialize in the same way as modern nation-state forms. However, new essentialisms are being asserted and universalized (increasingly by force) and thinly disguised in discourses, for example, of human and individual rights. In the several processes outlined which the WTC event symbolically condenses as it catalyzes their expansion, the mediating and resistant role of critical intellectual communities has been reduced (relativized as no more worthy of attention than general opinion) or squeezed out. This is particularly so in relation to critical communities once, if briefly, constituted within universities, who in recent years refract in their transformation the larger changes that have taken place in political and economic order of dominant state forms. Once critical disciplines—relevant to the space created in the state/society tension of an earlier order—have been redefined and depotentiatiated in process-

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es of amalgamation, managerializing, downsizing and elimination. This, of course, has most often engaged the willing participation of those who, at other times, might have been sharp opponents. The changes that have occurred in the university discipline of anthropology, as it was formed between the two World Wars and after, reflect many of the processes that I think the WTC event draws into focus. The ideological formation of anthropology as a distinct subject involved a marked inner tension between its role on the one hand, as an agent in the expansion of north American and European secular rationalism and, on the other hand, its self-authorization as a science of the other able to represent different visions of reality. Although the pragmatic value of the specific anthropological role was declared, paradoxically the intellectual space which anthropology occupied often placed its practitioners (regardless of conventional political designations of right or left) in a critical relation to politically dominant forces driven from within the West. Some of its apparent celebration of the exotic and esoteric, the importance of ethnography in foreign climes, became instrumental in its critical practice which was often avowedly antagonistic to programs coming from usually colonially powerful metropolitan centers. Anthropologists representing the other, challenged the generalist or universalist assertions or claims of those disciplines engaged in metropolitan hegemony. This dialectic became, of course, integral to the internal discourse of the subject, although weighted strongly from the standpoint of otherness. Such a discourse was vital in a critical perspective on metropolitanism and its ruling ideologies (rationalism, pragmatic individualism, biologism, now supposedly freed from its racist associations, economism, etc.). However, the balance of the dialectic changed as a consequence of a growing attack on the very representational role of otherness that defined much of anthropological

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practice. Regardless of the point of this anthropological self-criticism (although powerful critics were often from outside the subject), it had the effect of draining the subject of much of its critical anti-metropolitan force. Exoticism gave way to pragmatism. Anthropologists more than ever before (but along with many others in the humanities and social sciences) now operate as consultants for big business and government institutions, cogs in the globalizing wheel, as it were, but they are compromised and so economically dependent that, by and large, they are rendered critically impotent. In my opinion, anthropology was reinvented (its ethos of fieldwork was reduced to give way to forms of textual interpretation, interview and personal narrative), so much so that the valuable distinction that had been made for it from other cognate metropolitan disciplines faded and, like these, anthropology became more than ever before a force in metropolitanism and increasingly (along with so many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences) a powerful arm of dominant interests. Anthropology lost its radical edge or, if it maintained it, this became a radicalism internal to metropolitan or global centers, with limited regard for a criticism of the way centers related to the regions or peoples they dominated. The problems that became the heart of anthropological concern were fundamentally metropolitan issues, and/or were issues constructed even more strongly through a metropolitan vision. Moreover, the problems at the heart of the subject have increasingly been defined by agencies external to its once particular vision. What I am claiming was not a mere function of discourse within anthropology. The changes were part of larger ideological and political changes connected with transformations in state structures and the clearer assertion of dominant metropolitan power (often described as globalization). The criticisms that developed within anthropol-

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ogy, and shifted the dynamic of its inner critical dialectic in retrospect—despite their valuable insights—begin to look like part of an ideological bulwark of the “new global order.” Not a few of the criticisms have the fantastic shape of ideology such as the insistence that the focus on culture was one which invariably took cultures to be bounded and homogenized, or was one which refused to look at diversity and variation. Such attacks on the once anthropological insistence on important differences in value that are embedded in practices would appear to have opened the way not only for a reassertion of metropolitan value (with evidence of a new if different faith in biologism, individual instrumentalism, neo-economism, etc.), but also facilitates orientations that actively level out difference, enabling the growth of prejudice and unchecked metropolitan selfsatisfaction. The attack on modernism—well deserved though this can be and which is potent within and without anthropological circles—often appears to be concerned with a postmodern ideological assertion (and postmodernism is largely a north American construction) directly connected with the emergence of new forms of no less or even more virulent forces of annihilating power. The WTC disaster and the events surrounding it highlight dimensions of the current world crisis. Many of the reactions in the metropoles (the apparent rise of attacks on minorities, the blanket and highly abstract representations of Islam, the suggestion that danger inhabits difference) appear to be a tragic repetition with a difference of earlier assertions of superiority that initially gave rise to a once powerfully critical modern anthropology. There is a need for a return to its critical spirit, although undoubtedly this must be different from that which went before. But the task is difficult, given the major changes that have seriously undermined the institutions that once supported the anthropological critique of yore, and which have seriously disrupted and effectively rendered conservative (often par-

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adoxically in the name of radicalism) the critical potency of that anthropology that questioned and often refused metropolitan authority. At this point in its intellectual history, and at this critical juncture in world history, a major reappraisal of anthropological directions is needed more than ever before.

REFERENCES Kapferer, Bruce. “Star Wars: About Anthropology, Culture and Globalisation.” Australian Journal of Anthopology 11, no. 1(2000):174-198.

NOTES

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CONTRIBUTORS

f Ibrahim G. Aoude, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Hawaii. Allen Feldman, Anthropology of Everyday Life Program, Institute for the Humanities, Ljubljana. Jonathan Friedman, University of Lund and Director of Research, Ecole Des Hautes Etudes, Paris. John Gledhill, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. Keith Hart, The Arkleton Centre, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Michael Humphrey, School of Sociology, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

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Bruce Kapferer, Department of Anthropology, University of Bergen. Leif Manger, Department of Anthropology, University of Bergen. Michael Rowlands, Department of Anthropology, University College London. Marshall Sahlins, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago.