In the early 1920s Berlin saw the release of a book now deliberately forgotten, which was written by a world-famous philosopher, who spoke about the start of a new epoch in the development of mankind — an epoch of religious or ideological wars and a return to barbarism and medieval cruelty. The philosopher’s name was Nikolai Berdiayev, the author of the book The New Middle Ages. Against the background of news reports about terrorist acts, this book, which proved prophetic for the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s, leads one to speculate about a periodically activated mechanism whereby mankind returns to seemingly archaic forms of coexistence, and even experiences periods of retreat into other historical epochs.
OLD AND NEW TERROR
In the last few years, politicians the world over have been discussing the new world war — the war on global terror. Yet it is only the recent wave of terror in Iraq and Russia, specifically the tragedy in Beslan, which has led us to reexamine the essence of this phenomenon, without a doubt the gravest of all international threats. The general feeling that the disease is much too advanced, and that medications prescribed according to prescriptions dating back to the Cold War and the post-bipolar world of the 1990s are exacerbating rather than curing it, is increasing, thus leading us to reexamine both the nature of this disease and possible therapies.
No matter how hard we try to analyze the events in Chechnya, Iraq, and Afghanistan in terms of globalization, national liberation struggles, liberalization, modernization, westernization, postwar nation-state building, and political regulation, we are still left with the sense of the superficial and artificial nature of such standard classifications; we feel the invisible presence of some internal, unrevealed essence of these events.
If you leave aside such a complex notion as state terrorism, which is inherent in totalitarian regimes, it is obvious that terrorism should be classified into old and new terrorism. Old terrorism is the revolutionary terrorism of the socialist-revolutionaries in Russia, leftist extremism in 1960s-1970s Europe, acts of terror committed by Basque separatists and the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, and the activity of the Palestine Liberation Organization, including their massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. In committing every act of terror, the “old” generation pursued specific, local political goals. Unlike old terrorism, new terror is aimed not so much against a specific regime or state as against the entire system of international relations and the existing world order. Modern terrorism, as shown by the mass killing of children in Beslan, aims to destroy the existing system of human values.
Terror for the sake of terror and the obvious infeasibility of the terrorists’ demands or their absence, as was the case with the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, only emphasize the terrorists’ desire to declare their existence by killing other people and immersing the world in their own existentialist condition.
The new wave of terror is primarily a means of proving one’s moral superiority, and superiority of one’s lifestyle and way of thinking. Even though such motives have not been alien to terrorists in all periods, for the suicide terrorists of the twenty-first century this motive has become the primary one — and perhaps the only one. By dramatizing violence, terrorists create the invasion of the cult of death into mass consciousness and show the same contempt for the consumer society, which until recently formed the main irrational underpinnings of the biggest totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. But even the ideologues of those regimes differed from modern-day terrorists in that the latter’s formal motives are profoundly archaic. These motives, which match the formula of “cut off an infidel’s head and you’ll go to heaven,” are indeed medieval, much like the concept of neo-terrorism. Yet the success of these primitive messages is paradoxically linked to those complex, painful processes that the world is experiencing in the era of globalization.
THE TERROR MACHINE AS A TIME MACHINE
Today leading international law specialists have begun to talk about the erosion of nation-state sovereignty, about a post-state epoch of the new Middle Ages and the decline of the statocentric world. Elaborating on this thesis, one may say that the state obviously ceases to be the link between a territory, society, and the outer world, and is shedding the functions of the carrying construct in the system of international relations. The surrounding world is becoming less a group of nation states, and is progressively turning into a system with post-state, transnational, and network players. Supranational, regional, and macro-regional unions are taking the place of nation states; the process of forming new global imperial projects (USA) and national empires (the classic example being the EU) is underway. This process may be identified as the erosion of national sovereignty from the top down. The erosion of sovereignty from the bottom up is accompanying it — the state as an institution of classic capitalism and territorial sovereignty is coming under colossal pressure from ethnic, sub-ethnic, regional, and sub-national movements and identities. And although within this context terrorist organizations comprise only one type of illegitimate, anti-system actors in the post-state and transnational world, their actions are generally in sync with the broad vector of world development. While the global civil society and supranational structures are eroding state sovereignty from the position of the first world and the world market, the new machines of terror are attacking nation-state sovereignty from the position of the third world, primarily its Muslim segment. Terror is a challenge to the state system from the world’s periphery, the global underground of lower classes in the world polity — from the ungilded, albeit actively growing, billions. But there is another aspect: a large part of the population in problem regions identifies itself according to characteristics that are not typical of the historical epoch in which first world nations exist. For them religion replaces the national component, and citizenship is substituted by a system of vassal commitments to a specific leader. As a result, contemporary terror, which by definition is at the intersection of spaces (local/global) and epochs (the epoch of crusades/postmodernism), has become a kind of time machine mixing societies at different stages of historical development, and creating illegal loopholes for the invasion of third world radicalism into the satisfied stability of the first world and semi-stability of the second world (countries of the former socialist camp). A combination of archaism and modernization tendencies, and the use of contemporary military and information technologies are the main components of the terror machine.
With the weakening of the state system, a new field for interfaith strife is forming. State policy has always had a religious undercurrent, but in the West this connection has been indirect since the mid-seventeenth century. Religious wars led people to give up their religious self-identification and resulted instead in the appearance of nation states based on territorial sovereignties, borders, and national identities; paradoxically, the state and religion were simultaneously connected and separate. The theocratic state became secular. Christian values were transformed into secular precepts and such notions as democracy, humanism, human rights, nation, and territory, thus acquiring the status of values common to all humanity. It is this status that the radical Islam is challenging today by imposing the necrophilious heroism of suicide bombers.
THE EMPIRE’S NEGATIVE DOUBLE
The contradiction between the legitimate-neo-imperial and supranational-challenge to state sovereignty and the illegitimate, terrorist challenge also emerges at the organizational level. The state is primarily a vertical of power, hierarchy, and distinct borders. The new terror is primarily an anti-state organizational form. In point of fact, this is not even an organization or form but an extra-spatial “pure substance.” Within this context acts of terror are a challenge to the state as a dominant form of political organization, which comes from networks that have neither a center nor a periphery. A specialty of terrorist networks is the absence of centers and directed vectors of development. For this very reason terrorist threats should not be viewed as limited, isolated, or easily identifiable phenomena. The new terror is everywhere and nowhere; it is moving in all directions and nowhere. It is not on the frontline nor beyond it, i.e. it occurs in world capitals and megalopolises (New York, Madrid, Moscow) and on the periphery: in Baghdad, on the island of Bali, in Riyadh, or Beslan. The terror machine is eliminating distances, and this “end of geography” is creating an understanding of the need to bring order into problem and “barbarian” zones. Meanwhile, establishing order is a classic task for an empire. Therefore, the new terrorism is a response to and an inspiration for a new global empire. In this sense the terror machine is a “negative double,” a foul appendix and continuation of the modern post-national empire, whose borders and capitals are becoming blurred. (Where is the capital of the American global empire? Not only in Washington, but also in Brussels with its NATO, in post-Saddam Baghdad, and in the “financial cities” of the global market).
“FROM BUCKS TO HOBBES”
Terror is a graphic illustration of changes to the main function of the state, which Max Weber once defined as a “monopoly of legitimate violence.” Terror is an attempt to take over the state’s power function and war, and to individualize them. In this respect terrorist organizations undermine and take over the function of war and peace from states as legitimate players in the world of the Westfallen Agreement and NATO. By declaring their personal war, they are reminiscent of the feudal armies of the early medieval epoch. Obviously, in a situation where a dozen men can bring a huge nation to its knees, the whole world might face the threat of destabilization and chaos. So perhaps it would make sense to finally admit that success in the war on terror is not guaranteed, since the structure of the modern world itself contains possibilities for its disintegration and movement toward non-state and non-national forms of social organization. This is a movement “back to the future” — to post-territorial power structures and empires without territories, which are polished and redirected as the state machinery of security responds to the actions of the terror machine. The problem of ensuring total security is the main stimulus and constructive element. The fear of terror shifts the massive construction of neo-imperial states — “from bucks to Hobbes” — from the world market and global finances to more stringent and direct forms of global management and security, which appeal to authoritarian types of leadership and institutions, special services, intelligence, police and paramilitary structures of power, but this time not within the framework of European territorial absolutism of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but in the de-territorialized non-space of globalism.
A graphic example of these processes are transformations in countries that have fallen victim to terrorist attacks, primarily the US and Russia. Whether security authoritarianism is a temporary remedy for the flaws of a new spin in the globalization process or a new stable form of a new era-this is the fundamental question that is determining the prospects for a liberal civilization in a world where a terror machine has been set in motion.
