Wise things have been said in openDemocracy about the meaning of the recent terrible events. But something needs to be added, it seems to me, about the role of globalisation in both inspiring such acts of violence and making them possible.
It is customary to divide the states of the world into western and non-western. The use of these geographical terms has always been faintly ridiculous, even if Spengler briefly gave a point to it. Insofar as there is a single deep division here it is that between states which exemplify the political inheritance of Christian civilisation, and states which do not. The state itself is a Christian invention, growing in the late middle ages from the legacy of Roman law, papal jurisdiction and local sovereignty.
It could be said that the distinction is not between western and non-western states but between states and non-states. States, as they emerged from Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, are sovereign territories, ruled by laws, in which a process of representation secures a dialogue between those who make the laws and those who obey them. Administrators gain and lose office by a political process which they cannot alter to their own advantage, while religious institutions have been sidelined in government, and all but silenced in the laws.
Non-states and the middle east
Non-states are fiefdoms, secured by force, intrigue or inheritance, in which there may be no process of representation and no distinction between the constitution and the whims of the current ruler. Secular (as opposed to religious) law has no independent authority, but is construed as the command of the ruler, and can be changed or ignored according to the ruler’s desires. (The ruler can be a person, such as Saddam Hussein, or a party, such as the Communist Party, or a sect, such as the Taliban, or all three - as in Hafiz el-Assad’s personal rule through the Ba’ath Party and the Alawite sect over Syria.) Territory is still important, but it is regarded as a possession, rather than a sphere of jurisdiction.
Between those two extremes there are many intermediate cases. What is certain, however, is that many of the successor states of the empires (Ottoman, British and Soviet) which between them created today’s "middle east" seem to have lapsed into the condition of non-states, becoming private fiefdoms, run by individuals, families, clans or sects.
There have been exceptions: Turkey, following the secularisation and Europeanisation imposed by Kemal Atatürk, has effectively distanced itself from its Islamic and imperial past. Lebanon, thanks to its distinctive history, emerged as a quasi-nation (the Mutassarifah) long before the Ottoman empire collapsed; and, of course, Israel is a state on the European model, imported into territory which has never known such a thing. On the whole, however, the Islamic states have remained poised in the unstable region between non-states (Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq) and attempts at the so far unrealised ideal of an Islamic republic: a republic in which, rather than the state, God (as revealed through the prophet) is the ultimate authority.
Islamic jurisprudence does not recognise secular, still less territorial jurisdiction as a genuine source of law. It proposes a universal law which is the single path (shari’a) to salvation. Nor does Islam recognise the state as an independent object of loyalty. Obedience is owed first to God, and then, below Him, to those situated at greater or less remove in the web of personal obligations. Nor is there any trace in Islamic law of the secular conception of government that Christianity inherited (via St Paul) from Roman law, and which ultimately led, with the decline of faith, to Weber’s "legal-rational" forms of authority.
The risks of globalisation
States, taking advantage of the rule of law and the freedoms which that guarantees, have enjoyed an enormous trading advantage, and have profited from globalisation both to increase the wealth of their citizens and to broadcast the image of that wealth around the world, to people who are simultaneously amazed, provoked and humiliated by the spectacle. Hence people who had arrived at negotiated relations with their neighbours, whose climate, local economy and inherited melancholy they share, are suddenly put into relation with others, thousands of miles away, enjoying wholly different conditions, unimaginable luxuries, and freedoms that are both enticing and shocking to the traditional mind.
Furthermore, globalisation has eroded the barriers to migration. If planes are constantly leaving New York for cities around the world, then they will also come back full of people. Some of those people will want to stay and participate in the wealth that now surrounds them. Others will be outraged by the fickle, godless and salacious attitudes (as they see them) which are the mark of democratic government.
Hence - even without the added force of jihad and the political instability introduced into the middle east by the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the foundation of the state of Israel - globalisation is bound to create both intense hostility to western democracies, and the means to express that hostility through terrorist acts. To the person whose primary loyalties are religious, who has no conception of a territorial rule of law standing higher than the power of human sovereigns, and no understanding of political obligation as a duty owed to this purely human invention called the state, there is no contradiction between enjoying the hospitality, protection and even citizenship of a democratic republic while plotting to destroy it.
Those who express doubts about the "multicultural society" are not, as their opponents hasten to call them, racists. They are trying to remind people that we in the "west" enjoy a single political culture, with the state as the object of a common loyalty, and a secular conception of law which leaves religion and morality to the private realm. People who see all law, all social identity and all loyalty as issuing from a religious source cannot really form part of this political culture, and will not recognize the obligation to the state on which it is founded.
That is why it is possible for British subjects to travel to Yemen, in order to kidnap and murder British tourists and blow up the British embassy, without entertaining the thought that this might be an act of disloyalty. Citizenship, it is worth remembering, is a concept that comes to us via Christianity and the Enlightenment from Roman law.
Modern terrorist operations are greatly facilitated by globalisation, which, while it has worked to the disadvantage of the poorer non-states when it comes to economics, has worked greatly to their advantage when it comes to revenge. Not only is there a global market in weaponry. The devices now exist for training terrorists at a distance, communicating with them by email and mobile-phone, and coordinating operations of a stupendous complexity, such as those we have just witnessed in America.
Moreover, issuing from the democratic world is a constant stream of violent movies, which do not merely dwell on disaster but make proud display of the means to achieve it. Do we honestly think that these will not have their effect in the minds of people who have perhaps only glimpsed an aeroplane from a distance, and know nothing of American life apart from the excesses that they witness on TV? British ITV, in its retrospective newsreels of the tragedy at the World Trade Center, even accompanies the grim pictures with a kitsch-tragic film score, so dishonouring the dead and at the same time wrapping the whole episode in the cultural idiom of the B-movie - in short, normalising it.
And if the messages from the western media include, as now they do, the flood of pornography guaranteed by the US Supreme Court under the right of "free speech" (even if the "speech" in question consists largely of grunts), can we be surprised if the normal, pious Muslim soul draws the conclusion that what he is witnessing is the realm of Satan? Globalisation presents him simultaneously with the goal of martyrdom and the means to achieve it. In such circumstances there is surely very little work for Osama bin Laden to do.
I believe that we can defend ourselves against Islamic terrorism. But we must begin from a correct perception of what globalisation means to those who witness it from the Islamic standpoint. We will then come to see that globalisation is not a great movement to be advanced, but an unfortunate by-product of our successes, and of the unified political culture that made them possible - a by-product that must be controlled and limited like a dangerous drug, and not treated as the single cure of the world’s many diseases.
