I have lived in Europe for almost five years. My home is in Germany, my nationality and education are French. I define myself Arab-Lebanese. Not Muslim, which I am not by religion, but Arab by culture and civilisation while Islam belongs to what I define as my background.
I come from Lebanon. I lived there through the entire period of the civil war. That is the experience I want to bring to our discussion today.
Civil wars are the perfect context for the daily series of what we now call terrorists attacks. They are acts of violence against civilians, justified by perpetrators who are organised in the name of God or his Prophets, or by legitimate power acts they claim will defend me and you against you and me, from the danger of your group or mine.
Your community or mine. Civil wars build through an insidious process of dividing communities (including those that are just starting to grow) and hitting the heart of families, by dividing their members into friends and fiends in the name of ideology. The process provokes acts of violence, which extend to massacres; it alienates us from being free individuals; it undermines our capacity to think and our ability to remain critical all in the name of security.
Civil wars manipulate our need to belong. They reduce our identities to religion or ethnicity, denying personal biographies and experiences.
Civil wars manipulate our need for pride and honour.
Civil wars are another way to make war.
Civil wars create and reproduce an environment where there is a lack of consensus, lack of participation, lack of negotiation, lack of fair distribution.
Civil wars are the extreme sign of the failure to reach consensus democratically.
I have been engaged in the long process of democratisation of my country nowadays prescribed as a must by western governments as if we ourselves had not come to the idea before. For fifteen years I experienced what it is like to be unable to stop a conflict like the one in Lebanon no matter how much civil courage and good intentions you have every morning. Now, ever since 11 September 2001, I have been having a similar bad feeling: that we are reproducing on a larger scale a process that has the vicious ingredients of a civil war.
But this time, I can afford to dream of peace.
To dream of acting and participating against the war.
Because I am living in Europe.
Because of the democratic tradition and structures of European countries.
Terrorist attacks are not events, not an aberration of history, nor a speciality of uncivilised people. They are not only criminal. And they are never solely the work of outsiders.
Through the damage they inflict, they question our vision of democracy. They challenge our awareness and question the actions we undertake to protect ourselves.
I dont think that ETA could have gone that far in horror. But I know that terrorist groups are networked through hate and irrationality. A terrorist from al-Qaida or one of its associates could have used ETAs equipment and infrastructure. With or without ETA, terrorists can simply take advantage of what is available on the Spanish market, from internal schisms to a certain way of planting or manufacturing bombs.
Once again, terrorism shows us that it can take advantage of our unresolved problems and conflicts, that it can exploit our failure to react with courage and honesty to the changes in our societies, and in the world. Terrorism shows us in an extreme way that our ethics as well as our goodwill are not working.
Fighting terrorism is our common responsibility, as democrats in the Middle East (and that includes Israel), in the United States, in Europe (and that includes immigrants, Muslims and others).
We will have to act jointly without distinction between nationalities, ethnicities or religions.
We must support participation as against denunciation, partnership as against arrogance, integration not marginality, justice and rights not injustice, and consensus as against arbitrary power.
Power without consensus can make things worse.
Unchecked power, the sole reliance on power can be another form of terror.
We must protect ourselves from our own demons. In order to protect democracy, we should ask for more participation of all the groups in our societies.
We should ask that everyone makes it their responsibility to work to build a civil and democratic global consensus against terror.
In his Editors Note on openDemocracy.net, Anthony Barnett asks if mass terrorism has become part of our daily life.
I hope that we will never get used to it. I hope we will act before others, who could as easily - and this time in the name of security - drive us into hell.
We should have the courage to isolate terrorism and gain the confidence of those who look towards it, by making sure that our democracy is effective and appealing, not imposed.
