After the London bombings: global terror, the west and indiscriminate violence.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Hinkson, John
• Date: 22 March 2005

In the midst of carnage and outrage in many parts of the world, and with daily body counts in Iraq often in excess of the loss of life in the London bombings, the endless soul-searching accounts into that particular terrorist attack often seemed an exercise in double standards. But there is another possibility. Perhaps this preoccupation arose out of an unease still to be articulated. In this article I will argue that the London bombing confirms a new order of threat comparable only with that of September 11, not just a threat to the 'Western way of life' but, more significantly, touching on doubts about its very viability. Nevertheless, analysis in the press concentrates on the immediate anguish generated by the death of innocent people and terror's deep disruption of everyday life. It leaves in the background the larger processes of history, international power relations and cultural transformation that can provide a perspective on the experience of a terrorist assault.

Most people have only a rudimentary sense of the way that the external relations of their governments affect the way they live. It is one thing to depend on ready access to oil, to take a relevant example, but quite another to grasp that its taken-for-granted availability is frequently implicated in the subordination of other peoples. Often enough, as the history of conquest demonstrates, it entails the disruption of those peoples' taken-for-granted ways of living, including their religious beliefs.

When some seek to hit back by terrorist means, as in the case of the London and Madrid bombings, the sense of outrage and injustice of those who simply take for granted their own established way of living is understandable. And at least in the short term it is a simple matter for their political figures to play on their sense of outrage, to speak to their emotions rather than to enlarge their understanding of the overall international context. In Australia, Beazley's denunciation of 'sub-human filth' was a clear example. In the United Kingdon, the Queen's declaration that our 'Western way of life will not be affected' also depended upon a hypocritical self-righteousness blind to the growing association of that way of life with militarized, if not totalitarian, policy shifts. A changed relation of the state to citizens begins to take shape, as illustrated in policies of shoot first and ask questions later.

A number of more considered articles in the press have reflected upon the new reality that the London terrorists were 'homegrown'. What could be the reasons for British-born citizens making such attacks at the heart of their own country? Several arguments have been marshalled.

The first suggests that we do not need to delve into the deeper meanings of this terror; that we can see it in straightforwardly political terms. These terrorists are simply enacting political strategies, for instance to force a withdrawal of the 'coalition of the willing' from Iraq. Robert Pape has argued this view, acknowledging the fact of Islamic fundamentalism but dismissing its significance in the larger terror strategy. (1) For him, if this terrorist strategy were to succeed in forcing a withdrawal from Iraq, the growing tendency towards terror would dissipate. That these terrorists are born and bred in England does not cut across them adopting political strategies supported by fellow terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere. They know what has to be opposed: they see the outrages in the Middle East and attribute blame to the coalition. For Pape, having an Islamic background generates fellow feeling and solidarity, but that is all. Given the imperatives of asymmetrical warfare, in their own terms they have little choice but to go beyond conventional political means and engage in terror.

The second strand of interpretation emphasizes the nature of Islam itself. Contrary to Pape, it argues that Islam has been hijacked, or given an extreme interpretation, motivating potential terrorists wherever they happen to be born. In a long article in The Sunday Age, Peter Khalil, an analyst with the Eurasia Group in New York, argues this case, against Pape, in a relatively developed form. (2) In his view, Al-Qaeda has developed a general world-view that rejects Western modernity and its 'decadence' and is seeking to build a pure Islamic state, including the reinstatement of the historic caliphate that collapsed with the demise of the Ottoman Empire. It is this world-view that motivates the terrorist, justifying terror strategies aimed at achieving withdrawal from Iraq. In Khalil's view, diasporic Islamic youth in the West, relatively affluent as they may be, are drawn into action in rejection of the ideologies associated with the Western way of life.

Pape's conclusion is that the West should withdraw from their interventionist positions, although for him this means simply withdrawing off-shore and remaining in close proximity. Khalil, however, believes that moderate Islam should develop a positive view of the modern so it can find a way forward that gives meaning to its youth. This is the approach adopted by Tony Blair who has campaigned amongst moderate Muslims to convince them, along with those inclined to stray, of the distortions in bin Laden's version of Islam.

The views of Pape and Khalil contain partial truths but neither offers an analysis of the West. While they are more complex than those drawn directly from commonsense--those grounding assumptions of everyday life that we live by and barely know--both accounts remain continuous with it. In this response, terror is understood as a threat to the given social order and as such the natural question becomes how it might be possible to defend ourselves and our institutions. Of course, this response easily transmutes into reactions that will call out unintended consequences that will make their mark for generations. As a commonsense approach it is understandable, but it also illustrates the limits of commonsense in some situations of threat.

The limitations of commonsense are even more problematic when they pervade intellectual perspectives on terror. Far from the contribution that might be made by analysis and interpretation to developing new ways of understanding the immediate phenomenon of terror, commonsense notions are implicitly reinforced. (3)

The question is whether a given approach works only within the terms of the apparent objects of investigation--the terror organization, the particular state or society--or whether it can illuminate these while also reflexively delving into their grounding assumptions. Empiricist approaches screen out such grounding assumptions, occluding the possibility that terror may now be endemic for reasons quite different from those that Pape and Khalil canvass. Firstly, such accounts ignore the social and cultural conditions of the home-grown terrorist and how these contribute to support for terrorist strategies. Secondly, these accounts are not able to make sense of the focus of terror today on innocent people beyond making uninformative claims about 'extremists'.

Having a broader perspective than Pape's and Khalil's is a first step, a very important one, if terror is to be set within a changing social context. Recognition of such change is crucial. It can help to break down conflicts operative in contexts which have lost or are losing their force and make new coalitions possible. Offering important insights and making new connections between events, Walter Laqueur's No End to War illustrates this point. (4) Yet here, too, there is a problem of method, one related to the use of conventional concepts.

It will be argued that Laqueur does engage with the changed nature of terror in the last quarter century. He does so by adopting a perspective that allows him to step well beyond the relations of Islam with the West by taking up the broad question of technology and the formation of social movements concerned with the varied impacts of technology. In doing so he throws light upon the phenomenon of home-grown terrorism, as well as the rise of indiscriminate terror that targets innocent people.

Even so, Laqueur achieves this with his hands tied: while he generates new insights, he is unable to elaborate the change in Western societies that he identifies by his reference to 'technology'. I will argue that the transformation in the nature of terror demands that we grapple with the changed character of intellectual practices over the last two generations and related changes in the character of the social. Without investigating this development, Laqueur cannot elucidate the emergent social basis of the new movements he identifies or the reasons for the indiscriminate nature of contemporary violence. It is not surprising that for Laqueur the threat of terror emanates from what he considers the 'a-social fanatic'.

Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century

In No End to War Laqueur seeks to interpret the waves of terror that have swept the world over the last twenty-five years. He approaches this task through, firstly, a brief general history of terror and, secondly, a special focus on Islamic terror in its various forms and manifestations. These two elements alone do not make for a novel account of the contemporary phenomenon. However a third element--the articulation of the prospect of a global terror more comprehensive than the limited expressions of Islamic terror, a terror that takes its point of departure from 'technological civilization' in its own right--brings the reader up against the larger meanings of contemporary terrorism. These qualify any tendency to see this terror simply as a manifestation of a clash of civilizations, or as arising out of particular conflicts, such as the war in Iraq or the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Over half of Laqueur's book is taken up with an account of the Islamist movement's rise to prominence, from its early emergence in Egypt following the...