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 by Brian Milstein Presented as my final paper for the seminar, "Democratic Culture: Societal Inclusion, Public Deliberation, and Difference," Summer 2002, at the Graduate Institute on Democracy and Diversity, Transregional Center for Democratic Studies Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, New School for Social Research, Instructor Cite as: Milstein, Brian. "On 'Postmodern Tyranny,' or conversely: How to Be an Intelligent Globaphobiac." Unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, New York (accessed on [DATE] at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/goldfarb.html). This past summer, I had the privilege of taking a seminar with sociologist Jeffrey C. Goldfarb as part of a graduate institute in Cracow, Poland on "Democracy and Diversity," a program of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) arranged conjointly between the New School for Social Research in New York and Jagellonian University in Cracow. The title of the seminar was "Democratic Culture: Societal Inclusion, Public Deliberation, and Difference," and its purpose was to examine the ins and outs of political life in a democracy, or a democratic society, including those actions and structures that might facilitate or hinder free, open deliberation on political questions. Goldfarb dedicated the final meeting of the class to discuss the September 11th terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center and their potential significance as a category of political empowerment. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt's famous declaration that totalitarianism, as manifested in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, was "modern tyranny" par excellence, he put forward an assertion that global terrorism represented "postmodern tyranny." The claim did not sit well with students -- many of whom come from developing countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe -- who immediately counter-asserted the tyrannical excesses of American hegemony, which have become of increasing concern to them since President Bush inaugurated the "War on Terror." It seemed that Professor Goldfarb and his students were talking right past each other, unable to agree even on the concepts of "perpetrator" or "victim," and any suggestion to find a middle ground (which will be the topic of this essay) was altogether precluded. This episode in Cracow was the third attempt by Goldfarb that I know of to offer his views on the action taken by Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization in fall 2001. A similar attempt at a TCDS program in Cape Town, South Africa yielded similar results: I was shocked by the class discussion. With the exception of one young professor from Nigeria, all the students in Southern Africa were focused not on confronting Al Qaeda but on the American war on terrorism. It seemed that the participants could not imagine that the Americans were victims. They could only understand our power and condemn our excesses.Goldfarb draws heavily on Arendt's definition of "freedom," and its antonym "tyranny," which she once described as "a state...in which there is no communication between the citizens and where each man thinks his own thoughts" (Arendt 1977, 164). The imposition of a tyranny is that which effectively puts an end to open deliberation, which, for Goldfarb and Arendt, is constitutive of the political realm. Terrorism, he argues, does precisely that: using fear to sway public opinion, it prevents not only its direct victims from exercising political voice, but its observers as well. It is therefore a form of tyranny. Moreover, the technological innovations that have come to characterize "postmodern society," particularly the rise of worldwide electronic media networks, have made it so that an event such as the September 11th attacks can be virtually transmitted throughout the world, making its tyrannical effects felt everywhere simultaneously. He hypothesizes that the battle against this form of "postmodern tyranny" will be a primary political task of the twenty-first century, as was "modern tyranny" in the form of totalitarianism during the twentieth. I suspect that it was in part the rhetorical elevation of terrorism to the level of an epoch-defining political agenda that most offended his students, possibly because they perceived it as an agenda to be carried out by the First World and its allies against the undesirable elements of "backward" nations. Of course, this interpretation could not be farther from what Goldfarb intended, but it is the very possibility of such an interpretation of the war on terror (and the unfortunate fact that this is how many American citizens, officials, and intellectuals see it) that I think will ultimately bring us to the heart of the issue. The above having been said, a theoretical grappling with "postmodern tyranny" must, in my view, reconcile a number of conceptual and contextual difficulties: (1) Terrorism certainly is abrasive to free discussion generally, and is by most accounts a morally highly impoverished strategy for power. But already there must be raised a distinction between strategies for obtaining power and those for consolidating or maintaining it. "Tyranny" describes a regime -- something permanent, an institutionalized exercise not merely of power, violence or force but of domination. September 11th, at least in the first analysis, is a singular event, which, though it may signal or signify some potential, "greater" future state of affairs, does not on its own constitute a regime. Even if it did, one would then have to contend with a variety of other mechanisms and strategies that have been shown to constrain public deliberation, such as those of corrupt transnational corporations or homogenization by mass media, as well as hegemonic posturings by the Great Powers in global politics, all of which would seem to have equal claim to the title "tyranny" if its sole criteria were the inhibition of the political. It would then appear that terrorism either fails to qualify as a tyranny (stricto sensu), or it does so only in tandem with several other phenomena in the postmodern world, in which case it loses the special status that Goldfarb would like to imbue upon it. (2) A "tyranny" connotes the ruthless domination of the powerful over the powerless. Yet the terrible actions taken by Al Qaeda in September 2001 were nonetheless the actions of a dissident faction against a world hegemon. In terms of dynamics between domination and resistance, the political context of the acts appear to have them in the "wrong direction" to be a tyranny. Of course, it is precisely this kind of perspective, as a kind of reductionism, that he wants to dispel. For Goldfarb, it is of the highest importance not to lose sight of the thousands who were killed to debates regarding the distribution of global power. At the same time, it is precisely this kind of perspective, as a temper of public opinion, that nevertheless needs to be accounted for. For it is the global power structure, and the schism it creates that systemically excludes the voices of the periphery from the center that both motivated the attacks in the first place and earned them mixed sympathy around the world. Few condoned the attacks, but many purport to understand them at least as an act of resistance. Americans are often aware of their hegemonic position; less apparent is how the full effects of American hegemony, especially via its foreign relations policies, are felt by the citizens of other countries. The full extent of the difference in moral interpretations of world events between center and periphery has only recently begun to be appreciated by many Western intellectuals. Goldfarb assumed that the September 11th attacks were received with the same sense of unmitigated horror as they were in the West. Yet simply because the same images of the burning World Trade Center towers was broadcasted to all parts of the world, it does not automatically follow that the images were interpreted in the same way. In this sense, he underestimated the hermeneutic rift between himself and his interlocutors in considering the political context of the actions. (3a) Goldfarb's defining criteria for referring to the terrorist actions as tyrannies is that they "end politics," i.e., preclude political deliberation. Yet this claim (which I ultimately agree with) must be reconciled with the paradoxical effect that, in its aftermath, the attacks spurred a torrent of worldwide discussion and debate, on terrorism, on Third World dissidence, on the nature of American power and hegemony, on the what very telos that may be inherent in the world society that is emerging for the twenty-first century. Previously disempowered political voices have found renewed courage to voice their concerns before the global public sphere, in both "legitimate" and "illegitimate" ways. The lines of active debate seem to have become less confined to "pro-" versus "anti-Western" voices among peripheric interlocutors regarding self-determination in their own countries; debate has taken on a new dynamic in which issues are discussed at higher levels of both disillusionment and enthusiasm between formerly isolated representatives of the periphery, between them and the center, and even within the center itself. The aspects in which the September 11th attacks are destructive to political deliberation are not easily separable from the aspects in which they facilitate it. (3b) On the other hand, if the terrorist actions of fall 2001 are connected in any way to an increase in political discussion, the American reaction and its resonances have most certainly been linked to its repression, and some have charged that the Bush administration's policies in dealing with the attacks has in fact done more to preclude open democratic discussion than the attacks themselves. American foreign policy since September 2001 can be summarized in terms of a resurgence of interests-of-state over democratization as a greater cause, despite the president's own rhetoric that the war on terror promotes the defense of "freedom." Bush's manichean declaration that one must be "with us" or "with the terrorists" has given rise to countless acts of repression against pro-democracy groups on the part of authoritarian governments, particularly in Africa and Asia. In a recent report on the state of human rights since September 11th, 2001, The Economist concluded: "The sad truth is that September 11th has given despots everywhere a licence to brand all their critics terrorists and take action accordingly" (The Economist 2002b, 20). The difficulty for anyone trying to situate September 11th in terms of its meaning for political discussion must reckon with the opinion held by many that the American reaction signifies not so much a change in America's attitude toward the rest of the world but rather an extreme example of a mentality already present, the antipathy toward which was the motivation for the attacks in the first place. The above is not intended to debunk Goldfarb's argument -- nor is it sufficient to do so -- but to draw out some of the issues that need to be addressed to fully consider the implications of September 11th as a crucial event in contemporary history. I believe the above observations recommend that we cannot properly come to grips with the events that took place in fall 2001 and after without lending consideration to their context within an emerging global polity. The actions taken by Al Qaeda are unquestionably a form of transnational political action, but they are of a kind that cannot be reduced to its more conventional forms, such as diplomacy or interstate war. As for the remainder of this work, the first part will be aimed at locating the political realm at the global level and reflecting on its transformation through new forms of transnational integration. This brief sketch will be thematized with an eye to possible forms of political agency, but it should lay the conceptual groundwork for the second part, in which I plan to discuss the role of dissent and the political context within which we can best understand what happened on September 11th, 2001, what caused it to happen, and why it may or may not happen again. | ||
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We can begin to draw a portrait by drawing upon Arendt's model of the polis, though in a perhaps unorthodox way. Arendt envisioned the polis as possessing a vibrant "public realm" in which "freedom" could be exercised among equals. This realm was certainly the life-force and the very engine of the social order, but its effectiveness depended on a particular demarcation from the private realm, the realm of the household. This demarcation is relevant to Arendt's notion of freedom as including not simply freedom from command but freedom from the burdens of necessity. The household, from the perspective of the public realm, is "prepolitical," phenomenologically prior to freedom, a "natural community...born of necessity" (Arendt 1958, 30-1). Being prepolitical, according to Arendt, means that "force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity" (31). Violence is thus the means by which the citizen ascends to the realm beyond necessity, to the realm of freedom, of the political. The very sustenance of the political realm as a permanent mechanism thus depends on the permanent relegation of necessity, and so the relegation of violence: The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action...nor was it a catalogue of prohibitions.... It was quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town (asty), but not a city, a political community. This wall-like law was sacred, but only the inclosure was political. Without it a public realm could no more exist than a piece of property without a fence to hedge it in; the one harbored and inclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family. (63-64)If the division between public and private is to be seen as the basis for the political-legal ordering of the Greek polis, then Arendt's model finds an interesting parallel in international relations theory, which is built on a similar "wall-like law" separating external from internal sovereignty among states. This parallel, moreover, is not merely a metaphorical coincidence -- for the very concept of "state" has evolved in Europe in not just etymological but in political-legal conjunction with the concept of "estate," linked also with "status." The idealist principle, tracing itself at least far back as the AbbÈ St. Pierre and approximated in the U.N. General Assembly, stems from the presupposition that states are fundamentally independent and politically equal. How this ideal is playing out against the current state of affairs warrants additional reflection. Traditionally, the state has been considered the primary actor in global affairs, on both descriptive and normative grounds. International politics is generally approached with a picture of the world as carved up into a jigsaw-like arrangement of territories without remainder. These territories and the collections of people dwelling upon them have been organized into some sort of a society by a given institutional order and a government possessing a "monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence" (Wendt 1999, 202). Each territory with its corresponding population is thereby endowed with "an organizational structure of non-rival, unified authority" that constitutes its sovereignty -- its essential capacity to act and be viewed as a single, indivisible agent (208). This personification of the state can be said to have originated around the fifteenth century in Europe. "State" refers originally to the estate and the status of the monarch; estate and status were themselves linked, as social position in feudal times was a function of landed property -- hence the tradition of referring to the hierarchical order of feudal and post-feudal societies in terms of their "estates." The sovereign embodied the will of the state, and law comes into being as the very exercise of that will (Dyson 1980, 28, 32; Bodin 1992, 56). The person of the king was later to be abstracted into the polity itself, but the voluntaristic imprint onto political sovereignty as a higher-order will still resonates: "The king never dies" (Bodin 1992, 44). Hobbes, Vattel, and Kant continued to characterize the state as an "artificial soul" or "moral person" with the full capacity of practical consciousness, as did Locke, who thought the difference between a household and a commonwealth (each with its respective "master") to be, in a significant way, a mere matter of scale. Even when, in the following centuries, monarchy gave way to "popular sovereignty," the model of unified agency remained, such that, according to Alexander Wendt, "a democratic state will still have de facto sovereignty insofar as it remains a distinct organization delegated to make decisions and enforce the law on society's behalf. The people may have ultimate authority over this organization, but short of a collapse of state legitimacy the state will be sovereign in all but name" (Wendt 1999, 207, my emphasis). The inter-"national" arena, insofar as it itself can be conceived as a polity of sorts, consists of a body politic of sovereign states constituted as interacting individuals. More appropriately, this polity is characterized by its vertical division into sovereignties, each free to handle its own "private" affairs as it sees fit and to interact in the public space of world affairs as an equal member of the society of states. Constituted so, in Arendt's sense, this arrangement allows for the engagement of nations in action (Arendt 1958, 22ff). It is the nation-state, as zoon politikon writ large, that undertakes the risks of vita activa consistent with the "pure" political virtues of freedom and courage and becomes their instrument (cf. 27-37, passim). In contrast, society under the state's authority resembles an expanded realm of necessity, or a "collective of families economically organized into the facsimile of one super-human family" (28-9). To this extent, society stands in stark contrast to the public realm, where one "had first to be willing to risk his life" (Arendt 1958, 36). Charles Tilly's description of the state as a "protection racket" (quoted in Wendt 1999, 204) only corroborates her view that modern society precludes the transcendence she identifies as essential to the political. It is in this sense "prepolitical," and the realm of the social in important ways is closer to Arendt's conception of the private realm than of the public. In the same vein, the society that presupposes a sovereign, insofar as it is concerned with the protection of life, also justifies (legitimates) the use of "force and violence." The integrity of sovereignty is dependent on its absoluteness and its indivisibility as the originator and executor of law. Just as the use of force and violence in the prepolitical realm of the Greek household serves to free its master, so does the organization of "legitimate" violence under the state render it sovereign. It is perhaps a mere matter of choice-of-focus that Arendt herself does not come to this conclusion: that the blurring of the original distinction of "public" and "private" precipitated by "the rise of the social," transforming the political body into the "collective housekeeping" under the state apparatus, did not merely "end" action but rather elevated and concentrated it in the will of the state. Yet if we follow this train to its logical conclusion, it would seem that in the principle of sovereignty, taking its "wall-like" form in the border, the same action-constitutive mutual exclusion between the public and the private resurfaces in modern times as an analogous division between the international and the domestic.* As a social norm, sovereignty is also the basis of international relations. Wendt argues that the international system possesses a role structure, which sets the "terms of individuality" within the society of states (Wendt 1999, 256-8). By his model, states coexist in a mutual relation of "rivalry" (in contrast to outright hostility), according to which they respect each others' tacit right to exist, to territorial integrity, and to interact within the system as an equal; international disputes arise out of how much right and to whom, but the overall functioning of the system is guided by a strategy of "status quoness" (279-80, 295). This paradigm is central to the establishment and maintenance of what Edward Shils calls the "central value system" of international society. This system grounds a political ideal of states as independent, self-sufficient agents with equal status and voice in the international community.* Of course, the above model is no more accurate a description of the actual functioning of the international system than is Arendt's description of the Greek polis. Just as the ancient city-state had its asymmetries of power, wealth, social status, and partisanships, even in the public realm, the political life of state system is thoroughly ridden with divisions between "great" and "lesser" powers, "developed" and "developing" countries, "allied" and "rogue" states, and "free" and "occupied" nations. What results then is a spectrum of relationships to the central value system, and these relationships are often rooted in the very constitution of the states themselves. Shils writes that the central value system of a society is generally stabilized by a center inhered to by "the elites of the constituent subsystems and of the organizations which are comprised in the subsystems" (Shils, 95). In the case of international politics, these elites would include the United States, Russia, Japan, and both the member states of the European Union and the Union itself, as well as some international organizations such as the United Nations, the I.M.F., and the World Bank. These governments and organizations possess mechanisms or what international relations. theorists call "hard power" (such as military might) and "soft power" (such as economic influence) which, in the context of the global polis, give them a degree of tacit authority and political voice disproportionate to the remainder and to what would be accorded them in a "society of free and equal states" (the United Nations would stand as an exception; if anything, it has less power than has been in theory accorded it). They also stand as the primary proponents and enforcers of the central value system, which includes the promotion of ideas such as free trade, democratization, secular government, modernization, and of course sovereignty. States outside the center approach to varying degrees what in Shils' terminology would be the periphery, where conformity and attachment to the central value system diminishes. This weakening of adherence to the center's value system can take a number of forms, from "active rejection" to "intermittent, partial, attenuated affirmation" (102). The increasing attenuation of norm-conformity on the part of peripheral states often accords with an ambivalent relationship to the state system itself. If we combine Shils' center-periphery model with Wendt's model of international role structure, we begin to get a picture of the states' system having a definite political culture: states acting and interacting as "rival" individuals located in different relations to a central value system. | ||
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On the other hand, much has been said for the view that the described compartmentalization of humanity as a comity of nation-states is becoming decreasingly cogent. In the preface to her acclaimed book, The Retreat of the State (1996), Susan Strange calls for a "good-bye to international relations": "our times no longer allow us the comfort of separatist specialisation in the social sciences, and that however difficult, the attempt has to be made at synthesis and blending, imperfect as we know the results are bound to be" (xvi). Strange argues that accelerated advances in technology and the mobility of capital (finance) have permitted transnational corporate entities to accumulate power in ways that undermine the sovereign authority of states. For example, she cites the transnationalization of telecommunications since the 1980s, gradually establishing a worldwide communications infrastructure determined more by supply and demand than by state planning (100, 103). Telecoms form transnational alliances with each other and have spurred growth of large international businesses, tending to employ pricing systems that favor larger businesses at the expense of households and smaller businesses (105-106). Many of the global routes of communication are mediated through private firms that are less and less answerable to government authority. Strange makes similar arguments for insurance and accounting firms (such as Arthur Anderson), as well as for competition-restricting cartels ("private protectionism"; 147ff). The proliferation and expanded operation of secret societies and mafia organizations is likewise a byproduct of capital-market globalization, on one hand, and serves as both sign and symptom of weakening state power, on the other: "criminal gangs, like underground resistance movements in wartime or recalcitrant groups in prisons, tend to emerge when state authority, for whatever reason is already weakened, and the government has lost or failed to obtain the consent of the governed" (116). For Strange, the increased power of the market is coming to undermine not only the power but the very legitimacy of the state; even democratic legitimacy "is as apt to decline as a result of boredom and frustration as of the violent overthrow of constitutional government" (197). The apparent "diffusion of power" described by Strange in economic terms has been echoed from the normative-political perspective as well. Jurgen Habermas (2001) sums up what he famously dubbed "the postnational constellation" as a "paradoxical situation": We perceive the trends toward a postnational constellation as a list of political challenges only because we still describe them from the familiar perspective of the nation-state. But the more aware of this situation we become, the more our democratic self-confidence is shaken; a confidence that is necessary if conflicts are to be perceived as challenges, as problems awaiting a political solution. ...There is a crippling sense that national politics have dwindled to more or less intelligent management of a process of forced adaptation to the pressure to shore up purely local positional advantages. It is a perception that deprives political controversies of their last bit of substance. (61)Habermas points out a number of growing global phenomena that seem to undermine the effectiveness of the nation-state in different ways. Environmental concerns requiring regulation are often incongruent with the territorial jurisdiction of state administration, and the same applies to organized crime, particularly with regard to trafficking of arms, drugs, and even people. On the other hand, the increasingly complex overlapping and interdependence of economic, ecological, cultural and political concerns means "there is less and less congruence between the group of participants in a collective decision and the total of those affected by their decision" (70). In addition, the bases of "civic solidarity," often perceived as crucial to democratic legitimation, are being undermined: first, by increasing demographic heterogeneity resulting not only quantitatively from upsurges in global migration flows but also qualitatively in terms of local ethnocentrisms and xenophobic antagonisms; second, by the material spread of "mass culture" -- often spoken of as "Americanization" or "Westernization" -- that seems to level and mitigate cultural consciousness and distinctiveness. Finally, and in convergence with Strange's point, Habermas argues that state institutions are facing more and more competition from transnational corporations on the political-economic playing field of the distribution of wealth: "Power can be democratized; money cannot" (78). The gradual usurpation from democratic apparatuses of material economic power by corporations that are "democratic" neither in their mode of legitimacy nor their decision-making processes depreciates the very "use-value" of democratic citizenship (77, 68-80). Yet the apparent deterioration of the integrity of sovereign power, and even an associate depreciation of citizenship, correlates to an unprecedented expansion of communicative activity among levels previously under the state, including at the individual level. In other words, the loosening of borders has precipitated the emergence of a dynamic global public space. Habermas (1997) cites the wars in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf as the first major events to excite public opinion on a world scale, and he points to non-government organizations, as well as an assortment of issue-specific international conferences on "global issues," as evidence of "the growing impact on the press and the other media of actors who confront the states from within the network of international civil society" (124-5, my emphasis). The novel keyword is the "global issue," carrying the assertion that something is pressing that is of concern to all the world's inhabitants -- not necessarily nation-states only as such (although it could be addressed that way). It connotes both a requirement of expression and a form of solidarity that appear to reach beyond the "imagined communities" of horizontal closure described by Benedict Anderson. More to the point, it redetermines them. Anderson (1983) considered the development of "print-capitalism" to be key to the rise and spread of national consciousness, and, among its progeny, the advent of the daily newspaper played a large role in framing a communal stock of knowledge (34-6, 61-3). Early newspapers, whose focus generally emphasized events within national boundaries, fed and sustained a common provincial area of concern among their readers; today, major news sources are becoming international in their purview of "major" events. Moreover, the significance of this change is buttressed by the fact that both the newspaper and "print-capitalism" itself are being overtaken by electronic forms of information technology. For several decades, the world has been able to view international events live, and further share in global cultural events such as the Olympics and World Cup tournaments. Not only the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, but the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the horrors in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center rank among the "local" events that have not only grabbed global attention but elicited worldwide discussion. This phenomenon of greater worldwide attention to localized events is part of a greater globalization of information networks that corroborates with at least four features characterizing the context of a nascent global public sphere: (1) As previously mentioned, the global public sphere has been precipitated in part by the rise of international government and non-government organizations. The United Nations is the central body in which representatives of all states regularly meet and deliberate issues which are presented as being of global concern by the very fact of their recognition as subjects of discussion within that venue. The U.N. has thus functioned as a spearhead for a general increase in "gregariousness" across national boundaries. Political contact between nation-states is no longer confined to individual diplomatic meetings and ceremony, but is now part of the general state of affairs. This is essential to the definition of a public sphere -- its aspect of permanence. The international venue brings with it the rise of transnational public interest groups like Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Transparency International, and Human Rights Watch. These groups not only bring issues to the global forum, but in their very organization form communicative solidarities that infiltrate multiple national public spaces. One must also include nation- or region-specific groups like the Iraqi National Congress that seek audience in the global venue. All these organizations represent the first sentiments of civic responsibility beyond the nation-state. Nor is transnational discussion confined to overt political activism. The awareness of topics as being worthy of widespread discussion has encouraged cross-national meetings of professionals, ecologists, lawyers, doctors, scientists, and academics, of which the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies is a case in point. (2) One cannot ignore how the globalization of interaction both calls for and results from profound changes in the terms of symbolic interaction. Global communication implies global media of communication. Anderson and others have observed how the coagulation of the world into nations went hand-in-hand with the decline and rejection of "universal languages" -- of Latin in Europe, and of "official" languages in continental and colonial empires. The present era in contrast is witnessing what appears to be a return to universal uses of language, namely, English. English has become the (or at least an) official language of international navigation, of trade and commerce, and of most international organizations, as well as of the largest transnational corporations. English is also the major language of the most widespread media networks, such as the internet and news outlets such as CNN. In addition to the languages themselves, the media by which communication is transmitted is also changing radically. Electronic forms of media -- telephone, facsimile, radio, television, computer, satellite, etc. -- have reduced the time-lapse of long-distance communication to nil. Information about an event in one part of the world can not only be instantly transmitted to any part of the world but to every part of the world simultaneously. Moreover, print, while far from obsolete, is no longer the central medium of long-distance communication. What "print-capitalism" was to nationalism, image-capitalism may very well be to globalization. Film and television change the very conditions of symbolic interaction in terms not only of time and space but also qualitatively in terms of the kinds of information communicated and the performance of their communication. It is also important that technovisual media are mass-produced commodities, and globalized communications are inextricably linked to the globalized economy. Communication and information are transmitted and received in a common language, through common technologies, according to common modes of symbolic representation, made possible by a common economic infrastructure. On one hand, these developments may further propel us toward greater social integration on a world scale. On the other, the universalizing undercurrent suggested in the very nature of these media seems to lend credence to fears of a homogenizing global "mass culture." (3) We must not forget that the increasing entanglement of world spaces into networks of electronic communication are coextensive with new forms of "functional integration" (Habermas 2001) brought about primarily by the expansion of markets. Thus, one can say that the very conditions of global communication are at least economic in the first instance. It does follow that the "thickest" flows of electronic communication are through the widened "private sector" of transnational corporations and financial market interests, as well as large government organizations. Transnational instruments of "social integration," which include not only news media but forms of personal and interpersonal communication (satellite networks, cellular phones, the internet), similarly spread in accordance not only with technological advances per se but, more directly, with the laws of market demand, and these networks of communication remain mediated by their corporate providers. At its very origins, the technological achievements that have made global communication possible seem to anticipate a subversion of traditional divisions between "public" and "private" (see Weintraub, 7ff), as all forms of interaction -- political, economic, interpersonal -- increasingly come to pass through and grow dependent on "privately" owned technologies. The emerging complex of functional and social integration may require a broader rethinking of sociological cybernetic categories that we have become accustomed to. Systems of political, cultural, and private life can no longer be disentangled from the economic sphere, which effectively controls communicative integration patterns (for example, though discriminatory pricing policies or priority of corporate over household or nonprofit interests; see Strange 1996, 105-9). (4) Lastly, the global public sphere emerges within a network of political and economic institutions that become both party to and subject of public discussion. By these I mean institutions that exercise power on a transnational level. Included among these are, once again, the United Nations and NGOs, as well as nation-states and transnational corporations (including media syndicates). Also included are collective security and political bodies (NATO or the European Union), as well as economic policy and lending organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. Finally, we should also include cultural or religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church. These institutions essentially compose the global power-elite or "natural aristocracy" of the world system, and constitute, as it were the hegemonic center of global public life. This constellation shows a plurality of agencies and interests vying for address at the global level, and although their legitimacy originates from the approval of states (and many are still directly or indirectly controlled by interests of more powerful states, namely, the United States, Europe, and/or Japan), states represent but one collection of interests among several. To be sure, the interests of state sovereignty constitutes states collectively as an interest group alongside business and trade interests, human rights interests, health interests, etc. Yet this central elite is at least partly a continuation of the Shilsian "center" described above, and stands against an attenuated periphery of smaller states, marginalized national and economic interests, and under-recognized activist groups of various kinds. These transformations might anticipate a break in the dam of sovereignty as sole constitutor of political agency in world affairs. The global public sphere that is emerging is not the one envisioned by Arendt, with a "pure" state of freedom in contrast to a "pure" prepolitical state of necessity; nor is it the comity of nations described by international relations theorists, by which sovereignty is the rule designating legitimacy in action. On the other hand, the state of affairs described above does not accord with any organization of "collective house-keeping" on a world scale. Rather, the very division between "public" and "private" is left burred in the schema, which raises the question regarding the location of political agency. Yet perhaps Arendt can still be instructive in what it "means" to enter the political realm: To leave the household, originally in order to embark upon some adventure or glorious enterprise and later simply to devote one's life to the affairs of the city, demanded courage because only in the household was one primarily concerned with one's own life and survival. Whoever entered the public realm had first to be willing to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness. Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence, and only those men who possessed it could be admitted to a fellowship that was political in content and purpose and thereby transcended the mere togetherness imposed on all...through the urgencies of life. (Arendt 1958, 36)For all that has been asserted in the debates between those who uphold the centrality of the state and those who predict its marginalization, it is generally agreed that the so-called "monopoly on legitimate violence" remains more-or-less intact. Despite the tumultuous changes threatened by globalization, there does not at this time appear to be any trend that threatens to deprive states in general of their capacities to protect the life and limb of their citizens. Yet the opening of a global public space may allow for renewed displays of dramaturgical risk-taking with political intent before a world audience -- not unlike what Gandhi referred to as "experiments with truth" on the public stage. The interconnectedness of the globe brought about by unprecedented forms of media, as well as a diversity of forums in which to bring events to light, brings a heightened significance to the possibility of taking risks to redefine or to disrupt assumed definitions of situations in political settings in the presence of a globalized court of public opinion. The limit-case of such performances is public dissent in teleological action, or expressive actions performed with an implicit goal of affecting (or effecting) a consensus. Indeed, within any expression of dissent lies the tacit demand for some prior yet unacknowledged consent; the assertion of the entitlement to act is underwritten in the act itself. To quote Arendt (quoting Shakespeare), in such courageous performances lies an expression of freedom in itself unrelated from the surface content of the act: "That this shall be or we will fall for it" (Arendt 1977, 151). With this in mind, I suppose we could sum that the rise of a world public introduces a form of agency, of freedom, heretofore unconsidered from the perspective of international relations theory. | ||
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In Part I of this essay, we observed two visions of the global polity, namely, one defined first and foremost on the principle of sovereignty, which by some accounts is being gradually overtaken by a new paradigm, characterized by multifarious forms of functional and social integration, and whose political mechanism appears to take the form of a global public sphere. In the present day, we can still claim that the paradigm of sovereignty as the only fully legitimate form of political agency in world politics is still predominant, yet it feels the pressure of a gradual decentering of its own agency, correlate with the burgeoning of the latter paradigm, such that the very goal of preserving the sovereignty system is no longer a tacit but a fully manifest and actively pursued interest of sovereignty. The foremost advocate of sovereignty interests today is the United States, as evidenced in recent debates over the International Criminal Court during which a Bush administration declared: "We believe those who commit the most serious crimes of concern to the international community should be punished...[However,] we believe that states, not international institutions are primarily responsible for ensuring justice in the international system" (Lewis 2002, my emphasis). At the same time, the very recognition of sovereignty as not merely an implicit but an overt general interest already suggests -- or anticipates -- its demotion as a sacred principle of international law and relations. "Sovereignty interests" would in this case concern a class of organizations, namely state organizations, that compete in the global public sphere with other organizations such as institutions of international governance, private firms, or even political or economic underground organizations over the distribution of power. While affairs have not quite reached the point at which state organizations are eye-to-eye with other actors, it has become clear that states can no longer take for granted their monopoly on political agency. We could visualize the thrust of global debates as essentially a conflict of agencies, by which proponents of sovereign agency struggle to hold their ground against encroaching forms of transnational agency. It must be recognized that sovereignty interests, considered as the conservative doctrine of international affairs, necessarily calls for the continued reliance on Great Power leadership and so the preservation of center-periphery relations of power and the enforcement of a corresponding central value system. Globalization would emphasize economic expansion, the (in principle controlled) proliferation of transnational business operations, and the incorporation of free trade ideas into local policies under the oversight of the IMF and World Bank. The primary concerns of sovereignty interests involve the maintenance of status quo (order and stability) in balance with the integrity of the external and internal sovereignties of individual states. Prime tasks, from the perspective of the center (what has recently been called "the Quartet": the Unites States, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia), would include the realignment of "rogue" states and of "illegitimate" NGOs such as Al Qaeda and Hizbollah. In contrast, the prospect of "neocolonialism" in the global political economy is a major concern for a mass of nations -- especially those on the periphery of the central value system. Sovereignty interests tend to imply a "natural aristocracy" of some states (in the spirit of balance-of-power politics or hegemonic stability theory), which define and underwrite the central value system of global order, over a periphery of "underlings" that affirm the order at varying degrees of attenuation and ambivalence. The principle of consolidating such interests is sovereignty itself, as possessing a monopoly of political agency over all its variants, which represent threats by definition. Sovereignty, as we have seen, is an all-or-nothing game: it must be total and indivisible, preserving its own elevation to the external realm of action by the relegation of all other performances to the internal realm of "necessity," of the prepolitical. The infiltration of alternate forms of political agency is thus a challenge to sovereignty's exclusive access to the political realm eo ipso. As argued above, it is precisely the appearance of such alternate forms of political agency that have been made possible by the rise of a global public sphere. We can get a perspective on how these forms of agency operate by reflecting on its limit-case, the case most relevant to our present discussion: that of dissent practices across state boundaries. Roland Bleiker (2000) uses the term transversal to denote "a political practice that not only transgresses national boundaries, but also questions the spatial logic through which these boundaries have come to constitute and frame the conduct of international relations" (2). This transversal property of dissent actions did not necessarily originate with but is particularly suited to the technological and integrational transformations we have discussed; transversal dissent both arises from and propagates attitudes toward change in the international system. For Bleiker, present state and apparent direction of global society is such that it becomes more difficult to delimit our interpretations of political struggles according to locality; integration, functional and social, has pervaded world spaces to the point that an act of public dissent is rarely "just" a domestic affair: It is precisely in the fusion of the local and the global, in the spaces that lie between the domestic and the international that some of the most important discursive dynamics take place. Influential technological and communicative innovations have led to an increasing annihilation of space by time, to the blurring of conventional boundaries of sovereignty and identity. ...It is in these transversal and discursive terrains that the interaction between domination and resistance is carried out today. (184)Bleiker chooses the globally televised collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as exemplary to his critique of international relations: "None of the existing approaches to global politics was able to anticipate, let alone predict, the momentous transformations that took place when the Iron Curtain crumbled and the Soviet-led alliance system fell apart" (118). The state-centric approach of international relations theory was unable to explain in its limited formulations of structure and agency how the events of 1989 were possible. Whether Reagan did x, or Gorbachev did y, or the arms race or the economy did z could not adequately explain why one day an East German soldier put down his gun and picked up a sledgehammer, nor could it explain why the leaders of the Soviet bloc failed to take action to repress it. The event was not a violent overthrow, nor were there Bastille-style "raids" on government buildings -- citizens took to the streets, and the regime seemed to melt away. This is not to say that structural, economic, or political factors (in the traditional sense) were not at work. But a strong case can be made for the publicity of the event itself; even the waves of mass exit that so undermined the economic integrity and political legitimacy of the regime could not be properly accounted for without its consideration as a public drama: The local became instantaneously global. The global, in turn, started to shape local dynamics. Hundreds of thousands of protesting citizens, shouting 'we are the people,' monopolised television screens around the world for weeks during the autumn of 1989. ...Various foreign governments put pressure on East Germany's leadership. The Soviet Union decided not to support Honecker's struggle to retain power. Maybe most importantly, the spectacular televised images returned, via West German television, to the East German population and thus led to a self-triggering and spiralling dynamic of popular dissent. ...This transversal informational dynamic gave many people the necessary courage to join the continuously growing crowds in the streets. The virtuality of global media also provided direct incentives for East Germans to take the risk of participating in the exit wave. (125)Beiker's account of Berlin in 1989 demonstrates the potential effects of the global public sphere on the distinction between "global" and "local," between "large things" and "small things." The eye of the media is in a sense capable of raising the status of non-state actors -- dissident movements, corporations, advocacy groups, individuals -- to a public voice equivalent to that of governments. It is not simply that domestic affairs are more and more becoming subjects of the world's attention; the performative aspects of dissent practices themselves are transforming in self-conscious relation to their newfound opportunities for a global audience. It has been argued that the very the nature of new media, particularly television, has significantly changed the dynamics and expectations of public performances. Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) has argued that the spread of electronic media has altered the way in which situational contexts are defined and delimited, and thus in turn alters social behavior. For example, the media has a tendency to overstep and blur traditional boundaries between public and private, identity and difference, child and adult, and masculine and feminine. "Public relations" strategies become all the more important to promote "telegenic" performances on the part of public officials (268-304). For Meyrowitz, television has the dual effect of both blurring the barriers between situational definitions and rigidifying performance rituals to withstand public scrutiny (cf. 276ff). Neil Postman (1985) and W. Lance Bennett (1996) both take highly cynical positions regarding the presentation and edition of phenomena in the media. Both essentially argue that media events, so often taking the form of abridged sound bytes and video clips, are more often presented with an eye to their dramatic or "entertainment" value than with an authentic interest in informing the public, and so degrade public discourse. It just so happens that the collapse of the Berlin Wall was a very dramatic event -- even though the mass migrations to the West began three months prior, it was to be sure the visual crumbling of the wall itself that enamored the global public. While no one would argue that the fall of the Eastern Bloc would have been an extremely important and closely followed event regardless, it is questionable whether the world's imagination would have been so captivated without the spectacle. While withholding judgment on the lamentations of Postman and Bennett, one can say that the relation of media to public consciousness is a complex one that calls upon an actor certain performative demands for inclusion. There is a technique to gaining entrance into the mediated public sphere, particularly for those who do not possess power or status (such as a politician or a celebrity) that renders them "newsworthy" by the very fact. A public display of freedom in Arendt's sense would seem to have to demonstrate itself "worthy" of public attention to be politically effective. An act of dissent must be an act of risk that has the effect of a spectacle. It should be noted that the relationship of the political to the spectacular did not emerge with electronic media or "the age of show business." Over two hundred years ago, Kant took up this relation in The Conflict of the Faculties with regard to interpreting the French Revolution. Kant is looking for an indication that the human race is continually improving -- a "historical sign" that in some way betrays a "moral disposition" in humanity for "being the cause and...the author of his own improvement" (Kant 1991, 181). Yet Kant does not consider the significance in the revolution to lie in the event itself; indeed, Kant had misgivings about the idea of revolution in general and about the French Revolution in particular. Instead, for Kant: We are here concerned only with the attitude of the onlookers as it reveals itself in public while the drama of great political changes is taking place: for they openly express universal yet disinterested sympathy for one set of protagonists against their adversaries, even at the risk that their partiality could be of great disadvantage to themselves. (182, Kant's emphasis)While an event such as the French Revolution is, unquestionably, a "great" event in itself, Kant argues its teleological significance lies not in its execution: "It may be so filled with misery and atrocities that no right-thinking man would ever decide to make the same experiment again at such a price" (182). Rather, it is the feelings of sympathy aroused in those who have no direct stake in the event, but who cannot deny the authenticity of its expression or the "moral cause" behind its aim, that make it memorable. The revolution, for Kant, brought out a moral disposition in humankind that favors the right of all peoples to choose for themselves a civil constitution as they see fit and the moral rightness of a political constitution which by its very nature, avoids aggressive war (182-3). The revolution signified that this motivation is ingrained in all humankind, that it always has been so, and it will continue to be so regardless of its outcome. Unlike other spectacles that present themselves to the public sphere, this kind defies normalization, i.e., its affective character cannot be reconciled with standard resources of interpretation: "although the Revolution may have certain questionable results, one cannot forget the disposition that is revealed through it" (Foucault 1994b, 145; cf. Bennett 1996, 64-7). Like a wave of fluorescence, these rare spectacles light up and challenge an individual in his reflexive relation to present, awakening what Habermas called the "emancipatory interest" of knowledge, a questioning disposition toward the world around. Modern media, however, changes the nature of these events. It has been noted by many that the modern press thrives on spectacle, on the dramatic and the sensational, often to the chagrin of those who wish for a more informational or critical perspective. The visibility of the spectacle, the snapshot or the video clipping, plays a central role in defining the event for the public. Also, the media has the ability to raise local events to global consciousness in real time; it no longer requires a large nation on the move to attract attention. But much more has changed since the time of Kant, and also since the time of the French Revolution, which Jacques Derrida credits with at least two ideas currently in the forefront of contemporary political debates: first, the idea of a universal rights of man, and second, the idea of political terror. | ||
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Terrorism, as we know it today, requires an audience. This is in fact true for all forms of dissent, but whereas an act of civil disobedience or a mass demonstration is generally aimed also at the very power that is being fought (e.g., a strike against a company seeks public attention by disrupting the very operation of the company), and is so linked in the very expression of the act to the expression of its cause, terrorism operates via a direct assault on the public sphere itself. Terrorism is the parasite of public opinion par excellence. It cannot exist without a public opinion to affect, yet the primary means through which it seeks to attain its goal is unrelated to the political message itself, but simple fear. The attention it gains is entirely dependent on the amount of fear that it causes, displayed through the horrifying spectacle that it creates. This tactic melds in all too well with the televised media. Indeed, terrorism was made to be televised. A "hostage crisis," for example, would not have worked in the eighteenth century, where news of the crisis would have taken weeks to get around. Terrorism depends on an immediate reaction -- its aim is to capture the attention of as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. Terrorism possesses a "Schmittian" attitude toward the political, for if dissent implies a demand for prior consensus, terrorism implies a claim for "the right to suspend right." And indeed, from this perspective terrorism appears reminiscent of a kind of tyranny. However, while its aim is surely to take a decisionistic course of action upon the enemy, equally conspicuous from the action is the absence of the friend; although the declaration of an exception is made clear, the agent's act makes no reference to any norm except that of the civil society upon which the act is inflicted -- the act therefore remains parasitic and can only constitute itself negatively. Terrorist performances are, on the surface, inherently devoid of expressive solidarity; the people on whose behalf the actions are taken remain invisible to the public, and are at best referred to in a way that is ad hoc to the act itself. All that is visible in the public sphere is the spectacle. I would forward the hypothesis that it is precisely this "invisibility" of the cause, of the individuals represented in the act to the public sphere, that is key to understanding the nature of terrorist actions. For the conflict of moral interpretations necessary to make a terrorist course of action plausible to one party must result from a severe discrepancy in hermeneutic positions, usually accomplished by a form of exclusion from the realm of deliberation that is to become its target. Such an exclusion need not be directly coercive, nor need it involve a physical separation, but it always involves a sense of extreme disempowerment in relation to the political realm in question. The voices of those excluded are virtually unnoticed in the public realm, and when they are matter for public consideration, they tend not to be addressed as participating subjects of deliberation but are more often "talked over" as its object ("What are we to do about them?"). The mode of exclusion is written into the public conversation as a "discursive formation" (Foucault) such that its continuation appears almost to be a property of the public realm itself. The terrorist intervention expresses the perceived futility of actual participation by aiming instead for a direct assault on the political realm tout court. At the same time, the spectacle of the terrorist attack is viewed through the media by the excluded parties, who, by virtue of the spectacle serving as a point of focus, are transformed momentarily from an excluded seriality into a sort of "counter-public." The terrorist attack does then seem to function as an act that inspires solidarity by earning the common sympathy of those sharing the fate of exclusion in the same moment that it inspires horror in those with access to the political realm who remain oblivious in practical terms to the nature of the former's exclusion. The conflicting interpretations of the action are the consequence of the discord in hermeneutic positions owed to the opposing perspectives of inclusion and exclusion. In this case, terrorism acquires a critical capacity in that it renders explicit the severity of this division. The apparent production of a solidarity through the spectacle in the public realm remains, however, entirely negative, and this is due to the fact that the terrorist spectacle is, in the last analysis, devoid of content. It is the Arendtian idea of courageous action turned on its head; providing no expressive capacity beyond that in the public realm that it terrorizes, its perpetrators offer nothing except the fact of their exclusion. Al Qaeda does not seem to have much direct interest in a global public sphere, and is quite opposed to political and economic globalization. To be sure, the demands of bin Laden's organization appear to be for nothing short of the eradication of all global affairs from Muslim territories. Yet the sympathy garnered for the September 11th attacks appears to be motivated less by direct support of Osama bin Laden's cause and more out of a broader sense of an indignity with which the United States pursues its interests in the region, which has included unconditional support for the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, buttressing of autocratic regimes for oil and strategic interests, and a general one-sidedness with which the Muslim world is portrayed in American media (on the latter see, e.g., Said 1997). The worldwide broadcast of the collapse of the World Trade Center and the media's ad nauseum repetition of video clips of the second plane impacting Tower One from different angles testifies to the effectiveness of what many see as the most significant expression of Muslim frustration with America in recent memory. Further evidence of the testimony is the mixed reaction by many around the world who deplore the attacks themselves but seem to concede their motivation ("Yes, the events of September 11th were inexcusable, but..."). One must understand, however, that this apparent "sympathy" is essentially negative, i.e., it does not reflect a direct sense of allegiance to bin Laden any more than opposition to immanent war with Iraq reflects an allegiance to Saddam Hussein or, for that matter, sympathy for the French Revolution reflected a notion that its methods were justified. What is unique about September 11th is its recognition of a global societal order whose mechanisms for action are unrestrained by the "wall-like" organization of the "polis of states." The conflict of agencies embodied in the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon take the form of a civil conflict (insofar as we are talking about a dissent group taking action against a government) with transnational dimensions. It is perhaps tragic, perhaps inevitable that the most pronounced demonstration of transnational civil society in formation would simultaneously introduce the possibility of something akin to "transnational civil war." The situation has impressed a view of a world political society in which agency is no longer to be mediated solely through interstate war and diplomacy but may be carried into action via direct engagement with the public sphere. At the same time, it has impressed the potential for the most serious of abuses. Yet September 11th attacks and their worldwide reaction have demonstrated an acknowledgment of transnational forms social interconnection laden with structural relations of power and exclusion that need to be addressed. Socialization on a global scale may be far from complete, but it has advanced enough to have real effects, and it is too late to turn the clock back. Turning the clock back, however, appears to be precisely the goal of the Bush administration in its pursuit of the war on terror. It is of course of immediate urgency that those responsible for the deaths of some four thousand innocent civilians be brought to justice; instead of simultaneously investigating what lay behind the terrorist claim, if anything, the Bush administration has rather mounted a campaign for the reestablishment of interests-of-state over those of any popular dissent movements, including those struggling for democracy and human rights, exploiting the convenience of local authoritarian regimes to clamp down on potentially delinquent forms of transnational agency. As Goldfarb writes: It is the war on terrorism that is being used as a cover by dictators around the world to justify crackdowns on democracy advocates. Suddenly the rights of Muslims in the Philippines and Indonesia -- or of the democratic critics of the authoritarian "Asian way" in Singapore, Malaysia and Burma -- are not important to the Bush administration. Suddenly the strategic resources of Central Asian dictatorships are more important than the lives of human rights activists. Suddenly the defense of the American way of life and our democracy seems to be predicated upon a lack of concern for the democratic rights of people in less advantaged countries. (Goldfarb 2002)Since fall 2001, everybody seems to be "linked" to Al Qaeda. The label "illegal combatant" has been used to imprison and apply martial law to anyone from Taliban fighters to a local newspaper editor who criticized the Liberian president (The Economist 2002b, 20). This American-led "green scare" has been used to justify, among other things, the condemnation of those remnants of the democratically elected FIS fighting a military dictatorship in Algeria, increasingly brutal repressive measures taken by the Sharon government in Israel against Palestinians, the extension of dictatorial rule in Pakistan over a body politic that has been increasingly pro-Islamist, softening of prohibitions on racial profiling and of due process rules in the United States, the alleged heat-suffocation of several hundred Taliban fighters taken into custody by the Afghan Northern Alliance, countless acts of licence on the part of despots across Africa and Asia to suppress all displays of dissent, and, most recently and horrifically, the collateral slaughter of almost 120 innocent civilians by the Russian government in a recent counteroffensive against Chechen rebels (The Economist 2002a; The Economist 2002b, 18-20; Reuters 2002). The problem of such unreflective "strategery" on the part of the American government is that it drastically underestimates the systemic sources of transversal political agency, which includes international terrorism. The Bush administration has been repeatedly moving to distance itself from extranational obligations, spurning, for example, the Kyoto protocol, the International Criminal Court, the U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development, and well as U.N. population management programs. Its approach signifies a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the political effects of integration beyond the nation-state; for while the victims of these repressive moves by American allies clearly recognize the source of their rhetoric, the Bush administration considers itself removed from the sphere of responsibility. American policy is unwittingly exacerbating a division that is growing in global society (insofar as we can speak of one) between state sovereignty interests and popular solidarity movements, both national and transnational. Such an antagonism would be both dangerous and ultimately futile, particularly if the Bush administration continues to approach it from an increasingly anachronistic realist, state-centric perspective. This excursus is not intended as a complete explanation of terrorist forms of political dissent -- it is certainly not intended as a justification by any means -- but merely to assert that any serious attempt to deal with the threat of terrorism must get beyond oversimplistic assessments of "good" versus "evil" intentions. Truth be told, I do not know why the hijackers did what they did; but if the conditions that make terrorism appear a viable alternative can be traced to a thoroughgoing division or silencing of voices, we must be willing to ask What made this division possible? Dismissive arguments such as "They hate democracy" or "They're against modernity" not only misread but exacerbate the situation. Similarly, while cultural-historical differences would be central to any such investigation, I not yet convinced that the explanation is reducible to some irreconcilable "incommensurability" between Islam and the West. On a recent trip to Bahrain, which has been actively pursuing government based on free elections, Thomas Friedman (2002) reports being enthusiastically asked by a Saudi contractor if there was a chance of this phenomenon spreading to Saudi Arabia. Friedman suggests that many Arabs revere the importance of the global public sphere and presence in the mass media: Two Bahraini men stopped me on the beach to say how proud they were that tiny Bahrain's election made CNN's world news roundup! "Our democracy made CNN!" I had to smile. The last time Bahrain made CNN was in April, when a Bahraini youth was killed trying to storm the U.S. embassy in an anti-U.S. riot. (Friedman 2002)Moreover, a solution to the problem of terrorism cannot be accomplished by taking refuge in notions of sovereignty. The rhetoric of the Bush administration has aimed to suggest that September 11th came from nowhere, whereas the events of fall 2001 have demonstrated, if nothing else, that the influence of decisions and expressions -- governmental, corporate, or public -- can no longer be measured by borders. The globalization of society must be recognized if we are to properly assess what is to be done to dissolve these hermeneutic divisions and obviate the motivations that make terrorism seem a necessary course of action. But even this task cannot be reduced to what "they" must do or how "they" have to change or "catch up" or "be more like us." The burden of striving is at least as much upon America and the West as it is on anyone else. | ||
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