The Huge Disconnect over Terrorism

Today’s New York Times bears on its cover a photo (http://nyti.ms/1FI3jDe) of Europe’s political leadership displaying solidarity with one another and with the French people in the face of the expanding threat of terrorism both in France and in the world at large — this nearly fourteen years into the world’s declaration of an all out war on terror. But since terror has not retreated during these years — since, to the contrary, it has expanded (notwithstanding the $6T spent combatting terror by the US alone, with another €500M spent by the EU) — there may be good reason to doubt whether the military approach to combatting terrorism, not to mention the martial metaphor that undergirds this approach, is not itself symptomatic of a larger problem that the war on terrorism cannot touch and may even make far worse. Perhaps economic history can help us understand why.

In the History of Economics and Economic Theory classes that I teach at the University of California, Berkeley, much is rightly made both of the historically unprecedented boost that World War II and post-war reconstruction delivered to the global economy and of the global downturn that resulted from restored global competition beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Obviously in any absolute terms, the decision to combat Nazism and Japanese expansionism with unprecedented outlays of public resources, leading to full employment and scary economic growth in the 1940s and 1950s, need not have been made. Just as in any absolute terms, there was no historical necessity dictating the resolve of western powers in the 1950s and 1960s to develop and implement policies designed to expand the economic power of the lower and middling economic strata — a decision whose effect was to shift wealth downward. Similarly, when competition returned to the global economy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was politics and not historical necessity that dictated the neoliberal response to the resulting economic downturn. Financialization, deregulation, and privatization were choices made in order to maintain for the top centile the kinds of returns on investment that they had grown accustomed to in the 1950s and 1960s. But we can also easily theorize alternative regulatory decisions that would, instead, have allowed gains in productivity and efficiency to benefit the middling and lower strata, albeit without the huge returns enjoyed by the top centile. My only point is to note how the fraying at the edges of the global social contract which we have experienced since the 1970s was — contrary to historical determinists on the left and the right — far from necessary. Neoliberalism was a choice, not a necessity. But why might this choice have coincided with the rise of global terrorism?

Is not this coincidence between neoliberalism and terror coincidental? No, it is not. As Francis Fukuyama noted in his End of History (1992), loosely based on Alexander Kojève’s reading of the German philosopher GWF Hegel, whereas the Hobbesian and Lockean political tradition foregrounded fear of death and therefore the protective social contract, the Hegelian tradition foregrounded the Slave-Master relationship wherein the superiority enjoyed by the Master is earned by his willingness to sacrifice his life in the cause of freedom. And, since the freedom embraced by neoliberalism differs substantively from the substantive freedoms advanced in the rights-based constitutional and legal arrangements promoted in the 18th and 19th centuries, those attracted to Hegel’s approach (like Fukuyama) find fault in those (Hobbesian and Lockean) social arrangements that guarantee mutual protection and the enjoyment of life, liberty and happiness. For neoliberalism, empty freedom — freedom in the abstract, “market choice” — must take precedence over the latter (i.e., over life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). If the arrangements of the 1950s and 1960s were explicitly grounded in defense of the social welfare state, the arrangements promoted in the 1970s and 1980s were just as explicitly grounded in defense of the Slave-Master fight for freedom, even to the point of death.

This transition in the 1970s and 1980s has sometimes been misunderstood as a retreat of the state and an advance of civil society and, in some respects, the misunderstanding would appear to be justified. How else are we to understand the proliferation of private armies, armies no longer subject to civilian oversight by Congress or Parliament, under Ms. Thatcher and Mr. Reagan in the 1980s? Or how else are we to understand the unprecedented transfer during this same period of public resources into the private accounts of the top centile? Can this atrophy of the state and expansion of private wealth and power be understood in any way other than the retreat of the state and advance of civil society?

Yes it can, so long as we are willing to entertain different, non-democratic, and anti-public figurations of the state-form.

Think, for example, of state forms erected by and for enhancing the wealth and privilege of a monarch’s family and relations — a form perfectly natural and even expected in the early modern period. Similarly, although we might identify them today with Russia and the so-called “shatter zone” fixed between Russia and Western Europe, oligarchies are far from unique either to Eastern Europe and Russia or to the modern epoch. Here we need only recall Imperial Rome or the early modern families that governed northern Italy (the focus of Machiavelli’s studies). Or think of Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, which became a model not only for the Nazi German state form, but, imported by Schmitt’s student Leo Strauss and transplanted to the University of Chicago, this concept also inspired generations of so-called Straussians to mock and ridicule the naiveté of those who continue to show faith in democratic institutions and republican values. Therefore, so long as we are willing to see in the contemporary state-form something more akin to these anti-republican, post-democratic archetypes, we need not misunderstand the transition that took place in the 1970s and 1980s as the birth of a new lease on freedom. Rather might we see in the current state-form an illustration of what George Steinmetz has called “authoritarian post-Fordism.”

Look again at the picture displayed on the cover of today’s New York Times: arm-in-arm President François Hollande of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain. Do you see the disconnect? Combatting terrorism in the contemporary world would entail militant promotion of republican values and democratic institutions. It would entail radically broadening the social franchise globally, thereby ensuring that global wealth is held in common — res publica — and it would entail promoting and protecting the voice and rights and active participation of all members of the republic; but the explicit, public, outspoken policies of many of those linking arms in Paris would lead — are leading, have led — in precisely the opposite direction. We cannot combat terrorism by frustrating democracy or privatizing the wealth we hold in common. Rather are these policies the very life-blood of global terrorism, which is why the two have emerged together and why the military response to global terrorism can only feed its appetite.

Some might object to this argument, claiming that the demand for an expanded social and political franchise in the face of terror is tantamount to admitting defeat. “When every child is fed, every family safely housed, and every daughter educated and empowered, then al Qaeda will have won.” But perspectives such as this one not only misunderstand the foundations of republicanism and democracy, but misunderstand the causes and aims of the terrorists, which are transparently neither democratic nor republican, but opposed to both. Which helps to explain the dependent, mutually constitutive advance of neoliberalism, on the one hand, and terror on the other.