GLOBALIZACIJA - MOGUNOST IZBORA
MODERN TERRORISM Acts of political violence -- assassination,
riot, civil war, rebellion, or revolution -- occur in "changing
times." All societies have a value system describing how society
should be structured, how the benefits of society should be
distributed, and what is considered legal or illegal. Under
ordinary circumstances changes are folded more or less peacefully
into the system, but when the changes are substantial and involve
major shifts in power and relationships, people develop different
and competing ideas about what society should be like and how
things should be done. These competing sets of ideas, which are
called ideologies, contain suggestions for bringing about the
desired society and are used to mobilize support for that society.
Sometimes in this campaign for the "minds and hearts" of the
people, the usual methods of compromising differences in the
society cannot stand the strain, and the contending forces resort
to force in order to overcome the lack of social agreement on how
the benefits of society should be divided. This attempt to force
the new or defend the old is "political" violence, because it is in
the political sphere that such decisions are worked out, whether
the society is autocratic or whether the people in it have a large
measure of political participation. One should not expect, however,
to find either a society that is in stable equilibrium or one that
is totally out of control in the real world. These are ideal types
developed for the purpose of analysis. Most societies are somewhere
on a continuum of equilibrium; some societies deal better with
change than others because the methods for dealing with change
built into some societies work better than those in others. The
United States managed to cope with the Civil Rights Movement and
the various aspects of the war in Viet Nam without collapsing,
although the strains of doing so still mark the nation's political
discourse and the psyches of Americans. It remains to be seen
whether Russia can develop the political flexibility to deal with
the economic strains and social dislocation that result from the
break-up of the Soviet Union. Tendencies to disequilibrium in
societies are easier to observe than stability, because, however
sublimated or ritualized the competition always present in society
is, if the divisions are about basic principles, there may be no
acceptable way to mediate them, and the society can explode into
violence. If no one side is strong enough to force its will on the
rest chaos may result. The situation in the Balkans is a good
example. The violence may be riot, as in Indonesia, whose economy
is in free-fall, or like the "long, hot summers" in American cities
during the Civil Rights Movement; it may be street fighting like
that in post-World War I Italy and Germany, or civil war, as in the
Congo and Sri Lanka or in the United States between 1861 and 1865.
The discord may escalate into revolution as it did in the English
North American colonies, France, and Russia. It all depends on the
seriousness of the problems, the nature of the resistance, and the
will of the players. Assassination is a particular kind of
political violence which may or may not be the result of
ideological confrontation or social dysfunction. Some
assassinations are clearly the result of simple individual
competition for power in which one person with a lust to rule is
willing to break society's prohibitions against murder, but the
occurrence of assassination may also be a sign that the usual
arrangements for transferring power from one person or one
generation to another have broken down or that social norms are no
longer agreed upon. Where we find clusters of assassination, such
as in the early days of the Weir Republic or in the United States
in 1968, it is clear that society's controls are in disarray. Wars
between states might be regarded as the ultimate example of
political violence, but war does not tell us much about the state
of the societies involved. This kind of political violence may tell
us that there is a rogue state willing to try to force its will on
its neighbors or it may tell us that the "world" is
disequilibrated. There is as yet no supra-state society with
institutions to mediate conflicts between states successfully in
all cases. The League of Nations failed to prevent World War II;
afterwards the victorious allies tried again, but the United
Nations was not very successful in mediating conflict during the
Cold War, and it remains to be seen whether it will be any more
successful now that that long ideological conflict is ended. As
this is being written the Powers are threatening NATO air strikes
against Yugoslavia unless the Serbs in power there stop the ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo. The fact that there has been no universal war
since 1945 is not a tribute to the growth of a world society with
agreed upon norms. The development of weapons the use of which
could well destroy the planet has made the great powers so far
unwilling to let a new world war begin. Since, in the absence of
compromise, there has never been any method of solving political
conflicts exists except force, political violence fueled by
ideological conflict, by tribal vendetta, religious hatreds, or by
more traditional rivalries like that between Argentina and Great
Britain over the Falklands/Maldives are as present in the
post-World War II world as ever. While throughout history tribes
have hated and killed members of another tribe, and True Believers
have served their god by killing the servants of other gods, while
peasants have groaned and rebelled, and dynasties have fallen, the
kind of change we call revolution is a relatively modern
development. We may speak of a transportation "revolution" or a
communications "revolution," but when we apply the word to
politics, it means fundamental changes to the polity. In the late
Middle Ages, a series of massive changes began occurring in Europe
that gave birth to the modern world, during which European states
(and later the United States) emerged as world powers and began a
long period of world domination. In class, we have discussed the
following changes: the Commercial Revolution the Protestant
Reformation the Enlightenment the rise of Liberal Democracy by
evolution (England) or revolution (France) the Industrial
Revolution.
The American Revolution, the first of the "great" revolutions,
was a political revolution; the American colonies by force and
violence changed their sovereign and became independent. While
there were some changes to the social structure of the country
because of the war, the social and economic changes that have come
to the United States since 1776 have been evolutionary, rather than
revolutionary, in nature, except for the Civil War. What the
American Revolution, or more properly the Constitution of 1789, did
was put in place methods for assimilating political, social, and
economic changes in a reasonably orderly fashion. The colonial
leaders who fought the war, wrote the constitution, and formed the
Federalist party had no intention of changing anything but the head
of state. Changes after that were forced upon them, largely by
people working out the implications of the ideology of the
revolution, a process not yet complete. It probably never will be.
The same year the new American Constitution was ratified, another
revolution broke out. In 1789 many Frenchmen wanted no more change
than their American confreres had; indeed, the early French
Revolution was patterned on the American. But other people had
other ideas, and the French Revolution became not just a political
revolution, but a social and economic one as well. During the
conflict, the full modern political spectrum developed: men who
were prepared to fight for the traditional system, men who wanted
only a political revolution and men who wanted a complete change of
the social structure and its values that the word revolution has
come to mean today. With that set of competing ideologies, we come
to terrorism, for the French radicals instituted the Terror, the
first instance of modern state terror, to impose these radical
changes upon their fellow citizens. Individual and group terrorism,
the kind we read about in the daily papers, developed later, but
not much later. War to suppress the revolution had brought the
radicals' Terror to defend it, but subsequently the revolution was
first absorbed by the Napoleonic Empire and then defeated by the
enemies of the revolution. Conservatives or reactionaries ruled
Europe, but the dream of the radicals would not die. That men ought
to be equal has been an idea that gripped men's minds ever since.
In describing all these conflicts, I have used the word "men," and
by and large, I mean men, although the most radical believed not
only in political, economic, and social equality, but in sexual
equality as well. While those who demanded social and economic
equality (socialists) argued over how to structure the new society
and experimented with new social forms, a more radical group than
they arose, with the idea that society should not be structured at
all, that it was structure itself -- government -- that was causing
the problem. These are the anarchists. All of these radicals were
dreaming of and working toward "the revolution" that they all
believed to be coming very soon. It was not. They vastly
underestimated the strength of the conservative governments around
them, and when the Paris Commune was suppressed in 1871,
revolutionary Europe suffered a profound depression and
dislocation. Some decided to work for socialism through the
political system, and by 1900 socialist parties of one kind or
another existed in all European countries. The Marxists, who still
believed that only revolution would solve the problem, settled in
for a long period of organization and propaganda. The anarchists,
however, had other ideas. Believing, despite all the evidence
around them, that the society they defined as thoroughly corrupt
was ready to fall -- perhaps it was a counsel of despair -- they
carried out a series of assassinations. They seemed to have
believed that if only they kept lopping off the head of the state,
the body would fall. Originally they operated alone, these first
terrorists, but in Russia, there seemed to be no hope that Czar
Alexander II would extend the reforms that he had begun by freeing
the serfs, setting up a judicial system, and providing a small
measure of consultative government. Young members of the
intelligentsia fervently desired constitutional government, civil
rights, and some form of socialism. They formed groups to work for
these reforms, but they became increasingly frustrated and turned
to violence to try to achieve what they could not achieve by
persuasion. Thus were formed the first terrorist groups. We have
discussed several of these Russian groups, their socio-economic
make-up, their organization and tactics. All of the elements of
modern terrorism were present: the ideologies which described the
desired world, a block in obtaining the goal, and people willing to
attack the strength of the state in small numbers to popularize the
goal of overthrowing the existing regime. Like riot and civil war,
terrorism is obviously connected to political violence. Scholars
have spilt a lot of ink and politicians have expended a lot of
rhetoric trying to define terrorism. The fact that people have
failed to agree upon a definition owes much to the ideological
conflicts of the Cold War, as the clich "One man's terrorist is
another man's freedom fighter" illustrates, but it also illustrates
that we have been approaching the understanding of terrorism
incorrectly. Some students regard any kind of political violence as
terrorism and assert that it goes back to earliest times. To be
sure, terror and fear have been around as a part of politics for a
long time, but terrorism as it is practiced today is a relatively
new phenomenon. A useful, if imperfect, definition is:
Terrorism is the threat or use of violence for politicalpurposes
by individuals or groups whether acting for, or in opposition to,
established governmental authority, when suchactions are intended
to shock, stun, or intimidate a target groupwider than the
immediate victims. The benefits of this definition are many.
Threats come under it. The violence must be used for political
purposes. That leaves out failed bank robberies that end in hostage
situations, but making distinctions between terrorism and mere
criminal behavior is not always easy. The definition includes state
terror, government death squads and "disappearances," which not all
definitions do. Terrorism is designed to influence people not
involved in the incident. That addresses the question of publicity.
The great flaw of this definition is that it fails to distinguish
sufficiently between terrorism and other forms of political
violence. All forms of political violence -- riot, rebellion, civil
war, even revolution -- fit the definition, and yet common sense
tells us that terrorism is different from these other forms, or we
would not need the term. Terrorism is not an event, like a riot,
nor is it a process, like revolution. Terrorism is a tactic of
carrying out political violence, just as an infantry assault is a
tactic in conventional warfare. To distinguish it from riot and
rebellion, it is necessary to look at the motivation of those
involved. Teaching the history of terrorism for a decade convinces
me that there are only two motives for present day terrorism: to
force a change in the social, economic, and political structure of
a state or to set up a nation-state. Neither of these goals was
possible before the French Revolution. They are specifically
"modern" aspirations, and neither could be contemplated until the
concept of revolution to change the structure of society developed.
Nationalism, the idea that people with a common geographical area,
a common heritage, and a common language ought to be ruled as a
unit, was also a function of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic War. Terrorism is used in the early stages of the
revolutionary process when those determined on revolution are too
weak to overthrow the government. The action of the terrorist has
two goals: to frighten and thus weaken the government and to
propagandize the goals of the revolutionary to gain adherents to
the cause. Another goal may be to force the government to
over-react, thus alienating more people. It was institutionalized
as part of the Chinese/Vietnamese three-stage protracted war
strategy, and with the success of the Vietnamese revolution, it has
become increasingly popular, despite its lack of success in many
other situations. Terrorism of the sort we know today has been
prevalent in the past among people espousing nationalist as well as
right and left wing ideologies. In the U.S after the Civil War, the
Ku Klux Klan used terror not just to control the newly freed
blacks, but to defend southern institutions. In Ireland, early
nationalists used assassination to fight for an independent Irish
nation. Macedonians and Armenians attempted to secure their liberty
from the Turkish Empire and set up nation-states. Russian
revolutionaries attacked the Czar and other governmental officials
in order to destroy the Czarist government and institute some kind
of socialist state. Because of the anarchist leanings of the
revolutionaries, it is not always clear what they intended to do
next. For those who adopt the anarchist ideology, terrorism may be
the only stage in the revolution. Before World War I, terrorism was
a left-wing phenomenon, because states had been ruled by
conservative, often capitalist, parties. After that war and the
Russian revolution sparked by it,groups on the right began using
terror. Germany and Italy saw the spread of violence between the
left and the right, and political parties with reactionary rightist
ideologies (Nazi, Fascist) used modern political organizational
techniques and brutal squads of street fighters to come to power.
After achieving power, the political violence of these parties
became state terror. In Japan members of the armed forces, critical
of liberal democracy and capitalism and determined on Japanese
imperial expansion, used assassination and terror to force their
will on a weak democratic government. The result was not only
terror and death but World War II. In the United States, the Ku
Klux Klan emerged anew, adding hatred for cities, immigrants, Jews,
organized labor, and modern immorality -- drinking, smoking,
flappers and liberated women, and sexual carrying on -- to their
traditional hatred for blacks. Middle class people in small towns
and people who had recently moved to the city joined the Klan in
large numbers and terrorized and lynched people who did not fit
their ideas of Hundred percent Americans. Some of the Klans joined
forces with American Fascist groups to propagandize their ideology.
The Klan broke up before the outbreak of World War II, but it held
the balance of political power in a number of states during the
1920s and early 1930s. After World War II, the face of terrorism
changed again. That will be the focus of the rest of the
course.
Marilynn [email protected]
