Almost a decade after 9/11, and more than a century after its invention, modern international terrorism remains an often discussed but under-theorised phenomenon. As Audrey Kurth CroninFootnote 1 noted in 2006,Footnote 2 ‘the bulk of traditional research on terrorism has been descriptive analysis focused on one group, detailing its organization, structure, tactics, leadership and so on’, and there have been very ‘few serious attempts to analyze [Al-Qaeda] within a broader historical and political context’.Footnote 3 The situation has improved little since 2006: studies of international terrorism continue to be atheoreticalFootnote 4 for the most part,Footnote 5 and otherwise excellent historical treatments of terrorismFootnote 6 remain divorced from the insights of the institutionalist scholarshipFootnote 7on the historical evolution of the state and the international system.
Bemoaning this state of affairs, Nicholas Onuf observed recently that International Relations scholars, and especially ‘those with theoretical inclinations have given terrorism remarkably little attention’ and that ‘constructivists are notably missing from discussions of terrorism’.Footnote 8 In a similar vein, Colin Wight has pointed out that the theoretical and definitional malaise in terrorism studies can only be overcome if three interrelated considerations are addressed: ‘an integration of theories of the state and its development into the field; the adoption of a structural approach over the more psychological approaches that currently dominate; and a more historically grounded understanding of terrorism as opposed to the presentism that dominates post-9/11’.Footnote 9 As Wight has noted, ‘terrorism cannot be defined in the absence of some or other account of the state [which] can only be understood in terms of its history […] as a long process of appropriation and accumulation (of territory and resources) achieved through the use of violence, a process that had winners and losers’.Footnote 10 In other words, the phenomenon of international terrorism cannot be understood – much less defined – properly without linking terrorism studies with the scholarship on the evolution of the modern state.
In this article, I aim to do precisely that by wedding a constructivist understanding of terrorism with an overview of the historical evolution of the state. The common definition of terrorism as the premeditated use of unlawful violence intended to inculcate fear in a large audience in pursuit of a political goalFootnote 11 raises questions about what is ‘unlawful’ and why. As constructivists have long argued, the international system is bound by intersubjectively held beliefs about ‘the social identity of the state and the basic parameters of rightful state action’.Footnote 12 More attention needs to be paid therefore to which types of violence were rendered illegitimate as the modern state established its monopoly on the use of force. The confusion invoked by both the label of ‘terrorism’ and the substance of acts so designated hinge on the question of who has legitimate authority.Footnote 13 As I will discuss below, the Westphalian state has replaced three types of authority: religious, personal and local. Political challenges to the system inevitably derive their claim to legitimacy from one of these other forms of authority.
Distinguishing between ‘terrorist’ organisations and causes by focusing on their legitimacy claims allows this article to make several contributions. To begin with, this distinction sheds light on the issue of why international spectators ‘instinctively’ find some terrorist causes more palatable than others. A related issue is why ‘terrorism’ wields so much more psychological power over the public's imagination than the actual objective physical threat it poses. I argue that there is a correlation between the kind of legitimacy claim a ‘terrorist’ cause is based on and how threatening (and therefore terrorising) we find the activities based on that claim. The less the distance between the unrecognised legitimacy claim on the one hand and the principles conferring legitimacy in the modern states system on the other, the less ontologically threatening we find the claimants to be.Footnote 14 Moreover, the less ontologically threatening a particular claim, the greater the difficulty categorising its violent manifestation as ‘terrorism’. Let me explain.
From an ontological perspective, terrorist organisations pose a more significant danger to political communities than conventional state enemies (or domestic criminals) because they introduce a greater degree of uncertainty and indeterminacy into the equation. As noted by Jef Huysmans,Footnote 15 political communities and their agencies are ‘primarily legitimated by means of their successful dealing with the problem of death, both as concretized danger and as the undetermined’.Footnote 16 The management of ‘security’ (by the modern state) is as performative as it is descriptive;Footnote 17 it is about drawing boundaries between ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’, and as such is a way of moderating ‘the fear of uncertainty’Footnote 18 by externalising death as something that can be avoided.Footnote 19 The externalisation and objectification of death itself is a by-product of modernity: ‘death defies the power of reason’ and therefore challenges the core of modernity. Any given state's legitimacy depends on its ability to provide ontological security by ‘managing the limits of reflexivity – death as the undetermined – by fixing social relations into a symbolic and institutional order’. The modern state is tasked therefore by not only providing physical security for citizens, but also the image of control and manageability through categorisation and other symbolic ordering acts which make life more intelligible and seem more purposeful.Footnote 20 Terrorism is a direct, deliberate and self-aware assault on this illusion.
The modern states system is also driven by the same logic: ‘[…] the state system […] does not aim at the elimination of enemies but at the destruction of strangers, or more generally strangehood’.Footnote 21 This requires that ‘those “elements” which cannot be classified, which are ambivalent, and thus have a capacity to render problematic this ontological function of the state system, have to be eliminated, possibly through enemy construction’.Footnote 22 Terrorism is the activity that consciously, deliberately and politically challenges this capacity of the modern state (and the international system) to provide order in our everyday lives. Furthermore, doing away with the strangeness of ‘terrorists’ through ‘enemy construction’ is more difficult than it is with conventional state competitors. Conventional state enemies derive a reciprocal and mutual sense of ontological security from such a process of enemy construction; that is, if state A names state B as an enemy, and B does the same for A, they both have reduced indeterminacy and provided a modicum of order. Such is not the dynamic between states and ‘terrorist’ organisations, because the latter seek precisely to create indeterminacy. In that sense, terrorist organisations are similar to the revolutionary states discussed by Huysmans, posing ‘a threat to both the rules of the game and the status quo state(s)’.Footnote 23
Hence it is generally misleading to reduce the problem posed by terrorism to its methods, because there is no method that ‘one could say has been exclusive and peculiar to those associations which are designated’ as ‘terrorist’. It is the kind of threat that terrorism poses that makes it terrorising. As I will demonstrate below, not all terrorist organisations cause the same kind disruption to the ‘rules of the game’; the threat level varies by the type of organisation. Nevertheless, all terrorist organisations are also threatening because often terrorists are better conceptualised as ‘strangers’ rather than ‘enemies’ or ‘foreigners’: ‘Strangers are both inside and outside a society; they are insiders/outsiders. They articulate ambivalence and therefore challenge the (modern) ordering activity which relies on reducing ambiguity and uncertainty by categorizing elements.’Footnote 24 Terrorist activity aims precisely to confuse and collapse existing categories of civilian/official, stranger/enemy, citizen/threat, etc. It is for this reason that ‘terrorism’ is so difficult to define and categorise: the activity itself is an assault on the modern (state) project of reducing indeterminacy through classification and comparison. As such, ‘terrorism’ signifies an activity that directly threatens the ontological security of the state. Furthermore, it is purposefully threatening in this manner.
Those activities which reject the legitimacy of the modern state system in addition to rejecting particular modern states are the most ontologically threatening, and those activities which target the legitimacy of only a particular state, or a particular government, or a particular state's rule over a particular territory are the least ontologically threatening. To put it another way, claims to legitimacy that can be accommodated within the modern states system's ordering principles are the least ontologically threatening. Of the three alternatives mentioned previously, claims based on variations of local authority – for example, the justifications of secessionist movements which engage in activities signified as ‘terrorism’– are most easily reduced to the ordering categories of modern states: they evoke territoriality and claim legitimation in ways reminiscent of the nation-state principle, and it is precisely these types of secessionist organisations around which the theoretical and definitional confusion exists.
Looking at the historical evolution of international terrorism through this lens introduces another layer to the patterns of terrorist activity in the modern states system. According to a useful schema articulated by David Rapoport,Footnote 25 modern terrorism has come in four waves: a first wave dating back from 1880s to the end of WWI, a second wave between 1920s and WWII, a third wave in the 1970s and the present wave we are in now, dating back to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This schema is used by other scholars of terrorism as well,Footnote 26 such as Kurth Cronin, who notes that the current fourth wave of religious terrorism follows ‘three earlier historical phases in which terrorism was tied to the breakup of empires, decolonization, and leftist anti-Westernism’.Footnote 27 According to Kurth Cronin, modern terrorism throughout these four waves is better understood ‘as part of a larger phenomenon of antiglobalization and tension between the have and the have-not nations, as well as between the elite and underprivileged within those nations’.Footnote 28 Working from a World-Systems perspective, on the other hand, Albert Bergesen and Omar Lizardo argueFootnote 29 that understanding the causes of the first wave of terrorism may be especially significant because of the parallels between that period and our time. According to Bergesen and Lizardo, just like the present day, late nineteenth century was a time when globalisation and terrorism correlated. They note a number of other similarities: both of ‘these periods are also ones where the dominant state is in relative decline within the world-economy’Footnote 30 while simultaneously engaging in imperial expansion, and that both waves of terrorism emerge ‘in distinctly autocratic semiperipheral zones of the global system – then the Russian, Ottoman and Austrian Empires and now the autocratic states of the Arab-Islamic Middle East’.Footnote 31
I concur with Bergesen and Lizardo that the first wave deserves special attention, but for additional reasons. The first wave of terrorism is noteworthy because it contained the prototypes of both the more and the less ontologically threatening variants of terrorism discussed above. All groups which have been studied under the label of terrorism since that first wave of in the nineteenth century either resemble the first wave anarchists in the sense that they reject the idea of modern-statehood or they are like the first wave nationalist organisations such as IMRO in that they aspire for their own piece of the sovereignty pie. In other words, all historical variants of modern ‘terrorism’ fall into one of two categories of disruptive activity: one that is based in claims to local authority and targeting only particular states, and one that is based in claims to personal and/or religious authority, rejecting the ontology of modern states system (almost) altogether. It is therefore possible to classify groups labelled as terrorist as system-affirming or system-threatening. While the former is a contained problem, the latter has followed geographically broadening spread pattern throughout the international system.
Implicit in ethnic-nationalist terrorism is a reaffirmation of the principles that organise the modern states system. Nationalist-secessionist terrorism derives its legitimacy claim from localised authority based on right to territory, which is similar to the organising principles of the Westphalian system. Furthermore, by attempting to establish their own sovereignty by secession, nationalist terrorists concede the legitimacy of the modern state. Organisations of this type are not threatening to the international system at large, whatever headaches they may create for their host countries and physical damage they may cause. Definitional problems are in the conceptual category of terrorism are also traceable to groups of this type whose legitimacy is often determined by the eye of beholder. Historically, ‘terrorism’ of this type has been a important agent in the expansion of the international society.
Terrorism of the other type, of the type with a legitimacy claim that cannot be accommodated within the Westphalian order – that is, that of the anarchists and now of Al-Qaeda – is a direct threat to the international system. As will be discussed below, both the anarchists' legitimacy claims referencing personal authority and the fourth wave terrorists' appeal to religious authority are directly at odds with the Westphalian model, and there is a dialectical trend to be discerned in the fact that system-threatening variants of terrorism have continued to resurface, and each time with greater global reach, throughout the evolution of modern states system.
This article proceeds in three sections. In the first section, I present a brief historical overview of the evolution of the modern state with a focus on the competing legitimacy claims that were displaced through the centralisation of political power. In the second section, I reanalyse the terrorist movements of the nineteenth century within the legitimacy/ ontological threat framework described above. In the final section, I link the rise of modern terrorism to the contradictions embodied in the Westphalian state project, and explain the difference between system-affirming and system-threatening types of ‘terrorist’ activity. I then analyse subsequent waves of terrorism within that light. I argue that system-threatening terrorism has reached a new level of maturity and a broader geographical span with the advent of Al-Qaeda, though not yet its final form.
Centralisation and its discontents
The rise of the modern state entailed a transfer of power to the centre and displaced three types of authority with competing legitimacy claims: religious, localised and personal.
Religious authority suffered a near fatal blow during the Thirty Years War. The Westphalian Settlement of 1648, which introduced the principle of tolerance among rulers, contained within it the seeds of modern state sovereignty.Footnote 32 The process of displacement would not be completed until much later,Footnote 33 but the total and utter destruction of the Thirty Years War did give a strong impetus to the political thinkers of the era to look for ways to justify political authority without reference to religion: ‘If uncertainty, ambiguity, and the acceptance of pluralism led, in practice, only to an intensification of the religious war, the time had come to discover some rational method for demonstrating the essential correctness or incorrectness of philosophical, scientific, or theological doctrines.’Footnote 34 As Blaney and Inayatullah detail in the ‘Westphalian Deferral,’ ‘seventeenth-century thinkers – most prominently Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke – were engaged in a ‘common intellectual project’ of ‘pacifying politics’ in the wake of religious conflict, both international and internal’, and thinkers of this era turned to the idea of a social contract ‘because such a contractual arrangement was treated as if it were independent of, or neutral in relation to, religious belief’ and therefore ‘seen as a more certain basis for political authority and, thereby a solution to the problem of political order’.Footnote 35 As is now commonly acknowledged, the Westphalian consensus on state sovereignty marked the beginning of long secularising trend in international politics.Footnote 36
The second type of authority eclipsed by the rise of the centralised state was that of the nobles, landlords and bandits who claimed localised authority within their limited territories. By localised authority I mean the intermediaries of power whose ability use force to further their own ends was mostly uncontested, if not encouraged, before modernity, for example, the privileged classes such as the aristocracy or the landed gentry with access to enough resources to raise their own private armies. Before the rise of the modern state, and long after its inception as an idea, kings and various lords existed in a sort of competitive but symbiotic relationship, with each claiming ‘the right to levy troops and maintain their own armed retainers. Without calling on some of those lords to bring their armies with them, no king could fight a war; yet at the same armed lords constituted the king's rival and opponents, his enemies' potential allies.’Footnote 37 Furthermore, it was not only the ‘noblemen’ who retained the right to use violence; as Tilly points out, kings often had similar arrangements with pirates and other outlaws, offering them protection and sponsorship: ‘The distinctions between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” users of violence came clear only very slowly, in the process during which the states' armed forces became relatively unified and permanent.’Footnote 38 Before this distinction was clear, kings attempted to keep such potential competitors at bay by allowing (or encouraging) them to rape and pillage during wartime.
As power started shifting towards the centre after Westphalia, eliminating such competitors became a paramount task for the sovereign.Footnote 39 From an economic point of view, the shift to the centre was very much aided along (if not necessitated) by the emerging capitalist economy. The surplus generated by capitalism allowed specialists of coercion and predation to be bought off with the tax revenue from production, shifting power to the economic realm and civil society.Footnote 40 The accompanying ‘civilizing processes’ gradually converted most warrior nobles to ‘courtiers and bureaucrats’.Footnote 41 In other words, the threat from noble competitors was not eliminated by coercion or bribery alone; the nobles were also socialised into ‘civilization’. The centralisation of power created networks of interdependence, making individuals more sensitive to the needs of others and putting them in more need of a universal set of manners. To sum up, the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state with its centralised army went hand in hand with the rise of capitalism, the accompanying march of scientific rationality, and in general, the rise of European ‘civilization’.
However, there was yet another transfer of authority involved in the aforementioned centralising process: of the authority each person had over their own realm, including the right to decide how to handle transgressions against one's own person, property and family. Of all the developments associated with the rise of the centralised state, this one is the easiest to overlook because we tend to associate the modern state with citizens' rights and therefore with greater freedoms. The actual story is somewhat more complicated. The rational centralised state did not only displace religious authority or local intermediaries who may command their own armies, but also delegitimised the personal pursuit for justice. Throughout the agrarian ages – and even under ‘absolute’ monarchies until the advent of national police forces and an universal legal system – ‘individuals’Footnote 42 were generally accustomed, especially when personal matters were concerned, to execute their own brand of justice (the understanding of which would have been informed with but not determined by religion). There were legal systems prior to modernity, but the penetration of society by the state was relatively shallow, giving room to citizens to act in the manner they chose to much greater extent than is possible in modernity, even if they did not technically have delineated ‘rights’.
The social contract theorists of the early modern era therefore were not only interested in filling the vacuum left by religious authority by providing a rational justification for state authority, but in making a case for why one should give up one's prerogative to pursue one's own justice and the cede the authority to use, decide and punish crimes against one's own person to the state. In fact, it is possible to read the arguments about the state as evolving in two seemingly contradictory but logically complimentary directions: the more state intrusion into the ‘private’ lives of citizens becomes logically necessary (and rationally legitimate), the closer the identification of the state becomes with the people and hence the greater its accountability, at least in theory. Hobbes's Leviathan is absolute and infallible, and for the most part aloof from the society it represents, but it also stays out of the private business of the citizens after providing them with a common standard of justice.Footnote 43 Locke's government, on the other, is justified primarily because of the supposed rise in the prevalence of conflict after the invention of money – hence it is an impartial judge primarily of civil matters and in addition to what the Leviathan provided, that is, stability, it has an additional normative duty to provide for the common good. It is also more accountable to its people – they retain the right to revolt.Footnote 44 About a century later, with Rousseau, the state had been tasked with the duty, if necessary, to force the citizen to be ‘free’ but the state-subject distinction had been completely erased and sublimated into the concept of the popular will.Footnote 45 Later on, Hegel's citizens would not even need to be forced into freedom: for Hegel, the state was the very manifestation of (individual) freedom as the embodiment of rationality.Footnote 46
In other words, the evolution of modern political thought with focus on delineating individual rights and the appropriate boundaries of state behaviour mirroredFootnote 47 the expansion of the powers of central political authority and the increasing monopolisation of the legitimate use of force. The legitimate use of force was a power the modern state overtook from the medieval religious authorities and local nobles, but it was also usurped (or transferred) from regular people, from ‘individuals’,Footnote 48 with the promise of a more stable, better, peaceful, etc. society. The reason why there are still incidents of vigilante justice even in Western societies is because while it may be easy to make the theoretical case that the state makes the best impartial judge, it is difficult to sustain that belief when one's short term needs for justice come into the picture. This was a fact that was well-recognised by Hume, who thought convention and education more important than the idea of contract – Hume argued that the idea of modern justice (and therefore the right of the state to execute it) is an artificial virtue which needs not only rational justification but constant cultivation and habituation.Footnote 49 Considering also the fact that in most societies, the state bureaucracy is far from being impartial in practice (at least when some groups of citizens are concerned), too inefficient, too slow or too caught up in its own universal rules to mete out the kind of particular justice the victim demands of the situation, and it becomes clear why every now and then the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force is still challenged by even the most apolitical, regularly law-abiding variety of citizens.
It was no accident therefore that the articulation of anarchism (that is, the first ideological well for justifying modern terrorism – more on that in a moment) as a coherent philosophy coincided with the rise of the modern state. Anarchism emerged in direct opposition to the increasingly more dominant strand of social contract thought that argued that it was both rational and beneficial to transfer all of one's rights and freedoms to the state. One of the first articulations of this kind of reasoning is to be found in Edmund Burke's Vindication of Natural Society (1756). This work was later declared a satire by its author, but it can nevertheless be held as an example of the kind of counter-arguments being formulated in England after a century of social contract theorist making the case for why submitting to the state is better than living in the ‘state of nature’. Burke's depiction of the frustrations of the regular citizen before the almighty bureaucracy of the state have an eerily Kafkaesque tinge:
What shall I do? An Antagonist starts up and presses me hard. I enter the Field, and retain these three Persons to defend my Cause. My Cause, which two Farmers from the Plough could have decided in half an Hour, takes the Court twenty Years. I am however at the end of my Labour, and have in Reward for all my Toil and Vexation, a Judgment in my Favour. But hold – a sagacious Commander, in the Adversary's Army has found a Flaw in the Proceeding. My Triumph is turned into Mourning.Footnote 50
It was later yet anotherFootnote 51 Englishman, William Godwin, who took up this line of complaint and turned it into a more formal philosophical stance, right around the time of the French Revolution. Godwin believed that human progress and enlightenment would eventually render state intrusion into private lives unnecessary.Footnote 52 Godwin was very much influenced by Burke's arguments in the Vindication, and his belief in human perfectibility through historical evolution to the point where government would cease to be necessary foreshadowed some of Marx's predictions (or wishful thinking, depending on one's perspective).
Before the French Revolution, however, the distinction between anti-absolutism and anti-statism was not particularly evident. It is possible to see echoes of Godwin's arguments even in Rousseau, for example, in his articulation of the sovereign as the general will,Footnote 53 and there were those among the French revolutionaries who believed government to be entirely superfluous. The Enragés, for instance, openly opposed national assemblies and called for direct rule of the people. Of course, before long, it became evident to all, both within and without France, that the Revolution was producing anything but: ‘democratic politics, articulated in the French version of popular sovereignty, brought about a new form of absolutism’.Footnote 54 It is after this turning point that anti-statism came to be articulated sharply as anarchism and became something more than calling for the end of absolutist/monarchic government.
The French Revolution indeed was a turning point in the rise of the modern state, and it is no accident that scholars of terrorismFootnote 55 often use it as a demarcation point to separate modern terrorism from earlier acts of violence which bear a familial resemblance.Footnote 56
The drive towards centralisation reached a watershed moment with the French Revolution, which introduced a holistic understanding of popular sovereignty into the dynamic. Before the revolution, several states in Western Europe had centralised enough for monarchs to control their own ‘permanent, professional military forces that rivaled those of their neighbors and far exceeded any other organized armed force within their own territories’,Footnote 57 yet the processes driving this result had moved relatively slowly (although not necessarily peacefully), with each sovereign striking its own bargains with various groups which it needed to co-opt. Yet at this point, ‘no monarch could govern a population with his armed force alone, nor could any monarch afford to create a professional staff large and strong enough to reach from him to the ordinary citizen’.Footnote 58 In other words, up to the end of the eighteenth century, the growth of the state's authority was checked by the various concessions the monarchs had to make and the fact that the society remained largely out of reach. Ironically, then, the age of absolutism was not yet the pinnacle of state power (if we take power to entail penetration of society).
The popular sovereignty principle embodied in the French Revolution ended the process of gradual expansion of central state authority by introducing an element of urgency into the international system. There were several reasons for this. First of all, the ideas contained in the revolution ‘strengthened the French state by facilitating a new level of social mobility for warfare’Footnote 59 which enabled the French state to very successfully pursue imperial aspirations. Given the fact that it took several coalitions of all other major states in Europe (and a Russian winter) to successfully match Napoleon's manpower, it became immediately obvious what a great innovation the principle of popular sovereignty was from a war-making perspective. For this and other reasons, the principles of the French Revolution begged to be imitated by other states.Footnote 60
At first, other monarchs believed that they could contain the more dangerous implications of the French Revolution while emulating its strategies for war-making. The compromise struck at Vienna therefore retained the idea of dynastic legitimacy. However, in Western Europe, the effects of the revolution were felt immediately as they gave extra impetus to centralising processes already in place. For instance, the humiliating battle of Jena convinced the Germans, following the words of Fichte, to establish a universal, state-directed, compulsory education system as early as 1817 to ‘teach all Germans to be good Germans and […] prepare them to play whatever role – military, economic, political – fell to them in helping the state reassert Prussian power’.Footnote 61 The Prussian state used the education system to create ‘more unified national citizenry and thereby consolidate state power both within the nation and relative to the other national states’.Footnote 62 A similar move was underway in Denmark by 1814.Footnote 63
The significance of the French Revolution in international politics was not limited to inspiring monarchs around Europe to speed up the process of centralisation and modernisation; it also profoundly transformed the understanding of the state, and thereby the state itself: ‘By annihilating the nobility and undermining the clergy, the French Revolution removed – in one large and important state – the constraints on state power which Burke found so civilizing’Footnote 64 and it did so in the name of equality, liberty and the people. The revolution's ‘reconstitution of the legitimating foundations and structure of the French state, from a monarchy rooted in an Estates system to popular sovereignty, also entailed a reconstitution of the purposes of the state’. Hence, ‘the idea that the state and the nation should become wedded in one general will (and “national interest″), and that it alone had the power to command absolute allegiance, was re-invented in this period’.Footnote 65 These ideas found a fertile ground among the populations around the continent whose ‘national’ awareness had already been awakened by the Napoleonic Wars. The demand for the state's greater accountability to ‘the people’ reached its first mature articulation precisely at the same moment where the traditional checks on state power such as the nobility and the clergy had been eliminated. ‘The people’ become more powerful in theory, as the only legitimate source of justification for the authority of the state, but less autonomous in practice in the face of a state apparatus more intrusive than ever before. The growing tension in this direction erupted in the revolutions of 1848, with citizens all around Europe demanding rights and freedoms commensurate with their new found authority as the source of state's power. Dynastic legitimacy was increasingly becoming an anachronism.
Modern terrorism: the first wave
Modern terrorism was born in this period while the shocks of the French Revolution were still reverberating throughout Europe, and it really took off after the invention of dynamite. Examples of the shocking terrorist plots around Europe are the bombing of the Winter Palace (1880) and the assassination by dynamite of Alexander II (1881) by Narodnaya Volya, the dynamite attacks against the French judiciary in 1891, the nail-bomb attack on the French National Assembly in 1893, and the first instances targeting of civilians such as the bombing of Café Terminus in Paris in 1894 and the 1883, 1885 and 1897 London Underground bombings, and possibly the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886. Dynamite had not yet been invented when Karl Heinzen wrote in 1849 that ‘if to kill is always a crime, then it is forbidden equally to all; if it is not crime, then it is permitted equally to all […] the greatest benefactor of mankind will be he who makes it possible for a few men to wipe out thousands’.Footnote 66 Modern terrorism existed as an idea long before its primary methods had been streamlined.
The first thinkers to advocate the use of terror as a strategy were the aforementioned anarchists who came to believe after the French Revolution that no type of government was worth the liberty trade-off expected of the modern citizen. Hence we come upon the first self-proclaimed ‘anarchist’, Proudhon, who wrote in 1840 that ‘liberty is the mother, not the daughter of order’, as well as the emergence of anarchist thinkers such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, and one of the greater enthusiasts of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ strategy,Footnote 67 Johann Most. Anarchists hoped for revolution, and some thought terrorism was the way to instigate it. Sergei Nechaev, the founder of one of the first ‘modern’ terrorist organisations Narodnaya Rasprava (People's Retribution), called his terrorism manual the ‘Catechism of a Revolutionist’ (1869) and argued that when ‘revolutionaries’ target and kill people ‘whose sudden and deaths will inspire the greatest fear in the government’, ‘the guiding principle must not be the individual acts of villainy committed by the person, nor even by the hatred he provokes among the society or the people. This villainy and hatred […] may to a certain extent be useful, since they help to incite popular rebellion.’Footnote 68 Terrorist murder for Nechaev was a perfectly logical way to incite a popular revolution by signalling the weakness of the government on the one hand, and provoking its oppression on the other. At this juncture, disagreements between anarchists and socialists centred mostly on economic points. Both groups shared a deep distrust of the state and eagerly awaited the day it would finally be relegated to the dustbin of history.Footnote 69
In terrorism studies, the anarchist terrorists of the nineteenth century are considered to make up ‘the first wave’ of modern terrorism, along with the proto-nationalist terrorist groups active in the aging agrarian empires of Eastern Europe. In other words, two broad categories of terrorist activity mark this period: on the one hand, there were the socialist-anarchist groups such as Narodnaya Volya, Narodnaya Rasprava, as well as the various anarchist organisations active in especially Southern Europe, and on the other hand, there were the nationalist-secessionist terrorist groups such as the IMRO and the Serbian Black Hand.Footnote 70 It is a mistake, however, to lump all of these groups together – as is commonly done in terrorism studies – and declare that the first wave of terrorism was a problem which only affected the semi-periphery or was tied only to the breakup of empires.Footnote 71
The most prominent examples of the first group, that is, the anarchists, indeed were RussianFootnote 72 in origin, and therefore loosely fit the ‘semi-periphery’ billing, but their close ties with their European counterparts should not be overlooked. Russian anarchists such as Bakunin and Kropotkin often travelled to Western Europe to avoid or escape from Siberian exile and participated in the intellectual community during their stays in Western capitals. The influence went both ways. Karl Heinzen, for instance, whose influential musings about mass murder were quoted earlier, hailed from Germany and later moved to the US. On the other hand, Narodnaya Volya's initial success inspired many an anarchist in Western Europe and some even in the US to target high-profile political figures. Anarchism found especially fertile ground in Southern Europe.Footnote 73 Between 1881 and 1913, anarchists executed more than a dozen successful or nearly-successful assassination attempts on the lives of various politicians and heads of state, such as the French President, the Spanish Prime Minister, the Austrian Empress, King of Italy, to name a few. Furthermore, as described earlier, anarchists were also staging dynamite bombings throughout Europe (and North America) in this period.
Therefore, describing the anarchist-socialist terrorism of the first wave as an invention or problem relegated to the semi-periphery obscures the full picture. Anarchist-socialist terrorism of the first wave is better described as a ‘systemic’ or even ‘global’ phenomenon. Admittedly, the modern states system itself was not global yet, but where the European society of states had matured to the nascent form of the international system we live in today, so extended the reach of anarchism. In fact, it is very telling where anarchists were not active: the Ottoman Empire, while dealing more than with its fair share of nationalist/secessionist ‘terrorist’ activity had hardly an anarchist problem to speak of.
Interestingly enough, then, at the same time as European radicals were clamouring to get rid of their own states, groups elsewhere were fighting to establish statehood. The second category of ‘terrorists’ in the first wave was made up of various nationalist groups primarily active in the Austria-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires, such as the Serbian Black Hand, the Young Bosnians and the Macedonian IMRO. Additionally, even though most scholars date Irish terrorism to the 1920s,Footnote 74 the origins of that movement may also be traced back to this period – to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which grew out of the American Fenian Brotherhood. The transatlantic Fenian movement arranged for raids into Canada in the 1860s and 1870s, assassinated a Canadian politician in 1868, dynamited Scotland Yard and attacked various public monuments around London in the 1880s. We may think of all of these groups as the predecessors of modern-day nationalist-secessionist terrorism. The IMRO, for instance, had both an urban presence but also a rural militia wing,Footnote 75 very much like the ethnically motivated terrorist organisations active today, such as the PKK or ETA.
The rural militia tactics of these nationalist organisations were inspired by several traditions. First of all, they were drawing upon the age old-tradition of banditry, of outlaws such as Robin Hood who often enjoyed a degree of popularity among ‘the people’ throughout history.Footnote 76 The bandit as a popular resistance hero figure was therefore easily reclaimed by revolutionary nationalism.Footnote 77 Another source of inspiration were the partisans who had been so effective in weakening the French army during the Napoleonic wars. As explained by Colonel Lemiere de Corvey, ‘these guerrillas worked on the principle of avoiding any engagement in line with our [French] armies, and perseverance in this plan thwarted all our schemes’.Footnote 78 Corvey also noted: ‘This kind of warfare breeds terror. Regular soldiers think twice before pursuing an enemy in unfamiliar circumstances, for they do not know his strength and always fear an ambush.’Footnote 79
Such fascination notwithstanding, there was nothing particularly new or innovative about partisan warfare – it may in fact be the oldest and most basic kind of military engagement tactic known to man. What made it seem innovative and terrorising is the emergence of centralised states with their armies of national recruits – when modern bureaucratic armies became the ideal norm of war-making, age old-traditions such as defending one's village with a group of rag-tag unprofessional soldiers became reclassified as ‘unconventional’ warfare. For instance, when Imam Shamil was leading the Circassian resistance against Russian invasion in the 1830s, his men frequently ambushed the Russian forces. While their tactics are classified today as ‘guerrilla warfare’ it is unlikely that Shamil had any knowledge of the partisans in Europe. What is more likely is that the Circassians were fighting against invasion by modern armies of Russia in the one way that came most naturally given the terrain and made the most sense given the resource disparity.
The Caucasians following Shamil and the Partisans of Spain may have been fighting an active and recent invasion, but in the age of nationalism it did not take long for other ethnicised/nationalised groups under the rule of various empires to reassess their own situations as being one of a similar dynamic and to take up similar methods of resistance. Among these groups we may also count the ‘revolutionary bands’ of Italy, as described by Carlo Bianco, who in 1833 suggested that ‘actions regarded as barbarous in regular warfare must be resorted to in order to terrorize, unnerve and destroy the enemy’.Footnote 80 Later, similar methods would be taken up by the Boers against the British and by Arabs against the Ottomans. Charles Calwell noted in 1900 that ‘in most small wars the enemy inclines to this mode of carrying on the campaign and shirks more regular engagements’.Footnote 81 By that time, certain normative judgments had attached to various kinds of war-making – the British, especially, viewed guerrilla warfare with a mixture of admiring and patronising attitudes. T. M. Maguire argued that savage and semi-civilised races were especially suited for guerrilla warfare: ‘The natural man – the dweller in the hills and plains as distinguished from the product of the factory or large towns – has other qualifications besides eyesight and woodcraft which make him an ideal recruit […] In everything except discipline and armament he is, as a rule, superior to the man he has to fight.’Footnote 82 And of course, T. H. Lawrence famously noted that the wisdom of neither Foch nor Clausewitz could help the Arabs, but they were winning regardless: ‘Most wars are wars of contact, both forces striving to keep touch to avoid tactical surprise. The Arab war should be a war of detachment: to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing themselves till the moment of the attack.’Footnote 83 And as Lawrence noted, this tactic worked and gradually reduced Turkish army to helplessness.
The Italian revolutionary bands described by Bianco and Mazzini, and the Arab rebels coached by Lawrence are rarely described as ‘terrorists’ by anyone except perhaps their victims' heirs, but the truth of the matter is that there was not that great of a difference between these groups and the above-mentioned first wave nationalist organisations more commonly labelled as terrorist: the IMRO, the Black Hand, the Young Bosnians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, etc. These latter groups, like the Arabs, the Boers, the Italians etc., aimed to form their own nation-state units by seceding from or pushing out an imperial unit no longer recognised as legitimate political authority, and agitated with that purpose in mind.
Two things make such groups easier to signify as ‘terrorists’: the timing of their operations, that is, activity during peacetime, and their choice of targets, such as political figures in addition to more ostensibly military agents. These choices invariably implied urban activity and secret societies in addition to rural guerrilla formations. However, when we consider that these ‘terrorist’ groups considered their ‘homelands’ to be under ‘invasion’ very much in the same manner as the other national revolutionaries (among whose cadres we can also count the Americans), it is easy to see that the reconstruction of peacetime as wartime or political figures as foreign agents did not require a great logical leap.
Rethinking the ‘first wave’ and its implications for the evolution of terrorism
To sum up the discussion thus far, terrorism in the nineteenth century manifested on the fringes of two otherwise (radical but) mainstream movements, both derived from the principles (and contradictions) embodied in the of the modern state: egalitarianism and nationalism.
The modern state is justified by popular sovereignty, which means it promises universal emancipation. Universal emancipation is rooted in the idea that all human beings (or at least the citizens) are equal, which is a principle that is based in and practiced through reason – the modern state is therefore rational. However, the nineteenth century actualisation of the idea of the modern state was anything but these things. It became evident not too long after the achievement of formal rights and equality that political emancipation may not equal human emancipation, and that in fact it may entrench existing inequalities. As Marx observed, ‘far from abolishing these effective differences, [the state] only exists so far as they are presupposed; it is conscious of being a political state and manifests its universality only in opposition to these elements’.Footnote 84 Even Hegel, in his early writings, worried about transcending the state for this reason, or at least the kind of state based on security of property and nothing else than self-interest, the kind of state which treated individuals as mere cogs in a machine.Footnote 85 He later came to believe that this problem had its solution in the idea of state as the perfect manifestation of rationality (that is, if only the state could move beyond being the mediator of a rights based ‘civil society’ and become the expression of freedom itself), but Marx, among others, saw the solution in reading state out of the equation altogether.
The contradiction of nationalism was borne out of the same dynamic. The modern state, now as the manifestation of popular sovereignty, was meant to represent all of the inhabitants on its territory, which created the necessity for the state to recognise previously under-recognised groups, such as the Jews. However welcome such emancipation reforms were by the discriminated minorities, they also came at a price. Speaking of the Wilhelm's 1812 edict declaring Jews to be natives and citizens of Prussia, Patchen Markell remarked:
The law secured recognition for the Jews, yet it also secured recognition for Prussia by placing Jews into a new relationship with the state; it lifted restrictions on Jewish life, but it also served as a tool through which the state could mould its Jewish population into a shape consistent with the requirements of modern government – by which, that is, it could perform the work of identifying Jews as citizens, and identifying itself as the sovereign. As Salo Baron wrote, ‘Jewish emancipation was as much a historic necessity for the modern state as it was for the Jews.’Footnote 86
In other words, equality for Jews did not mean equality for Jews as Jews, it required assimilation. Equal rights demanded compromising one's identity. The edict asked the ‘newly emancipated Jews to fulfil a number of obligations and threatened them with loss of their status as citizens if they did not comply.’Footnote 87 Furthermore, the emancipation deprived rabbis and community elders of all legal jurisdiction and authority.
It is not so much that this was an unfair deal for the Jews (which it was), but as Markell points out, the real problem was that the Prussian state continued to remain ambivalent about the inclusion of the Jews in the national project. As soon as the edict was in place, requiring among other things that Jews take Western-style surnames and speak German, the king started worrying about Jews doing exactly that because then they would no longer be recognisable as Jews.Footnote 88 The emancipation act had revealed a basic contradiction in the idea of modern sovereignty: ‘on the one hand, Jewishness (otherness) must be eradicated […]; on the other hand, in order for the consequent recognition of the sovereignty of the state to be more than momentary and ephemeral, the institutions of the state must maintain a vigilant surveillance of the Jews to be sure that they are conforming to the terms of their emancipation’.Footnote 89 Therefore, the modern sovereignty project tasked the Jews with an impossibility: to assimilate into the German nation while remaining recognisable as Jews, so that the state could keep reconfirming the fact of their successful assimilation. The inevitable failure of the inclusion project was blamed on the Jews, who were now accused of being deceivers and hiding their true essence behind a German façade.
Markell's discussion of Jewish emancipation perfectly exemplifies the kind of trade-offs involved in the expansion of modern state sovereignty. The sovereignty project extended formal equal recognition to all, but created for historically disadvantaged groups new burdens of assimilation. The old monarchs may have deemed some groups favoured subjects and disapproved of others, but pre-modern state arrangements never penetrated society deeply enough (especially in social or cultural matters) for such pronouncements to become a cause for secession, even if such a strategy could be imagined. The modern state promised equality and justice for all, but in exchange, it required one's full commitment as a citizen, and retained for itself the right (and newfound ability) to intervene in all aspects of its citizens' lives. This created a new type of assimilation pressure especially for those groups who were culturally coherent and historically distinct enough to be ill at ease with the way the new nation was defined.
This is the kind of dynamic which was at the heart of nationalist secession attempts from the Ottoman Empire, most of which came not before but after the proclamation by the Sultan in 1839 of the equality of all subjects under the law. To our modern eyes, the Ottoman millet system seems outright discriminatory, and the Tanzimat decree of 1839 a progressive reform in the right, ‘modern’ direction, but by declaring all subjects as citizens equal under the law, the decree also sapped the traditional authority of religious-ethnic intermediaries and forced the various ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire facing the Ottoman state as individuals, without any guarantee that the state would represent them in their particularity. The granting of equality in formal rights therefore only increased the anxiety about state power, as opposed to decreasing it.
Nationalist self-determination, as an ideology, does not solve the aforementioned contradictions in the modern sovereignty project, but is less threatening than an ideology which rejects the modern sovereignty project altogether, such as anarchism, because it creates the illusion that it can, elsewhere. One response to the false universalism of the popular sovereignty project of the modern state, and its tendency to privilege the dominant culture, is to break into ever smaller cultural units with the hope that every group can enjoy the advantages of dominance. This was not an option readily available to Jews in the nineteenth century, but it was available to most other ethnicised minorities, especially those groups in historically multi-national empires whose state apparatuses were ill-prepared to provide the kind of deep penetration and surveillance demanded by the modern state project. By modernising, these multi-ethnic empires stepped into the worst of both worlds: they created anxiety with their aspiration of centralisation, and had to sit by while that anxiety to give rise to nationalisation because of their inability to penetrate society in practice. This is why the nationalist-secessionist terrorist organisations of this era hailed primarily from within the territories of the Ottoman and the Austria-Hungarian empires. The Irish terrorism follows the same pattern, taking shape after the union with Great Britain and the Catholic emancipation of 1829.
It is because we instinctively recognise nationalist secessionism as an imperfect but nevertheless quasi-rational response to such contradictions in the modern state project that we have such great difficulty with labelling nationalist movements who engage in illicit warfare and political violence as ‘terrorists’. This type of activity does not endanger the ontological security of states at a profoundFootnote 90 level. If it is justifiable and legitimate according to the norms of our international system to defend one's homeland when it is being actively invaded, why would it not be justifiable and legitimate to defend one's identity from invasion and assimilation during peacetime, with whatever means necessary? What if one finds oneself in the receiving end of such assimilatory measures as a result of sustained occupation which is made not more but less acceptable by its longevity? (as the Balkan peoples came to see the Ottoman institutions they had lived with for more than five centuries…). Maintaining that the first action is moral and necessary whereas the other is extra-normal and therefore illegitimate is difficult in modernity, the scientific, rational methodology of which requires that similar problems be treated with similar measures. Hence our difficulties with fully condemning nationalist extra-legal violence, both back then and still today.
This is especially so because nationalist-secessionist terrorism at its core embodies a viewpoint which concedes the legitimacy of the idea of modern state, and therefore the modern international system, and therefore all the existing states within it – in seeking its own state, it implicitly reaffirms and helps perpetuate the sovereignty of all other states, and does not so much point to the failings of the modern state project as to side-step them for the time-being. That is not so terrifying or terrorising. The activity of such organisations is extra-legal by definition because they do not have their own state apparatus, and therefore they lack the internationally sanctioned state monopoly on the legitimate right to use force, but that is exactly the what they are (or claiming they are) trying to remedy through the use of force. Therefore, their general motivations are recognisable and intelligible to the international community, even when their particular actions are not.
What is classified as second wave or anti-colonial terrorism was dominated by secessionist groups of this type. Between the 1920s and the 1960s ‘terrorists’ motivated by the goal of self-determination targeted agents of overseas empires and the colonial police force around the globe: in India, Cyprus, Palestine. Colonial enterprises faced challenges the longest in places which were within the boundaries of the nation-building project: the French experience in Algeria comes to mind. When the second wave of terrorism was over, the victor was the modern states system: the nationalist terrorists-revolutionaries set out to make their states after the image of their colonial masters. Many a ‘terrorist’ from this wave went onto become national heroes and statesmen after independence: Menachem Begin of Irgun is just one example. If the second wave of ‘terrorism’ is remarkable for anything it is for the fact that there were no serious terrorist groups active in this period with a system-threatening ideology in the vein of anarchism.
Anarchist terrorism was system-threatening because it rejected the legitimacy of the Westphalian nation-state, both in theory and in practice. The absence of such an ideology in the second quarter of the twentieth century may be taken as evidence that the modern sovereignty norm as organised around the principle of national self-determination had reached a certain threshold of legitimacy after World War I: those groups which had achieved it in practice were proud of it, and those who lacked it aspired to it. The second wave ended along with decolonisation.Footnote 91 By the end of the 1960s, most groups which aspired to national self-determination had achieved it. Those which had not continued to employ ‘terrorist’ tactics, but after the second wave, the global ratio of nationalist-secessionist terrorism started to decrease. This larger trend was not immediately evident because regions with unfulfilled hopes of nationalist self-determination witnessed the beginning of some of the most violent and entrenched conflicts within this wave, each borne out of growing desperation with the status quo: hence the PLO in Palestine, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, ETA in Spain, the IRA in Northern Ireland etc.Footnote 92 However, even in its worst form, (secular) nationalist terrorism rejects only the authority of particular states and their modern centralising projects. These types of organiasations derive their legitimacy from an alternative claim to a particular territory that can be separated from a larger unit. In that sense, ethnic-secessionism harkens back to the local authority claims pre-dating modernity, but update those claims by linking local territorial authority to national self-determination.
Unlike the nationalist-secessionist groups, the anarchists rejected the authority of all states over the ‘individual’Footnote 93 and instead emphasised liberty. It is with violent organisations which deny the sovereignty of the modern state altogether the international community has much less of a difficulty affixing the label terrorist, and understandably so. The anarchist-terrorists were the first to create this type of unease. The members Naradnoya Volya are never described as ‘freedom fighters’, for instance, despite the fact that the stated goals of their terrorist activities were explicitly about demanding more freedoms for the masses. This is firstly because the anarchists did not enjoy the a priori legitimacy bestowed upon the secessionist terrorism by the claim to represent ‘the nation’.Footnote 94 The anarchist organisations claimed to speak for the people or the masses, but the modern state already had claimed a stake on that representation by granting the people ‘rights’ – and without the people actually rising up altogether to retract the legitimacy they had theoretically granted the state in exchange for those rights, any act of violence was doomed to be both extra-legal and morally illegitimate. In other words, unlike nationalist terrorism, which can claim to be ‘the army’ of a nation which should be recognised but is not, and therefore is assumed to have no legitimate voice representing it, ideologies such as anarchism and socialism were in direct competition for the right to represent people already recognised in their particular grouping by the nation-state.
Popular legitimation is essentially what separates terrorism from revolutionary violence – outsiders may condemn political killings during a revolution, but we reserve our deeper condemnation for their ‘terrorist’ equivalents. Murder is murder, but if the perpetrators can demonstrate mass support (or claim it after the fact of the revolution), their actions gain a degree of legitimacy – popular sovereignty shifts from the existing state apparatus to the revolutionaries. Marxists revolutionaries understood this fact – Trotsky criticised anarchist terrorism not because of its violence, but rather because he believed that it dulled people's propensity to revolt: ‘The more ‘effective’ terrorist acts are, the greater the impression they make, the more the attention of the masses is concentrated upon them, the more will the masses' interest in self-education will decline …] If we rise against terrorist acts, it is only because individual revenge does not satisfy us.’Footnote 95 Marxists came to view anarchist-terrorism as too disconnected from the masses to be legitimate (or successful). The ultimate success of Marxist-Leninism as a revolutionary ideology over anarchist-terrorism may be traced back to the recognition that revolution could only be staged if it could claim to have the backing of a particular ‘people’, but this is also the reason why the Marxist-Leninists ended up reproducing the very contradictions in the modern state idea that they set out to address. In order to claim popular sovereignty and engineer mass-uprisings, they had to organise around existing national lines and target particular states. It was the anarchists who were truly international in their operations – but in the modern nation-state system, one could either be universal in their opposition or successful revolutionaries, not both. The choice to emphasise mass representation and to delay the internationalisation of conflict until after (if and when) each state had its own revolution meant that the Marxist-Leninists implicitly conceded the legitimacy of the modern ‘national’ (or ‘the people's’) state, reluctantly as an idea at first, then also in practice. This is why, despite all their radicalism and anti-nationalist rhetoric, the Russian revolutionaries ended up creating a state that was not radically different than its competitors in the modern international system.
This contradiction was re-manifested in the dominating ethos of the third wave of 1970s, which was not nationalist self-determination, but rather ‘leftist anti-Westernism’.Footnote 96 However, despite the international reach of both their rhetoric and operations, the ‘leftist anti-Westernism’ of the terrorist groups of this wave remained just as location bound as the Soviet revolutionaries. While these types of terrorist organisations, unlike their nationalist counterparts, did not aim to secede, each nevertheless targeted a particular state apparatus (even if they at times struck abroad).
By the 1970s, leftist anti-Westernism had found legs both within Western capitals and also in the developing world. Groups active in Western countries included the Baider-Meinhof Group in West Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the US and the French Direct Action. In the developing world, such groups were mostly active in Latin America: the Colombian M-19 and FARC, and the Peruvian Shining Path count as examples of this larger trend. Another region where such organisations were active were the eastern flanks of the Western World: Greece and Turkey both had their share of anti-Western leftist terrorist organisations. The geography is telling: this sort of terrorism gained its largest support bases in regions where the Westphalian state had been emulated the longest (minus the Soviet bloc): namely, the areas world-systems theorists would call the semi-periphery, that is, Latin America and Eastern Mediterranean. The anti-Western leftist ethos of the third wave is noteworthy in that it signalled the return of anti-systemic motivations for terrorism after the interruption of the previous wave. Third wave anti-Western terrorism was a nascent system-threat manifested as localised struggles against particular states. Implicit in the anti-Western rhetoric was the growing disillusionment with the promise of the Westphalian state and the international system based on that norm to deliver on the promise of sovereignty equality and equal autonomy.
I noted earlier that by designating social issues as ‘non-political’, political emancipation ‘disguises their status as forms of power and makes them more difficult to address politically’.Footnote 97 A similar process has been at work internationally since the inception of the modern states system – the notion of sovereign equality makes it very difficult to speak of social hierarchies in the international system, let alone combat them as power relations. Such depoliticisation is not entirely accidental, at either the domestic or the international level: it legitimates the hold on power certain groups have in what is supposed to be a framework of equal recognition.Footnote 98
There is a certain dialectical trend here, along with a growing global reach. Just as the modern state's guarantee of formal rights and recognition had not translated into substantive equality domestically a century earlier (and had in fact entrenched existing inequalities), it was now becoming evident that the achievement of formal sovereignty as a people did not translate into actual autonomy and equality in the international system (and had in fact entrenched existing inequalities between regions and nations). The third wave's terrorism's ideological response to this failure was to attempt to secede, in a manner of speaking, from a system (and a world economy) which granted formal equality but thrived on unequal relationships of exploitation. Terrorists of this wave thought this to be possible only if they could wrestle control of the particular states they were targeting, states which were run by elites whose loyalties were seen to rest with the core rather than the nation they were supposed to represent. China's example and the USSR's financial support no doubt played an important role in feeding this illusion. In this sense, third wave anti-Westernism was an interesting amalgamation: the dominant norms of the international system were partially rejected, but its core organising principle, nation-state sovereignty, was tolerated (if not embraced). In other words, the anti-systemic terrorist organisations of the 1970s struck a compromise similar to that of the earlier Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries by targeting particular states structures (and also supposedly on the way to international revolution).
The dominant terrorist organisation of the fourth wave, which is said to be characterised by a religious ethos,Footnote 99 is less interested in such a compromise with Westphalian principles. As such, the ideologyFootnote 100 of Al-Qaeda represents a further maturation of the system-threatening vein of terrorism, though probably not its end point, because it too is not fully universal in its claims, and remains partly anchored to particular localities, mainly because of its reliance on pre-existing terror franchises.Footnote 101Al-Qaeda is rhetorically clear in the fact that it has no interest in maintaining the organising principle of Westphalian sovereignty in the event of its triumph. Instead, Al-Qaeda (and the particular well of Islamic thought it is drawing upon)Footnote 102 invokes communities organised around ordering principles based on religious authority such as the Ottoman Empire or Medina during the time of Mohammad as models of political organisation.Footnote 103
It also repeatedly emphasises in its proclamations that it rejects the international system altogether, even if its principal target is the US. As noted by Philpott, ‘What [Al-Qaeda] primarily scorns […] is a secularized political order that challenges its own political theology of authority, along with the particular offenses perpetrated against Islam by the US, the most powerful representative of that order.’Footnote 104Al-Qaeda principals repeatedly emphasise the fact they are leading a worldwide insurgency,Footnote 105 and will not be satisfied by local victories. Here's how Ayman Al Zawahiri, for instance, described the ‘universality of the battle’:Footnote 106
The western forces that are hostile to Islam have clearly identified their enemy […] They are joined in this by their old enemy, Russia. They have adopted a number of tools to fight Islam, including: 1. The UN; 2. The friendly rulers of the Muslim peoples; 3. The multinational corporations; 4. The international communications and data exchange systems; 5. The international news agencies and satellite media channels; 6. The international relief agencies […] In the face of this alliance, a fundamentalist coalition is taking shape. It is made up of the jihad movements in the various lands of Islam […] It is anxious to seek retribution for the blood of the martyrs, the grief of the mothers, the deprivation of the orphans, the suffering of the detainees, and the sores of the tortured people throughout the land of Islam, from East Turkestan to Andalusia.Footnote 107
What is noteworthy about Al-Qaeda is that as an organisation it is not interested in replacing any particular regime in any one particular country, even if it supports its local affiliates in such quests, and may welcome the destruction of many governments around the world which do not live up to its standards.Footnote 108 It may rhetorically target the US as its principal enemy, but creating regime change in the US is not an explicit goal. The paragraph quoted above underlines that the Al-Qaeda leadership defines as their enemies not just the US, but Russia, current regimes in Muslim countries, all multinational corporations, the UN, and all other international organisations. In other words, Al-Qaeda rejects and aims to disrupt the entirety of modern international system. The organisation's goal is not to wrestle control of an existing state and isolate it from what they perceive as unjust and ungodly influences; Osama bin Laden had (and passed on) that chance with Afghanistan.
The fact that the aspirations of the organisation reach beyond a locality to the entirety of the international system separates the ideology of Al-Qaeda from most other ‘terrorist’ ideologies of the twentieth century, but draws it closer to that of the anarchists. Just as the anarchists were global in their operations (as global as they could be given the geographical limitations of the international system of the time), so is Al-Qaeda. Just as the anarchist rejected the modern state, so does Al-Qaeda. However, unlike the anarchists who invoked personal freedom to legitimise their cause, the legitimacy claimed by Al-Qaeda is one of religious authority: ‘Unlike the state, radical revivalists like bin Laden are religiously constituted actors, bound together by a common political-theological outlook that claims authority to act on behalf of the umma – that is, all Muslims, in whatever state they may live – and even order them to battle.’Footnote 109 This makes Al-Qaeda a new and particularly ‘terrifying’ manifestation of the ontologically threatening variant of systemic terrorism.
Unlike the anarchists, however, the proponents of Al-Qaeda's brand Islamic fundamentalism are not fully universalist in their claims or aspirations. As noted above, there is a vague dream of recreating the Ottoman Empire or some type of return to the early days of the Islamic caliphate. In other words, however vaguely, proponents of Al-Qaeda do envision some type of state as part of their victory project. Their appeal to Muslims as opposed to humanity in general is particularising, as well as localising. In other words, there is enough room within Al-Qaeda's rhetoric for a compromise with ordering principles of the modern system where in the event of future local victory of an Al-Qaeda affiliate, Al-Qaeda's future ideal of recreating an empire of believers may become a rhetorical vessel onto which the Westphalian synthesis is mapped.Footnote 110
This may be seen as both good and bad news. On the one hand, having a grounding in principles which may be approximated in the modern states system increases the chances of a radical movement's survival. This is the case with secessionist movements, whose aspirations to local authority and territoriality can be accommodated without disrupting the sovereignty principle, and this was also the case with Marxist-Leninism, once it conceded the necessity of mounting revolts within the boundaries of pre-defined countries as a precursor of global revolution. While the kind of loosely defined Islamic amah state envisioned by Al-Qaeda does not resemble any modern state, if the movement came to be led by people who find the control of a state desirable, such an aspiration would likely have the same effect on Al-Qaeda's ideology that it had on Marxism. Conceding the modern sovereignty principle would make Al-Qaeda much less ontologically threatening, but perhaps more of a sustained problem/‘enemy’ in practice, as was the case with the Soviet Union in the past, and is the case with Iran today.
Conclusion
I noted at the outset of this article that there is a dialectical trend to be discerned in analysing terrorist movements based in their legitimacy claims. By way of conclusion, let me now reiterate the arguments presented thus far with an eye on underlining that trend.
The sovereignty of the modern state rests on centralised, secular, rational, objective and universal authority which is nevertheless (and paradoxically) bound in space (territory) and particularity (the people in a specific territory, the nation). As discussed above, of the competing claims to legitimacy, claims based on local authority are most akin to the modern sovereignty claim of the state (because they mirror the organising principle of modern sovereignty, only on a smaller scale), and claims based on personal authority/freedom are least similar (because they reject all external authority over a person, and therefore all organising principles). Religious claims can be located somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. I have also discussed that almost as immediately as the modern state reached its full articulation as an idea, the contradictions inherent in the project gave rise to (among other things) the two variants of modern terrorism, on both ends of the legitimacy spectrum. The anarchist terrorists of the nineteenth century were a perfect ontological threat to the new modern system because there was no way to accommodate their demands within the modern sovereignty framework. Their ideology was universal even if their reach was not; they were limited by the fact that the modern states system in the nineteenth century itself was not yet global. The nationalist terrorists on the other hand were a boon for the modern international system, because they conceded the legitimacy of its organising principle and helped spread it around the globe for the next century.
Anarchist terrorism came to naught because of the hope held out both by the compromise socialism made with the modern state, and also by decolonisation. In other words, localised struggles motivated both by socialism and nationalism created the impression among the discontent that the inequities created by the modern state project could be solved only if one wrestled control of their own Leviathan. However, with the expansion of the international society to a global scale – first by the break-up of old empires, next by decolonisation, and finally by the end of bipolarity – it has become increasingly difficult to ignore that modern sovereignty creates domestic homology and is not particularly effective way of combating global inequity. In other words, for reactionaries, revolutions on a local scale glow less and less with a utopian promise. Increasingly, the international system as a whole becomes the subject of revolutionary ire. This is why, with each subsequent wave of terrorism since the nineteenth century (and with each expansion of the international society), system-threatening variants of terrorism have made a stronger comeback, each time less willing to compromise with principles of Westphalian legitimacy. Therefore, when Al-Qaeda is eventually defeated (and/or coopted into the Westphalian model), it is likely to be replaced by an organisation with an even broader reach and an ideology with a legitimacy claim to a more universalising authority. That will surely be terrorising.
