Thematic Debates of Security

Cooperation and Conflict
http://cac.sagepub.com `A Parallel Globalization of Terror': 9-11, Security and Globalization

MIKKEL VEDBY RASMUSSEN Cooperation and Conflict 2002; 37; 323 DOI: 10.1177/0010836702037003676 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/37/3/323
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A Parallel Globalization of Terror: 911, Security and Globalization

MIKKEL VEDBY RASMUSSEN
ABSTRACT
Little research exists on how the conception of world order in terms of globalization denes security policy. The way the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on 11 September 2001 were understood highlights how globalization denes threats, and the policies adopted to deal with them, in the post-Cold War international order. This article utilizes three elements of the globalization discourse (globality, globalization and globalism) identified by Ulrich Beck in analysing the Western reaction to the events of 11 September 2001. It is argued that the attacks reected a new strategic globality in which the new civilian infrastructure of globalization enabled Third World groups to intervene in the West. In terms of globalization, the events of 11 September were seen as the realization of scenarios for post-Cold War insecurity that dominated the late 1990s. The terrorist attacks actualized the ontological insecurity which followed from the notion that globalization enabled threats to proliferate with the same force as trade. Focusing on globalism, the article analyses the strategies for creating safety in a globalized world that presented themselves immediately after the events. The author presents three globalisms: particularism, imperialism and cosmopolitanism. Keywords: 911; constructivism; globalization; security; United States
In this article, I analyse how globalization was used to explain the signicance of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. The United States, in particular, and the Western world, in general, understood what had happened and what they needed to do in response in terms of their own conception of the post-Cold War world. This post-Cold War world-view was dened by globalization. But what denes globalization? I begin with Ulrich Becks distinction between a global social structure (globality), the process that transcends previous national structures in favour of new global structures (globalization), and political action based on the premise of globalization (globalism). With this distinction it is possible to see that a substantial number of the different conceptions of what became known as 911 are based on common conceptions of globalization and globality.
Cooperation and Conict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association Vol. 37(3): 323349. Copyright 2002 NISA Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) 0010-8367[200209]37:3;323349;027676
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COOPERATION AND CONFLICT 37(3)
Focusing on the immediate Western reactions to the events of 11 September 2001,1 I utilize these events to analyse how Western security policy is conceived in terms of globalization. The subject of the article is not how other societies or groups construct globalization or the events of 11 September 2001, nor is it a discussion of how globalization, the events of 11 September 2001 or the aftermath ought to be regarded. Becks three concepts of globalization structure the article in three sections. The rst deals with what I term strategic globality. In the second, the Western conception of globalization as the process dening the post-Cold War world is analysed. Finally, I identify particularism, imperialism and cosmopolitanism as three policies of globalization (globalisms) that presented themselves in the wake of 911. I begin, however, by making the case for focusing on the construction of 911 and at the same time present Becks concepts of globalization. Constructing 911 in Terms of Globalization In the autumn of 2001 there was little hard evidence as to why al-Qaida chose the World Trade Center as its target for the 11 September attacks. One could speculate that the twin towers were attractive targets simply because they were landmarks. Perhaps the sheer size of the buildings made them a target easier to hit by inexperienced pilots than, for example, a New York landmark such as the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps it was the number of casualties which the destruction of the buildings would generate that attracted al-Qaida. The point is that in the autumn of 2001 no one in the West seemed to know the answer for sure. Al-Qaida only offered the brute facts of the attack.2 In the absence of a clear statement of purpose, the terrorists left an understanding of the reasons behind the attack for the United States and the rest of the Western world to ponder. The Western discourse on the reasons why included the tactical considerations mentioned above, but tactics could only be the immediate cause of the attack. The debate quickly focused on what were believed to be the permissive causes of the attack. The most powerful explanation that rst came to light was that alQaida had chosen to attack the World Trade Center because of its value as a symbol of globalization. To the West, the World Trade Center became a scale model of a globalized world, and the fact that the twin towers fell represented the vulnerability of the world order dened by globalization, which had developed following the end of the Cold War.3 The West therefore made its own fear al-Qaidas reason. It was the West, not al-Qaida, that dened itself and its future in terms of globalization. It was the West, not al-Qaida, that produced volume upon volume analysing the causes and consequences of globalization. Globalization was the Wests conceptual means for understanding itself and the world.4 Al-Qaida targeted the West, however, and the West constructed the attack in the context of globalization, because only in this context did the attack make sense to the West. Globalization explained why even American cities were vulnerable to mass terrorism; and
RASMUSSEN: GLOBALIZATION OF TERROR
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globalization explained what was at stake and how the West could, and should, respond. We therefore need to take a closer look at the way the strategic environment is conceived in terms of globalization if we are to explain the American understanding, and Western understanding in general, of what security challenge the attacks on 11 September 2001 represented. In doing so, it is important to note that globalization is used in a number of different ways, ways that describe different results of the transformation process and that globalization is used to construct. Ulrich Beck distinguishes between three meanings of globalization: globality, globalism and globalization proper. According to Beck, globality refers to a global social structure which presents agents with a world horizon (2000: 12). Globalization refers to the process that not only produces a world horizon but also breaks down the categories of the national state that used to dene the political, economic and social world (pp. 1, 11). Globalism is globalization turned into action. Globalism is politics justied in terms of globalization. Beck regards globalism as the death of politics as world markets eliminate or supplant political action (p. 9).5 I analyse the Western construction of the events of 11 September 2001 in terms of globalization. In the rst section, I focus on globality and in the next on the conception of globalization as a process that made the impact of the attacks much greater than it would otherwise have been. In the nal analytical section I map the three globalisms, the three recipes for policy, which presented themselves to Western policy-makers in the autumn of 2001.
Strategic Globality The attacks of 11 September 2001 arguably showed the globality of security in the late-modern world. Where Americans traditionally could safely assume that wars took place beyond the horizon, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress in October that:6
The recent attacks on Washington and New York demonstrate [that] we are witnessing a dramatic expansion of the deadly zone of conict to our population centers. War used to be something that took place on foreign soil. No longer. (Wolfowitz, 2001: 33)
Less fortunate peoples than the Americans had been experiencing war on their soil for some considerable time. What had changed, the Deputy Secretary of Defense argued, was the ability of others to project power vis-vis the United States. Using the global civilian infrastructure, even nonstate actors were now able to inict considerable harm on the United States. As President George Bush told Congress, however, the United States ability to project power had also markedly improved, giving the United States a truly global military reach. Referring to the operations in Afghanistan, the president had this message to terrorists plotting to use their projective power against the United States: Even 7,000 miles away,
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across oceans and continents, on mountain tops and in caves you will not escape the justice of this nation (Bush, 2002: 6). One could argue that the improved power projection capabilities of terrorist networks and of great powers like the United States are a quantitative change only. Strategic globality is far from new. On the contrary, globality has been a strategic quality for hundreds of years. Ever since the seventeenth century, European conicts have had a global dimension, as European colonies added an overseas theatre to European wars. The Seven Years War (175663), one of the rst such conicts, was fought not just in continental Europe but also in North America and India. From a theoretical point of view, one could even argue that strategic globality has been the very condition for the international system. Raymond Aron dened the international system as the ensemble constituted by political units that maintain regular relations with each other and that are all capable of being implicated in a generalized war (1966: 94). The background for this denition is that for much of human history only the resources mobilized for war were sufciently great to overcome geography and make the actions of one power of immediate relevance to every other. In Anthony Giddenss terms, it was only war that was able to create one international space, one system, of states that did not share a geographical place (1990: 1821). Arguably, globalization is changing this situation by creating a civilian infrastructure that is creating a transnational space. For much of the modern period, European conicts like the Seven Years War were the product of the European ability to project power to the rest of the world. What is new about the mass terrorism displayed in the 11 September attacks is that it no longer takes the infrastructural power (Mann, 1994) of a great power to reach strategic globality. The development of a civilian global infrastructure allows civilians to project power on a global scale. Al-Qaidas use of commercial ights as a cruel type of cruise missile is a dramatic example. Numerous think-tank reports and government studies suggest that many other elements of the global civilian infrastructure can be used for violent purposes (more on this later). Because such power projection is no longer dependent on the infrastructural power of a great power, it is no longer just First World conicts that are exported to the Third World. Now, the Third World is able to bring its conicts to the First World as well. As was the case with the European colonial empires, some of these conicts are internalized. A global infrastructure allows for the extension of social spaces beyond their traditional geographic connes. The perpetrators of the attacks on 11 September 2001 were thus apparently recruited from radical Muslim groups in Europe, from where they travelled to the United States for the attack itself (Friedman, 2002). The attack did not originate from the Third World in a geographical sense, but rather from a Third World space which globalization imported into the First World. Strategic globality has taken on a new quality, but strategic globality itself is not a new phenomenon. The questions the United States and the West were left with after the attack were the result of globality rather than its explanation. Globality explained how the attack was possible and outlined
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the possibilities for retaliation. But globality offered no conceptual means for analysing why the attack had occurred and what kind of threat the attack constituted. Furthermore, globality offered no political program for how to deal with strategic globality. In the next section I deal with how the mass terrorism of 11 September 2001 was constructed as part of the process of globalization. In the following section I map the three globalisms, the three recipes for policy, which the construction of the world in terms of globalization presented to Western policy-makers in the autumn of 2001. A Window Into Our Future Presenting the Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR, 2001) to the House and the Senate armed services committees, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz described the attacks on 11 September 2001 as a window into our future (2001: 3). The events of 11 September were horrible in themselves. However, many events are horrible without having the political consequences of the events of 11 September 2001. The events of 11 September were of such signicance because they were constructed as a scenario for security threats in the twenty-rst century. This way of constructing 911 shows the reexive nature of security policy in the late-modern age.7 The new reexivity manifested itself in the conclusion that even the United States had become a vulnerable risk society. Below, I use Ulrich Becks theory of reexivity and risk society to conceptualize this. Terrorism is regarded as an inherent risk in modern sociability because it is constructed as the negative consequences of the globalization process. The very process by which the West is believed to be transcending the modes of conict and production of the twentieth century thus entails the creation of new threats and new modes of conict. This leads to a crisis in what Anthony Giddens refers to as ontological security, which was in the making before 11 September 2001. For that reason the events of that terrible day were quickly interpreted as proof of the growing power of the dark side of globalization. Because terrorism was constructed as the other side of globalization, the power associated with the social, political, economic and cultural aspects of globalization was conceptually transferred to terrorism. Reexive Security Arguing that the attacks were a wake-up call one that we ignore at our peril (Wolfowitz, 2001: 5), Secretary Wolfowitz engaged in constructivist politics when he appeared before the Congress committees to present the Quadrennial Defense Review. On behalf of the administration he asked Congress to take action based on a perception of how certain contemporary processes produced a dangerous future and what kinds of threat this future presented. The way the events of 11 September were constructed as important by means of a scenario highlights the reexive nature of security policy in the twenty-rst century. In reections on the meaning of 11
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September, globalization played a vital part, because it was globalization that dened the process creating the future to which 11 September was a window. Critics of the American strategy following 911 have pointed out that equal numbers of people have died around the world without the United States, or any other Western power, having taken comparable action or even given the events much attention.8 The moral relativism of that argument aside, it points to what one might term the reexive security dilemma of the late-modern world. The security dilemma is traditionally dened as the risk of reducing ones security by acts intended to increase it, because another party feels threatened by the action in question.9 It probably describes important security policy mechanisms in a highly conictual world of sovereign states. The reexive security dilemma is a more appropriate tool with which to analyse the post-Cold War period a time when the Western world is not faced with a serious military threat from any power. The question is no longer whether one provokes conict by seeking security, but rather what conicts, or security issues in general, are important to ones security. In the absence of a clear and present danger, most issues are the cause of endless discussion and not of vital and pressing importance. The dilemma then becomes when and how to act. The Clinton administration was caught in this dilemma time and time again during the 1990s, as it struggled to dene whether, for example, the conicts of the former Yugoslavia were of any consequence to European and transatlantic security or whether intervention in Somalia was a national interest great enough to merit casualties. Security policy was constantly a subject of reection.10 The Clinton administration therefore reversed its position several times on the importance of what was at stake in the various crises it encountered.11 How does one analyse the reexive security dilemma and the choices of security it presents? Ulrich Beck offers one point of departure, as his theory of reexive modernity springs from the question of how one navigates the multiple risks, that late-modern society presents social agents with. Ulrich Beck argues that the very activities that make late-modern societies function present a risk to that society and its inhabitants. Pollution is a prime example. Without industry, present society would cease to exist, but industry cannot function without pollution presenting a challenge to the well-being of the inhabitants of industrial societies (Beck, 1992). This boomerang effect makes late-modern society a reexive society, Beck argues: society becomes a theme and a problem for itself (p. 8). Late-modern society is not the iron cage of a single, meansend rationality that Max Weber described, but rather a hall of mirrors offering the possibility of endless reection on what one is doing and what one might do on seeing the issue from another point of view. In other words, late-modern society is dened by process rather than by structure. Society is not shaped by the static structures of class, rationality and production by which Marx and Weber described modern society, but by the process that transcends those structures. If the basis for political discourse is a process of transcendence, then sce-
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narios become the currency of politics. In Becks words,events that have not yet occurred become the object of current action (1999: 52). The object of politics is not the present, because the present structures are not going to last. In times of chance, one must act on the basis of a vision for the future, a scenario of where present processes will lead us and our environment of action. Scenarios offer, in Becks apt phrase, a real virtuality (p. 136). By showing why a certain course of action is necessary in the present, scenarios make the future real by constructing it as the cause, rather than the effect, of present actions. However, a scenario is but one construction, and other visions of the processes of change offer different scenarios and correspondingly different policies. Beck therefore argues that we are living in an age of constructivism (1999: 133) and understands social constructivism as not exclusively about the philosophy of science, but also as a matter of praxeology. A Parallel Globalization of Terror To the West, the attacks of 11 September 2001 constituted a real virtuality. The carnage of the World Trade Center collapse presented a brute fact of what the enemies of the West were capable of in an age of strategic globality. The attack was made all the more signicant, however, because of the virtual context it was placed in a context which the reality of the tomb of rubble (Bush, 2001a: 3) made vivid in the minds of the members of the House and Senate armed services committees, as Paul Wolfowitz presented a scenario for the security threats of the twenty-rst century:
A future where new enemies visit violence on us in startling ways; a future in which our cities are among the battleelds and our people are among the targets; a future in which more and more adversaries will possess the capability to bring war to the American homeland; a future where the old methods of deterrence are no longer sufcient and new strategies and capabilities are needed to ensure peace and security. (2001: 4)
The Deputy Secretary of Defense refers to all three elements of globalization: globality, globalization and globalism. I will return to the question of globalism in the next section, focusing here on globality and globalization. In Wolfowitzs analysis, 11 September 2001 made real how strategic globality had now made American cities battleelds and our people among the targets. War was no longer a state of emergency but a risk in everyday life. Terror had become one of the risks of late-modern society, with the distinction between civilians and combatants broken down. We are all soldiers now, David von Drehle wrote in the Washington Post (2001). Defence against terrorism and vigilance against individual terrorists had become the responsibility of American citizens. In his State of the Union Address, President Bush acknowledged two ight attendants who detained a passenger trying to set off a bomb on a transatlantic ight (2002: 32). Individual heroism was so highly valued because much more terrorism was expected. The question was how that future was shaped and how it
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could be inuenced to achieve greater security. According to Wolfowitz, the process by which the attacks of 11 September 2001 became possible and would shape future security threats was globalization:
Along with the globalization that is creating interdependence among the worlds free economies, there is a parallel globalization of terror, in which rogue states and terrorist organizations share information, intelligence, technology, weapons materials and know-how. (2001: 37)
There is a dimension of time and a dimension of space in this statement. In spatial terms, the Deputy Secretary argued that globalization was a process of terror as well as a benign process. This was a dramatic argument, because globalization was constructed as a process determining the shape of the worlds free economies and by implication for the worlds free societies. It is in realizing the dark side of globalization that the temporal element comes into play. As globalization was believed to dene the future, the dark side of globalization harbours dark prospects for the future. Wolfowitz argued that the realities of 11 September supplanted a rosy scenario of interdependence and peace, which had guided policy in the 1990s, with a more complex and threatening scenario: a parallel globalization of terror. Globalization dened the 1990s. I believe that if you want to understand the post-Cold War world, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrote in 2000, you have to start by understanding that a new international system has succeeded it globalization (2000: xxi). Friedman no doubt reected on the dominating conception of the 1990s as an era in which liberal internationalism was secure for the future. During the twentieth century, the West had believed that peace depended on a stable, liberal world order, a world order that would allow democratic ideals and institutions to spread, thereby creating governments inclined to peace rather than conict. One could argue that the West fought the two world wars and the Cold War to defend or realize that liberal order. As the Cold War came to an end, democratic peace theory codied this belief in an empirical law (quoted in Lynn-Jones, 1996: ix). In Becks terms, the democratic peace had ceased to be a virtual ambition for future world order and had become if not the reality then the generally accepted blueprint for the future.12 Globalization became a guiding concept for the analysis of the structure, process and politics of the post-Cold War world. As Becks categories suggest, it is the process element that is the most important in reexive modernity. Globalization is about the future it promises rather than about the present realities it analyses. In Jens Bartelsons words, globalization is a horizon of political imagination structured around expectations of transcendence (2000: 192). This description captures Friedmans denition of the post-Cold War international system or order in terms of globalization. Contrary to the bipolar Cold War international order, globalization does not define order by means of a clearly defined, static structure. Globalization is a process that denes times in terms of transcendence. Globalization describes a process of transcendence that is underway and
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species the parameters of this change (the horizon of political imagination, in Bartelsons terms). Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz understood the process of globalization in the way it had been understood during the 1990s: in terms of transcendence. In the 1990s, Wolfowitz argued, there was a temptation to believe that this favorable circumstance was a permanent condition (2001: 1112). He was highly critical of what he presented as the complacent focus on the benets of globalization. The September 11 attacks, Wolfowitz argued, have awakened us to a fundamental reality: the 21st century security environment will be different from the one we faced in the 20th century but just as dangerous (2001: 13). Ontological Insecurity Paul Wolfowitz would probably not claim, and it certainly would not be fair to claim, that the parallel globalization of terror had been completely ignored in the 1990s. By the end of the 1990s, fear of the dark side of globalization had reached the highest levels of government. In 1999, British Prime Minister Tony Blair asserted, albeit in a different context, that globalization [was] not just economic, it [was] also a political and security phenomenon (1999). Actually, the impact of what happened on 11 September 2001 was strong because it was a realization of the fears presented in a number of scenarios during the 1990s.13 In 1999 the bipartisan HartRudman report concluded:
States, terrorists, and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of mass destruction and disruption, and some will use them. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers. (US Commission, 1999: 138)
The use of weapons of mass destruction was a central concern in the 1990s. By the end of his second term, President Clinton reportedly believed that within the next ten years, there was a 100 percent chance of a chemical or biological attack on the United States.14 The fact that the attacks on 11 September 2001 were carried out in hijacked civilian planes used as weapons in no way allayed fears of terrorists using nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. On the contrary, it fuelled fears of what devastation genuine weapons might cause. Furthermore, the fact that 911 realized the fears behind the scenarios rather than the scenarios themselves only made things worse. It suggested that the United States and the rest of the Western world were neither prepared nor knew what to prepare for. The lack of what Anthony Giddens terms ontological security, the rm knowledge of what one might expect (1991: 3569), is a characteristic of the reexive risk society (pp. 1835). During the Cold War the mutually assured destruction of the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union arguably placed the American people at much greater risk. The nuclear threat, however, was material and the logic of the balance of terror ensured that it was extremely calculable. The superpowers played the nuclear game in strict adherence to the meansend rational rules of
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deterrence. For that reason, people in East and West had ontological security during the Cold War albeit in a somewhat ironic form.15 They knew what threats to prepare for and had reason to hope that if their governments played the strategic game skilfully and responsibly a nuclear war could be avoided. The events of 11 September 2001 seemed to conrm the growing fears of the late 1990s that the strategic game had changed and that Western governments did not quite know what the new rules were. From the very beginning, 911 was presented as a lesson in new strategic realities and corresponding strategic commitments equal to the lesson learned from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. As such, the events of 11 September were constructed in the terms by which Ulrich Beck denes risk society. Terrorism was dened by the same social ontology as Western society: globalization. Wolfowitzs critique of the 1990s and of the politicians of the decade was that, in his view, they believed the end of the Cold War had provided the ultimate and un-ironic ontological security because no single power challenged the West any more. Ontological security could not exist in a time of globalization because of the transcendental nature of the process. Instead, globalization turned out a risk in itself. The same process that made the Western ontology of liberal democracy and market economies universal also made the West insecure. The Power of Globalization Belief in the power of globalization reinforced ontological insecurity. If one accepted globalization as a powerful economic and social force that necessitated new rules of politics, then the same power had to be associated with the parallel globalization of terror. For that reason, the logic by which the process of globalization was believed to work was used to describe the development of new threats. In the security discourse, that logic is often described as proliferation. As David Mutimer points out, proliferation has been increasingly used to describe security problems in general (1998: 99129). The Quadrennial Defense Review thus refers to the pervasiveness of proliferation in an era of globalization (QDR, 2001: 6). Security problems of the West are no longer constructed in terms of a concrete and specic threat, as they were during the Cold War. Security problems are constructed in terms of scenarios. They are reections of the possibilities the infrastructure of globalization gives for proliferating the technology, know-how and personnel of the Wests enemies. Added to proliferation is the possibility of networking the capabilities multiplied by proliferation into a powerful strike force (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001). President George Bush expressed this fear for proliferation and networking in his State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002 when he described the enemy, and its capabilities, in the war on terror:
Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes, are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning. (2002: 10)
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According to President Bush, terrorists proliferate, spread throughout the world. They are trained and guided by a network that includes outlaw regimes. Presenting the terrorists as time bombs operating by the unstoppable and autonomous logic of a clock, the President emphasized ontological insecurity. Global space made terrorism so integrated in Western societies that it was unstoppable. The same mechanical and deterministic logic has been used about economic and social globalization (Rosenberg, 2000). Proliferation and networks are the same processes by which economic and social globalization are believed to work. Markets and social practices proliferate through the infrastructure of globalization. Proof of globalization has thus often been taken to be the spread of Western (American) customs and products to far reaches of the globe. And the power of globalization has equally often been illustrated in reference to the global reach of rms, civil society organizations or other agents capable of networking across state borders. Even successful state integration projects like the World Trade Organization, North American Free Trade Agreement, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the European Union can be constructed in terms of networking or multilevel governance across state borders (Marks et al., 1993; Nye and Donahue, 2000; Prakash and Hart, 1999; Friedman, 2000). Proliferation and networks are supposedly the reason states are losing control (Sassen, 1996). Transferred to issues of security, this lack of control becomes a lack of ontological security. During the Cold War, the threat was the concrete capabilities of the Soviet Empire. Today the threat is chaos, argued Tony Blair (2001a: 38). This is ontological insecurity: fear of the inability to maintain order. Ontological insecurity is the hallmark of risk society because it causes reection on the very nature, the ontology, of the situation we are in. If ontologically secure, we trust our environment and the people and organizations in it. Ontological insecurity, however, compels us to distrust and question our environment and take action against people or organizations believed to be agents of insecurity. By identifying terrorism with the process (globalization) which the West believed shaped international order, as well as national, social orders, following the Cold War, terrorism was constructed as an existential threat. The perception of the threat of terrorism fed on the Wests construction of its own future in terms of a powerful process of globalization.As the dark side of globalization, terrorism had a power equal to the bright side of globalization. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were therefore seen, in the words of German Chancellor Gerhard Schrder, as a declaration of war against all of civilization (2001: 20). It was cosmos defending itself against chaos. President Bush thus identied the struggle against terrorism as a resolve to keep the most basic commitment of civilization: we will defend ourselves and our future against terror and lawless violence (2001a: 1). It was a ght for ontology as well as security. Exactly what ontology was to be secured? The events of 11 September were believed to be a result of, as well as an attack on, the post-Cold War international order. International order could not merely be defended,
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because the process that created it was believed to be feeding the attack. International order became, in Becks phrase, a theme and a problem for itself. Thus 911 caused much reection on the ontology of the international system and what strategies that ontology provided for creating security. In the next section I sketch three different ontological concepts and the strategies they dictated. Making the World Safe for Globalization The events of 11 September realized the fears of what the globality and globalization of security might cause. What hopes were there for using globality and globalization to create security? According to Ulrich Beck, the politics of globalization, globalism, substitutes the debate of political alternatives with a monolithic market logic (2000: 9). Whatever the merits of this argument, when it comes to national economic and welfare policies,16 it is not necessarily true of security policy. On the contrary, the construction of 911 in terms of globalization sparked intense debate in the Western world because 911 came to mark what Tony Blair referred to as a kaleidoscopic moment in which the pieces that made up world order had been shaken (2001a: 155). In the words of John Lewis Gaddis, everyone acknowledged that everything had changed (2001: 3). A dening characteristic of globality was the fact that most, if not all, societies had to deal with globality. However, only the West dened itself by globality, and thus constructed its political discourse in terms of what Beck refers to as globalization and globalism. In fact, one might argue that in reexive modernity Western identity was dened by a conception of social life in terms of globalization and globalism. Societies or persons that dened themselves and their opportunities in terms of globalization would be recognized as Western. When globalization was identied as a source of insecurity, considerations of security became reexive: the dening feature of Western society was dened not only as the driving force of the future, but also as the single most important source of insecurity. Constructing new threats in terms of globality and globalization, the West in general and the United States in particular asked how security was to be created and who was to create it. If al-Qaida could harness the power of the dark side of the forces of globalization, how could the bright side of globalization be used to counter terrorism, and who was to organize the ght against terrorism? This question became the centre piece of a debate that went to the very heart of what the West was all about. If Western identity was dened by globalization and Western identity functioned as a basis for collective action among a number of states, then agreement on how globalization generated security threats, and what action (and by whom) was merited to create security, was essential for the continuation of the West itself. Thus the ontological insecurity created by the attack related to reections not only on the threats, but also on the policies needed to counter them. The reexive nature of security showed in the way policy became an object of reection, and the differences in reection became security issues
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in themselves, because they put the premise of Western identity (i.e. globalization) and the West as a community of collective action up for debate. As most states identifying themselves as Western found the existence of the West a condition for their security, the debate itself was a source of ontological insecurity. The debate was dened by three different strategies for how to create security in the post-911 world: a particularist, an imperial and a cosmopolitan strategy. In this case, strategy refers to the praxeology that followed from a certain ontological conception of the possibilities for creating security inherent in the present international system. The three strategies dened the Western discourse on how to achieve security following 11 September 2001. The particularist strategy was rejected by Western governments. It remained a matter of considerable controversy whether an imperial or a cosmopolitan strategy should be chosen as the basis for policy. As the United States government was inclined to follow the imperial strategy, which the European governments rejected in favour of various versions of cosmopolitan strategies, this was a source of considerable controversy. Particularism: The Age of Muslim Wars To particularists, the end of globalization could be dated quite precisely: 11 September 2001, at 8:48 a.m. EST, when the rst plane hit the World Trade Center. The terrorist attack showed, particularists would argue in the following days, that globalization could not deliver on its promise of transcendence. On the contrary, the events of that September morning showed how dangerous it was to imagine the possibility of transcending the fault lines between civilizations, as Samuel Huntington termed the most comprehensive we within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from all the other thems out there (1998: 43). Huntingtons argument is a claim on the durability of structures (i.e. civilizations) in the face of processes of transcendence (i.e. globalization). Cultural identities could not be transcended by any global process, according to Particularism, but least of all by globalization, which in fact just reected the cultural values of the West. Particularism may be used to describe the belief (widespread, but most forcefully presented by Huntington) that the West could only nd peace and security in isolation and on its own cultural terms. In 1989, Samuel Huntington had warned, with reference to Francis Fukuyamas notion of the end of history (Fukuyama, 1992), that to hope for the benign end of history is human. To expect it to happen is unrealistic. To plan on it happening is disastrous (Huntington, 1989). Globalization was based on the same conception of a new departure that could transcend the violent history of the twentieth century by realizing a global, liberal order. In fact, that conception came to dominate the 1990s, while Huntingtons dystopian vision was marginalized. The attack on the World Trade Center might be taken as evidence, however, that the belief in transcendence was not only unrealistic, but had proven disastrous. The particularists argument was reexive: the Western concept of transcendence was to blame for an unrealistic policy that had left the United
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States and the West unprepared for a 911. From that point of view, the greatest risk facing the West was the Wests misconception of itself, and thus of the world. This was not the age of globalization and democratic peace, Huntington argued:
Contemporary global politics is the age of Muslim wars. Muslims ght each other and ght non-Muslims far more often than do peoples of other civilizations. Muslim wars have replaced the cold war as the principal form of international conict. (2001: 8)
The terrorist attacks did not herald a new kind of war (Bush, 2001b: 17), according to Huntington. They were proof that the oldest kind of war (wars between different identity groups) had returned. Huntington had little doubt that Osama bin Laden sought a clash of civilizations (2001: 12). According to Huntington, identity could only be found in a Hegelian struggle of identity with the Other (1998: 129). When Muslim societies failed to respond to globalization, thus producing great social problems and political and ideological unrest, the resulting crisis of identity led to a challenge to the dominating Western identity (Huntington, 2001: 9). And in Huntingtons analysis the West had in fact responded to the challenge from the Other, strictly along civilizational lines (2001: 13). To Huntington, the unied Western response was good news. Arguably the main foreign policy purpose of Huntingtons thesis was to stress the importance of continued transatlantic security cooperation after the demise of the Soviet Other.17 Huntington argued that NATO had a common civilization to defend, and emphasized that the Alliance would soon be needed to contain the challenge from rival civilizations with the same perseverance with which it had contained the Soviet Union (1998: 161). NATOs decision to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and offer the United States any military aid deemed necessary (NATO, 2001) was proof to a particularist that NATO had accepted its post-Cold War role as the security organization of Western civilization (Huntington, 1998: 307). As The Economist observed, the construction of 911 and the ensuing war on terrorism in terms of a clash of civilizations was more prevalent in Muslim societies than in the West (The Economist 2001: 14). In Western political discourse, Huntingtons particularist world-view gained even more prominence than before. It was discussed by presidents, chancellors and prime ministers. However, it was used as a position to reject. Huntingtons argument seemed to have gained most ground in continental Europe, where the events of 11 September fuelled unpleasant debates about the status of Muslim immigrants. Perhaps for that reason, German Chancellor Schrder was one of the most explicit in his rejection of Huntingtons thesis: Is this the clash of civilizations that has so often been spoken of? My answer is clear. It is no (2001: 23). Other Western leaders were equally clear.18 As military operations in Afghanistan began, Tony Blair noted that this is not a war with Islam (2001b: 15), and George Bush emphasized that the USA is a friend of the Afghan people, and we are friends of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith (Bush,
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2001c: 6). Western leaders did use the concept of civilization, but they used it in the universalist sense which Huntington had rejected in favour of a particularist interpretation.19 As mentioned above, civilization was an ontological concept that embraced all peoples of the world. Civilization described the civilizing process whereby the world became an increasingly better place and the values that ensured progress (Elias, 1978). From that point of view, globalization was a late-modern, sociological term for the civilizing process. In the words of George Bush, the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers. They were unprecedented because the parallel globalization of terror empowered what in more blunt times would have been referred to as barbarians (2002: 1). Because civilization and globalization were constructed as the same thing and terrorism was believed to be the dark side of globalization, terrorism was perceived as a powerful threat to the progress of human society as such. From that point of view, it was not rhetorical overkill to regard the war on terrorism as an existential struggle:
There is no compromise possible with such people, no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must. (Blair, 2001a: 267)
But in Western eyes it was an existential struggle of a Hobbesian rather than the Hegelian kind which Huntington spoke of. Terrorism was seen as a challenge to international order and the civilizing process of globalization generated by that order. To Western leaders, terrorism was not the cultural challenge Huntington identied. If one accepts that the West had a Hobbesian rather than Hegelian conception of what was at stake, one might ask whether international society did need a Leviathan, or a more active one, to maintain order. One might term this the imperialist point of view, and that is the one we turn to next. Imperialism: A Hobbesian Moment For the rst time since the end of the Cold War, Robert Harris wrote in the Daily Telegraph on 13 September 2001, one has the uneasy feeling that the future is not as settled and monolithic as it once appeared, that the American empire may one day go the way of the Roman.According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, that uneasy feeling might be the beginning of imperial power rather than its end. Hardt and Negri observe that imperial rule functions by breaking down (2000: 202). The uneasy feeling that mere anarchy is loosed upon the world (Yeats, 1983: 189) may be the foundation of a Hobbesian moment, a moment of reection in which people realize that the societal foundations of their lives are not as secure as they believed them to be. In this state of unease, or ontological insecurity, they realize that a Leviathan is needed not only to make them secure but also to strengthen their belief in their world, in their ontology (Hobbes, 1996). The United States government followed the Hobbesian script quite closely: it took decisive action to counterattack terrorism at the same time
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as it emphasized that the ontology of modern society still ought to be dened by liberal ideas (freedom). The focus on decisive action placed the American government, and its unrivalled ability to project power, at the centre of attention. The focus on liberal ideas invoked the traditional American discourse of the United States as the champion of liberty. Taken together, the focus on decisive action and Liberalism put the United States apart from the rest of the world as the strongest and the freest society in the world. In turn, that led to the conclusion that world order depended on the United States strength and freedom. The course we follow is a matter of profound consequence to many nations, President Bush argued; if America wavers, the world will lose heart. If America leads, the world will show its courage. America will never waver. America will lead the world to peace (2001d: 50). Discussing al-Qaidas reasons for going to war against the United States, President Bush concluded:
They hate our freedoms our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their way. (2001e: 27)
To the President, the United States was the only substantial force standing in terrorisms way and guarding civilization. Therefore, a dichotomy between the interests of the United States and the interests of the world was a false one. When the United States was insecure because of terrorism, so was the whole world, and in making the United States secure the government made the world secure. As George Bush had argued when a presidential candidate: our gains are not measured in the losses of others. They are counted in the conicts we avert, the prosperity we share and the peace we extend (1999: 13). This line of argument was not new. For all George Bushs critique of him, Bill Clinton had argued the same way (Clinton, 1999). Indeed, Frank Ninkovich argues that so has every American President since Woodrow Wilson when faced with what they believed to be a crisis of modernity (1999). However, it may be novel that the United States is believed to be the sole guardian of world order. From that point of view, the world order is an empire. The September 11 attack was a result of insufcient American involvement and ambition, Max Boot argued in The Weekly Standard; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation (2001). Boot speaks for a number of conservative intellectuals closely connected with the Bush administration who argued that the previous post-Cold War administrations made the mistake of conducting foreign policy as if the United States position was still that of the Cold War (Eakin, 2002). The end of the Cold War, they argued, had left the United States with unrivalled power, and therefore given the United States a responsibility of maintaining world order no one else had. The British historians, Niall
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Ferguson and Paul Kennedy, argued that by the beginning of the twentyrst century American power far exceeded that of the British Empire in the nineteenth century (Kennedy, 2001, 2002; Ferguson, 2001). Just as Boot did, they found that the United States had yet to produce the functional equivalent of Pax Britannica. Ferguson wondered whether the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place have the guts to do it? (2001: 141). The school of Republican intellectuals, including Boot and Wolfowitz, clearly believed they had the guts (Eakin, 2002). And they believed that the events of 11 September 2001 showed the need for the United States to assume the duties of an international Leviathan. They provocatively called for the United States government to take on an imperial role. Hence the title of Boots piece: The Case for American Empire. The concept of empire served as a challenge to preconceived notions of American power. Empire serves this provocative rhetorical function for those, like Boot, desiring a more expansive and assertive American security policy, as well as for those critical of American power (Hardt and Negri, 2000). President Bush did not have the same rhetorical need to provoke, so he did not use the term empire. However, especially following 11 September, the President and his administration became more and more convinced that decisive American action was imperative if security was to be achieved in a globalized world. The Bush administrations construction of American power in imperial terms challenged the conception of the West as a community dened by collective actions maintaining world order (see note 1). The imperial argument underlined an imperative for acting, no matter what the United States allies might think. In his State of the Union Address of 2002, George Bush recognized that not all governments shared his administrations view on how, or indeed how decisively, one should pursue terrorism: some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will (2002: 16). The President constructed inaction as weak governments betrayal of the true interests of every civilized society.20 But where less important powers could falter, the President argued that United States could not. The United States not only had a special responsibility because of its capabilities, but it was also specially vulnerable because it was the centre of civilization and because it had the power to hold the centre. Hugo Young of the Guardian referred to this as the unilateralist impulse of a new age (2002). However, the Bush administrations imperial policy was not unilateralist in the strict sense of the term. This is what the notion of empire itself suggests. In a balance of power system, a great power is functionally equivalent to other states, albeit more powerful (Waltz, 1979). An empire is different from other international agents, as it integrates them within the order dened by its power (Doyle, 1986; Watson, 1992). A great power is part of an international order; an empire is international order. Thus an empire is not a structure in the Waltzian sense (Waltz, 1979). Empire is better understood as a process in which the imperial power continuously asserts order. The concept of empire might thus be said to be yet another example of the shift from structure to process that characterizes
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reexive modernity. As order is constantly asserted by the imperial power constituting it, the way empire shapes international relations appears less natural than, for example, a balance of power order. The nature and merits of imperial power are therefore always open to reection. An imperial power may be powerful enough to formulate its own policy, but it is not isolated from the rest of the world. On the contrary, people like Boot use the notion of empire to advocate the imperative for engagement. The Bush administrations analysis of 911 shows that it does not believe that unilateral solutions are possible in a globalized world. We recognize, Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department, argues, that many of the dening features of this increasingly globalized era are intrinsically transnational (2001: 6). Therefore the Bush administration should perhaps be described as exceptionalist rather than as unilateralist. It does not believe that the United States is acting alone or in a void, but clearly it does believe that American values and power set it aside from the rest of the world. That is the point of the notion of empire. It implies the freedom to act for what is right and what is necessary.21 Multilateral institutions and coalitions are thus means, rather than ends, in themselves. Richard Haass argues that the United States has unique global responsibilities. And if we are to meet them effectively, we may not always be able to go along with measures that many or even most others support (2001: 29). This approach caused deep resentment among the Allies as well as in the wider world. At the same time, the chorus of those who welcome American action, as well as those who believe that the ills of the world are caused by American inaction (Chomsky, 2001; Said, 2001; Zizek, 2001), has grown stronger after 11 September 2001. Even those who blame the Bush administration, however indirectly, for having brought the attack on the United States by not focusing enough attention on the IsraelPalestine issue are in fact taking the imperial line. In effect, they too argue that whatever happens in the world depends on American power. They resent the empire, but they need it all the same.22 This is the nature of the Hobbesian moment. Cosmopolitanism: A Kantian Moment So I believe this is a ght for freedom, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the Labour Party Conference in October 2001, and I want to make it a ght for justice too. Justice not only to punish the guilty, but justice to bring those same values of democracy and freedom to people round the world (2001a: 150). To Tony Blair, this was not merely a Hobbesian moment, but rather a Kantian moment that provided the opportunity for creating a just, not merely a stable, world order. By stating he believed the war against terrorism to be more than a ght for freedom, Blair signalled that he found George Bushs ultimate war aims too narrow. As we have seen, freedom was the Bush administrations cue, but it was not enough for Blair. Freedom referred to what the West had, and what it needed to defend. Blair agreed this was an existential struggle: This is a battle with only one outcome: our victory or theirs (2001a: 9). Where the American government believed that our victory should serve to secure American
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power on which world order and globalization depended, Blair believed that victory should be used to transform world order. Where the conservative George Bush sought security and stability, the liberal Tony Blair sought security and reform. One illusion has been shattered on 11 September, Blair argued, that we can have the good life of the West irrespective of the state of the world (2001c: 8). Where Bush had an exceptionalist, imperial vision, Blair had a cosmopolitan vision. Blair believed that the ontological insecurity caused by the dark side of globalization could only be overcome if international governance was transformed to t the facts of globalization.
The issue is not how to stop globalization. The issue is how we use the power of community to combine it with justice. If globalization works only for the benet of the few, then it will fail and will deserve to fail. But if we follow the principles that have served us so well at home that power, wealth and opportunity must be in the hands of the many, not the few if we make that our guiding light for the global economy, then it will be a force for good and an international movement that we should take pride in leading. (2001a: 5960)
Blair argued that this would be the true new world order. In the 1990s, he argued, the West had failed to forge a new international order by means of the power victory had given them. Blair agreed with the republican imperialists in Washington that too little had been done in the 1990s. But where they referred to the defence of the new world order, Blair blamed his generation for not having the courage and conviction to create more peace by more integration in the manner of what he referred to as our predecessors following the Second World War (2001c: 34). Again, being powerful was not enough to secure Western values, according to Blair, the world order guaranteed by the West needed to become something more than a means to stability. A liberal international order was an end in itself because it realized what Immanuel Kant had referred to as a cosmopolitan system of general political security (Kant, 1970b: 49). Globalization meant that the values and interdependence, which had characterized the Western community, had proliferated to the rest of the world. The institutional network needed to follow suit, Blair argued:
After the Cold War, despite the talk of a new world order, we failed to renew these institutions or create new ones. Perhaps the euphoria that accompanied the crumbling of the Soviet bloc reduced the incentive to take a hard and radical look at the conduct of international affairs. Now it is time to do so. (2001c: 35)
The insistence on the present as a time of transcendence and on the need to take action to take control of the transformation characterized not only Blairs argument but also the three globalisms. This was the way of politics in a time dened by transcendence. But the three globalisms differed on where transcendence was taking them. Bush believed that it was possible to
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transcend the present insecurity by a determined effort that could secure world order. Blair believed that the world order should transcend itself in order to create the foundations for future security. The difference between the Hobbesian and the Kantian conception of the moment was in itself instructive of how globalization undermined the distinction between domestic and foreign policy. The way the American liberal press received Blairs speech shows that the formation of foreign policy was no longer a domestic issue and that politics no longer stopped at the waters edge.23 The differences between conservatives and liberals were carried on to global political space. Where ideological differences proved transnational, the different choice of strategies by the United States government and Western European governments strained the notion of the West as a community of collective action. Choosing how to achieve security thus became a threat in itself, as it strained the Western communality widely believed to be the object of the 11 September attacks themselves and the foundation for international order, as well as the security of the individual Western states. This, especially, placed the European governments in a reexive security dilemma: if they needed the United States for their security, how could they reject the American strategy? On the other hand, most of them believed that the American strategy actually would not solve the security problems, and perhaps even create new ones. Conclusions The events of 11 September 2001 became 911 by means of globalization. The facts of the attacks on New York and Washington, and the resulting devastation of the World Trade Center, did not speak for themselves. They were made to speak by means of the concept of globalization. Globalization provided a way for us to understand the reasons why the United States had been attacked, and provided the means by which to conceptualize what should be done in response to the attacks. In this way, globalization turned the attack into a symbol for something even more momentous than the brute facts of that terrible morning. 11 September ceased to be a date and became a symbol. Following the end of the Cold War, the West has come to dene itself and the world in terms of globalization. Globalization showed the transcendence of the Cold War world in favour of a new world order governed by the values of democracy, market economy and civil society by which the West dened itself and human progress. Hence, globalization has become a late-modern, sociological name for the civilizing process, which according to the Western mind gradually improves the human condition, civilization, by transcending its own achievements in favour of something increasingly better. In other words, Western victory in the Cold War had allowed it to dene the world on its own terms and given it reason to believe that the world in due course would become like the West. The Western preoccupation with globalization should thus be regarded in terms of what Anthony Giddens terms double hermeneutics (1984: 284,
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34854): globalization is a way of conceptualizing a time of transcendence, but it is also a political means to get a desired kind of transcendence. Therefore it is important to distinguish between the different meanings of globalization analytically even if they are intertwined in discourse. This article has used Ulrich Becks distinction between a global social structure (globality), the process that transcends previous national structures in favour of new global ones (globalization) and the political action of globalization (globalism). While strategic globality is not new, the ability of non-state agents with relatively few capabilities to project power globally is new. The events of 11 September 2001 thus showed that globalization had eroded the (Western) great powers monopoly of intervention. The new global civilian infrastructure made intervention a collective good. The concept of Imperialism shows that the Bush administrations policies were not unilateral, not even isolationistic, as they were often portrayed (perhaps especially in Europe). The use of Becks typology of globalization allows one to see that the Bush administration did understand the world in terms of globalization. The politics they derived from this understanding was different from that of the previous administration and the European allies, however. The belief in globalization was the base-line of all mainstream concepts of the world, and therefore the belief in globalization did not necessarily translate to the same (liberal) policy. In fact, it was a discursive trick to claim so. On the contrary, the notion that the world was transcending itself presented different scenarios for the future and different notions of what one wanted of the future. For that reason, the time of globalization is intensely political. But the times are political in ways quite different from the clash of ideologies of the twentieth century. The politics of globalization is not about radical projects for transforming society, but about reections on the social processes of the society at hand. The greatest schism in the policy relevant debates of the autumn of 2001 and spring of 2002 was thus between the conservative imperialists, who saw the problems of the future in terms of the Wests ability to defend its freedom, and the liberal cosmopolites, who wanted to translate their domestic reform agenda to the world stage. Imperialism and cosmopolitanism not only constituted a transnational distinction between conservatives and liberals, it also constituted a distinction between the United States and Europe. Imperialism was an exceptionalist ideology in the sense that only the United States had the possibility of empire. Though quite a few Europeans argued in favour of assertive American power, the choice of how to use its power was Americas to make. In many ways 911 was constructed as a Hobbesian moment that called upon the United States to act decisively and reinforce Western values. And it was exactly on this point that the imperial policy of the Bush administration alienated large European constituencies. The different political interpretations of globalization thus put the very values, which were believed to be globalized, and the Western alliance at the centre of globalization, in question. This was yet another example of the reexive nature of the times. Thus 911 had become a symbol for a new security agenda in
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which the West could only nd security by challenging the ways it had previously achieved security, and only secure progress and civilization by challenging the values by which the West dened itself.
Notes
A previous version of this paper was presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association in New Orleans in March 2002. I thank the discussant Jan Art Scholte and my fellow panellists for their insightful comments. I also thank Birthe Hansen, Lykke Friis, Jens Bartelson and the anonymous reviewers for scrutinizing my argument. I gratefully acknowledge the funding of the Danish Social Science Research Council and the Security and Defence Studies project at the Danish Institute of International Affairs. 1. Focusing on the West of course leaves open the question of how to dene the West: Is the West an alliance identiable with NATO? Is the West a community of values? Is the West a convenient cover for the United States? Or is it something else? A concept such as the West is a means by which to signify identity and, using this identity, to constitute an imperative for action (Coker, 1998; Gress, 1998; Rasmussen, 2001b). Thus one might argue that a society identifying itself as Western, and recognized as such by others together with which it acts on the international stage, is Western. Because the West relates meaning this way, the concept itself became important in the aftermath of 911, as a number of governments dened themselves and their policies as Western and the attacks as an attack on the values associated with this identity. I refer to the West in the context of this broad community, and identify individual state agents (e.g. the United States) to the extent they act on their own or refer specically to national subjects. 2. John Searle distinguishes between brute and institutional facts. According to Searle, brute facts exist regardless of how they are known to us. Institutional facts exist only by virtue of their social construction (Searle, 1995: 158). 3. Whether the buildings, in spite of their name, had been a symbol of globalization before 11 September is of little consequence: they became a symbol of globalization when disaster struck. 4. This does not mean that al-Qaida, or other non-Western social agents, did not relate to globalization. However, they did not dene themselves by it. In Becks terms, they had a concept of globality, but not of globalization and globalism. I return to this below. 5. The purpose of this article is not to account for Becks analysis of globalization or 911. The article utilizes Becks concepts as heuristic instruments. 6. One should pay careful attention to statements from Paul Wolfowitz. The statements of any Deputy Secretary of Defense give insights into the way an administration constructs the strategic environment. In the case of Paul Wolfowitz, it also gives insight into the thoughts of what Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor of Newsweek, terms the one strategic thinker of the administration (PBS, 2001). 7. I have elaborated on the reexive nature of post-Cold War security policy in Rasmussen (2001a). 8. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound, Slavoj Zizek wrote, we should also now more than ever, bear in mind that the actual effect of these bombings [the attack on the World Trade Center] is much more symbolic than real: in Africa, EVERY SINGLE DAY more people die of AIDS than all the victims of the WTC collapse, and their death could have been easily cut back with relatively small nan-
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cial means. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Rwanda and Congo to Sierra Leone (Zizek, 2001; capitals in original; see also Chomsky, 2001). 9. An arms race typically offers this kind of negative trade-off, as the procurement of arms intended to make state A more secure makes state B fear it even more, leading B to acquire new weaponry, and thereby forcing A to increase procurement yet again. On the security dilemma, see Jervis (1976) and Buttereld (1951), as well as Herz (1951). 10. Perhaps one is able to induce an interesting hypothesis from the Clinton administrations track record: it was only when an issue became a matter of American credibility (that is, the United States ability to function as a security agent) that an issue became a top priority which the President was willing to commit military force to solve. If this is so, it is the ultimate act of security reexivity: to act to maintain ones ability to act. The reason for this reexive way of conducting security policy was not (exclusively) the nature of that particular presidency, but the very nature of the decision-making process in a time of no clear, essential security challenges. The dilemma was inherent in the situation. It would have been an act of extraordinary statesmanship of President Clinton not to be caught in the dilemma. 11. Richard Holbrookes (1999) account of his involvement in the United States Balkan policy is one illustration of this. General Wesley Clarks (2001) memoirs of the Kosovo war is another. 12. I have elaborated on this argument in Rasmussen (2001b). 13. President Clintons rst national security advisor, Anthony Lake, presents a number of the most feared scenarios in a popular form (Lake, 2000). 14. Statement by Richard Clark, National Coordinator for Security, CounterTerrorism and Infrastructure Protection on 60 Minutes, CBS, 22 October 2000, quoted in Cilluffo et al. (2001: ix). 15. On the meansend rational logic of deterrence theory, see Freedman (1989). On the irony of ontological security during deterrence, see Coker (1994: 197225). 16. Friedman argues that globalization makes state control virtually impossible, and empowers the individual (2000), whereas Mark Rupert (2000) describes how dissenting voices nd it hard to be heard in a discourse where the global logic of the market and liberal democracy are seen as truths rather than policies. 17. The second purpose of Huntingtons book arguably relates to American domestic policy. It is a rejection of multiculturalism, as this passage illustrates: The clash between multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and the American Creed is, in James Kurths phrase, the real clash within the American segment of Western civilization . . . The futures of the United States and of the West depend upon Americans reafrming their commitment to Western civilization. Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism. Internationally it means rejecting the elusive and illusory calls to identify the United States with Asia (Huntington, 1998: 307). 18. Some European leaders were not on message. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was quoted making a Huntingtonian argument. The speed with which he retracted his comments shows how the Western discourse was dominated by an anti-Huntington line. Arguing otherwise was simply not a viable course for a Western leader. 19. The distinction between Kultur and civilization stems from the Enlightenment revival of German nationalism. The Germans wanted to distinguish the traditions of the German bourgeoisie from the French-speaking aristocracy (Elias, 1978: 724). Kant was one of the rst to make this distinction (1970a). For an
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encyclopaedic introduction to the distinction between civilization and culture in German political discourse, see Fisch (1992). 20. Charles Krauthammer presented one version of this argument (2002). 21. The insistence on the exceptional moral character of American international involvement reminds one of President Woodrow Wilsons insistence on being an associate rather than an ally of France and Britain during the First World War. Wilson wanted to avoid any of the prior understandings associated with alliances in order to be free to make a world safe for democracy after the war. In the same way, the Bush administration prefers coalitions because it does not want to be subjected to the judgement of other governments. This seems to suggest that the Bush administrations approach is neither a radical break with American foreign policy tradition nor merely a realpolitik strategy. See also Ninkovich (1999). 22. Hardt and Negris Empire (2000), which is arguably one of the most comprehensive and intellectually challenging critiques of globalization, as well as of the role of American power in globalization, shows this ambivalence clearly. The book is intended to be an expos of American power, but the more the functionality of imperial power is exposed, the more necessary the power of empire seems to be. The authors end up by presenting only the most feeble and ritual alternatives to empire. 23. See for example Lewis (2001).
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MIKKEL VEDBY RASMUSSEN is a Research Fellow at the Danish Institute of International Affairs (DUPI). His research focuses on the transformation of Western concepts of security following the end of the Cold War. He is Director of the Security and Defence Studies project at DUPI. ADDRESS: Danish Institute of International Affairs, Nytorv 5, DK1450 Copenhagen K, Denmark. [email: mvr@dupi.dk]

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Cooperation and Conflict

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A Parallel Globalization of Terror: 911, Security and Globalization

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