MODERN TERRORISM

Acts of political violence -- assassination, riot, civil war, rebellion,

or revolution -- occur in "changing times." All societies have a value
system describing how society should be structured, how the
benefits of society should be distributed, and what is considered
legal or illegal. Under ordinary circumstances changes are folded
more or less peacefully into the system, but when the changes are
substantial and involve major shifts in power and relationships,
people develop different and competing ideas about what society
should be like and how things should be done. These competing
sets of ideas, which are called ideologies, contain suggestions for
bringing about the desired society and are used to mobilize support
for that society. Sometimes in this campaign for the "minds and
hearts" of the people, the usual methods of compromising
differences in the society cannot stand the strain, and the
contending forces resort to force in order to overcome the lack of
social agreement on how the benefits of society should be divided.
This attempt to force the new or defend the old is "political"
violence, because it is in the political sphere that such decisions are
worked out, whether the society is autocratic or whether the people
in it have a large measure of political participation.
One should not expect, however, to find either a society that is in
stable equilibrium or one that is totally out of control in the real
world. These are ideal types developed for the purpose of analysis.
Most societies are somewhere on a continuum of equilibrium; some
societies deal better with change than others because the methods
for dealing with change built into some societies work better than
those in others. The United States managed to cope with the Civil
Rights Movement and the various aspects of the war in Viet Nam
without collapsing, although the strains of doing so still mark the
nation's political discourse and the psyches of Americans. It
remains to be seen whether Russia can develop the political
flexibility to deal with the economic strains and social dislocation
that result from the break-up of the Soviet Union. Tendencies to
disequilibrium in societies are easier to observe than stability,
because, however sublimated or ritualized the competition always
present in society is, if the divisions are about basic principles, there
may be no acceptable way to mediate them, and the society can
explode into violence. If no one side is strong enough to force its will
on the rest chaos may result. The situation in the Balkans is a good
example.
The violence may be riot, as in Indonesia, whose economy is in
free-fall, or like the "long, hot summers" in American cities during
the Civil Rights Movement; it may be street fighting like that in postWorld War I Italy and Germany, or civil war, as in the Congo and Sri
Lanka or in the United States between 1861 and 1865. The discord
may escalate into revolution as it did in the English North American
colonies, France, and Russia. It all depends on the seriousness of

the problems, the nature of the resistance, and the will of the
players.
Assassination is a particular kind of political violence which may
or may not be the result of ideological confrontation or social
dysfunction. Some assassinations are clearly the result of simple
individual competition for power in which one person with a lust to
rule is willing to break society's prohibitions against murder, but the
occurrence of assassination may also be a sign that the usual
arrangements for transferring power from one person or one
generation to another have broken down or that social norms are no
longer agreed upon. Where we find clusters of assassination, such
as in the early days of the Weir Republic or in the United States in
1968, it is clear that society's controls are in disarray.
Wars between states might be regarded as the ultimate example
of political violence, but war does not tell us much about the state of
the societies involved. This kind of political violence may tell us that
there is a rogue state willing to try to force its will on its neighbors
or it may tell us that the "world" is disequilibrated. There is as yet
no supra-state society with institutions to mediate conflicts between
states successfully in all cases. The League of Nations failed to
prevent World War II; afterwards the victorious allies tried again, but
the United Nations was not very successful in mediating conflict
during the Cold War, and it remains to be seen whether it will be any
more successful now that that long ideological conflict is ended. As
this is being written the Powers are threatening NATO air strikes
against Yugoslavia unless the Serbs in power there stop the ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo. The fact that there has been no universal war
since 1945 is not a tribute to the growth of a world society with
agreed upon norms. The development of weapons the use of which
could well destroy the planet has made the great powers so far
unwilling to let a new world war begin.
Since, in the absence of compromise, there has never been any
method of solving political conflicts exists except force, political
violence fueled by ideological conflict, by tribal vendetta, religious
hatreds, or by more traditional rivalries like that between Argentina
and Great Britain over the Falklands/Maldives are as present in the
post-World War II world as ever. While throughout history tribes
have hated and killed members of another tribe, and True Believers
have served their god by killing the servants of other gods, while
peasants have groaned and rebelled, and dynasties have fallen,
the kind of change we call revolution is a relatively modern
development. We may speak of a transportation "revolution" or a
communications "revolution," but when we apply the word to
politics, it means fundamental changes to the polity.
In the late Middle Ages, a series of massive changes began
occurring in Europe that gave birth to the modern world, during
which European states (and later the United States) emerged as
world powers and began a long period of world domination. In class,
we have discussed the following changes:

the Commercial Revolution

the Protestant Reformation
the Enlightenment
the rise of Liberal Democracy by evolution (England) or
revolution (France)
the Industrial Revolution.
The American Revolution, the first of the "great" revolutions, was
a political revolution; the American colonies by force and violence
changed their sovereign and became independent. While there
were some changes to the social structure of the country because of
the war, the social and economic changes that have come to the
United States since 1776 have been evolutionary, rather than
revolutionary, in nature, except for the Civil War. What the
American Revolution, or more properly the Constitution of 1789, did
was put in place methods for assimilating political, social, and
economic changes in a reasonably orderly fashion. The colonial
leaders who fought the war, wrote the constitution, and formed the
Federalist party had no intention of changing anything but the head
of state. Changes after that were forced upon them, largely by
people working out the implications of the ideology of the
revolution, a process not yet complete. It probably never will be.
The same year the new American Constitution was ratified,
another revolution broke out. In 1789 many Frenchmen wanted no
more change than their American confreres had; indeed, the early
French Revolution was patterned on the American. But other people
had other ideas, and the French Revolution became not just a
political revolution, but a social and economic one as well. During
the conflict, the full modern political spectrum developed: men who
were prepared to fight for the traditional system, men who wanted
only a political revolution and men who wanted a complete change
of the social structure and its values that the word revolution has
come to mean today. With that set of competing ideologies, we
come to terrorism, for the French radicals instituted the Terror, the
first instance of modern state terror, to impose these radical
changes upon their fellow citizens. Individual and group terrorism,
the kind we read about in the daily papers, developed later, but not
much later.
War to suppress the revolution had brought the radicals' Terror to
defend it, but subsequently the revolution was first absorbed by the
Napoleonic Empire and then defeated by the enemies of the
revolution. Conservatives or reactionaries ruled Europe, but the
dream of the radicals would not die. That men ought to be equal
has been an idea that gripped men's minds ever since. In
describing all these conflicts, I have used the word "men," and by
and large, I mean men, although the most radical believed not only
in political, economic, and social equality, but in sexual equality as
well.
While those who demanded social and economic equality

(socialists) argued over how to structure the new society and

experimented with new social forms, a more radical group than they
arose, with the idea that society should not be structured at all, that
it was structure itself -- government -- that was causing the
problem. These are the anarchists. All of these radicals were
dreaming of and working toward "the revolution" that they all
believed to be coming very soon. It was not. They vastly
underestimated the strength of the conservative governments
around them, and when the Paris Commune was suppressed in
1871, revolutionary Europe suffered a profound depression and
dislocation. Some decided to work for socialism through the political
system, and by 1900 socialist parties of one kind or another existed
in all European countries. The Marxists, who still believed that only
revolution would solve the problem, settled in for a long period of
organization and propaganda. The anarchists, however, had other
ideas. Believing, despite all the evidence around them, that the
society they defined as thoroughly corrupt was ready to fall -perhaps it was a counsel of despair -- they carried out a series of
assassinations. They seemed to have believed that if only they kept
lopping off the head of the state, the body would fall. Originally
they operated alone, these first terrorists, but in Russia, there
seemed to be no hope that Czar Alexander II would extend the
reforms that he had begun by freeing the serfs, setting up a judicial
system, and providing a small measure of consultative government.
Young members of the intelligentsia fervently desired constitutional
government, civil rights, and some form of socialism. They formed
groups to work for these reforms, but they became increasingly
frustrated and turned to violence to try to achieve what they could
not achieve by persuasion. Thus were formed the first terrorist
groups. We have discussed several of these Russian groups, their
socio-economic make-up, their organization and tactics.
All of the elements of modern terrorism were present: the
ideologies which described the desired world, a block in obtaining
the goal, and people willing to attack the strength of the state in
small numbers to popularize the goal of overthrowing the existing
regime.
Like riot and civil war, terrorism is obviously connected to political
violence. Scholars have spilt a lot of ink and politicians have
expended a lot of rhetoric trying to define terrorism. The fact that
people have failed to agree upon a definition owes much to the
ideological conflicts of the Cold War, as the clich "One man's
terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" illustrates, but it also
illustrates that we have been approaching the understanding of
terrorism incorrectly. Some students regard any kind of political
violence as terrorism and assert that it goes back to earliest times.
To be sure, terror and fear have been around as a part of politics for
a long time, but terrorism as it is practiced today is a relatively new
phenomenon. A useful, if imperfect, definition is:

Terrorism is the threat or use of violence for political purposes by

individuals or groups whether acting for, or in opposition to,
established governmental authority, when such actions are intended
to shock, stun, or intimidate a target group wider than the
immediate victims.
The benefits of this definition are many. Threats come under it.
The violence must be used for political purposes. That leaves out
failed bank robberies that end in hostage situations, but making
distinctions between terrorism and mere criminal behavior is not
always easy. The definition includes state terror, government death
squads and "disappearances," which not all definitions do. Terrorism
is designed to influence people not involved in the incident. That
addresses the question of publicity.
The great flaw of this definition is that it fails to distinguish
sufficiently between terrorism and other forms of political violence.
All forms of political violence -- riot, rebellion, civil war, even
revolution -- fit the definition, and yet common sense tells us that
terrorism is different from these other forms, or we would not need
the term. Terrorism is not an event, like a riot, nor is it a process, like
revolution. Terrorism is a tactic of carrying out political violence, just
as an infantry assault is a tactic in conventional warfare. To
distinguish it from riot and rebellion, it is necessary to look at the
motivation of those involved. Teaching the history of terrorism for a
decade convinces me that there are only two motives for present
day terrorism: to force a change in the social, economic, and
political structure of a state or to set up a nation-state. Neither of
these goals was possible before the French Revolution. They are
specifically "modern" aspirations, and neither could be
contemplated until the concept of revolution to change the structure
of society developed. Nationalism, the idea that people with a
common geographical area, a common heritage, and a common
language ought to be ruled as a unit, was also a function of the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic War.
Terrorism is used in the early stages of the revolutionary process
when those determined on revolution are too weak to overthrow the
government. The action of the terrorist has two goals: to frighten
and thus weaken the government and to propagandize the goals of
the revolutionary to gain adherents to the cause. Another goal may
be to force the government to over-react, thus alienating more
people. It was institutionalized as part of the Chinese/Vietnamese
three-stage protracted war strategy, and with the success of the
Vietnamese revolution, it has become increasingly popular, despite
its lack of success in many other situations.
Terrorism of the sort we know today has been prevalent in the
past among people espousing nationalist as well as right and left
wing ideologies. In the U.S after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan used
terror not just to control the newly freed blacks, but to defend
southern institutions. In Ireland, early nationalists used

assassination to fight for an independent Irish nation. Macedonians

and Armenians attempted to secure their liberty from the Turkish
Empire and set up nation-states. Russian revolutionaries attacked
the Czar and other governmental officials in order to destroy the
Czarist government and institute some kind of socialist state.
Because of the anarchist leanings of the revolutionaries, it is not
always clear what they intended to do next. For those who adopt
the anarchist ideology, terrorism may be the only stage in the
revolution.
Before World War I, terrorism was a left-wing phenomenon,
because states had been ruled by conservative, often capitalist,
parties. After that war and the Russian revolution sparked by
it, groups on the right began using terror. Germany and Italy saw
the spread of violence between the left and the right, and political
parties with reactionary rightist ideologies (Nazi, Fascist) used
modern political organizational techniques and brutal squads of
street fighters to come to power. After achieving power, the political
violence of these parties became state terror. In Japan members of
the armed forces, critical of liberal democracy and capitalism and
determined on Japanese imperial expansion, used assassination and
terror to force their will on a weak democratic government. The
result was not only terror and death but World War II.
In the United States, the Ku Klux Klan emerged anew, adding
hatred for cities, immigrants, Jews, organized labor, and modern
immorality -- drinking, smoking, flappers and liberated women,
and sexual carrying on -- to their traditional hatred for blacks.
Middle class people in small towns and people who had recently
moved to the city joined the Klan in large numbers and terrorized
and lynched people who did not fit their ideas of Hundred percent
Americans. Some of the Klans joined forces with American Fascist
groups to propagandize their ideology. The Klan broke up before the
outbreak of World War II, but it held the balance of political power in
a number of states during the 1920s and early 1930s.
After World War II, the face of terrorism changed again. That will
be the focus of the rest of the course.
Marilynn Larew
larew@towson.edu