11 Aralık 2013 Çarşamba

Countering Ideological Support for Terrorism: Can the Global Consolidation of Democratic Rule of Law Be the Answer?



Terrorism, the worst of all ills in human history, has been defined in various ways since the “word” first appeared during the Jacobin period in late 18th century France. Leaving aside some extremely broad definitions which tend to accept “non-violent terrorism” as a possibility, most analysts ranging from political theorists and philosophers to historians and social scientists agree that terrorism is inextricably connected with violence. In a similar vein, there is also a considerable degree of agreement on the political characteristics of terrorism, hence violence. Put differently, terrorism is a kind of violence with political aims: “Neither violence nor terror is inflicted for its own sake, but rather for the sake of a further aim such as coercion, or some more specific political objective.”

Based on the foregoing, it should be clear that any “ideological support” or “justification” (legitimation) of terrorism resorts to certain political aims like the now seemingly outdated discourse of class struggle where Jacobin equation of terror with freedom and democracy is somewhat reiterated under the banner of “proletarian” dictatorship and democracy, or struggles for national liberation, or a struggle for the recognition of the rights of a social group within a nation-state, etc. In elaborating on the ways in which the actual use of or threat to use violence is justified, one has to bear in mind that not only individuals and groups but also states resort to violence for certain political purposes.

In one of the most important classic texts of political philosophy, St. Augustine, writing in 5th century B.C., “tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. ‘How dare you molest the sea?’ asked Alexander. ‘How dare you molest the whole world?’ replied the pirate. ‘Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief, you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor.” According to St. Augustine, the pirate’s “excellent” reply is a good point of departure to think on what distinguishes “the state” from “theft”, “piracy” or “banditry”. For St. Augustine the answer lies in that the state, unlike the pirate, uses violence for “justice”.

It seems quite plausible to substitute terror and terrorism with pirate and theft and emperor with the state and justice with the concept of legitimacy. By way of this substitution, it is not too difficult to start thinking about the difference between the various ways of and purposes for using violence by the state and terrorism. What I have in mind is Max Weber’s famous and oft quoted defition of the modern state. According to Weber, the state is an entity which claims a “monopoly on the legitimate use of violence”. The difference between St. Augustine and Weber, between justice and legitimacy consists in the fact that for St. Augustine justice is the ultimate characteristic of “de civitate Dei”, whereas legitimacy for Weber is derived from the legal framework of the modern state.

Taking Weber’s definition as a point of departure, it can be argued that the use of violence by any individual, group or organization outside the state (and its bureaucratic administration) is regarded to be terrorist provided that this use of violence is aimed at and capable of threatening the people, causing fear and creating a sense of insecurity, destroying the human capacity of thinking and acting rationally. From this perspective, any challenge to the state monopoly of the legitimate use of violence is, by definiton, terrorism.

The crucial point in this perspective regards the concept of legitimacy. Bearing in mind that contemporary terrorism has assumed the form of “propaganda by the deed”, we need to focus on the ways in which terrorism justifies itself in challenging the existing order of things in a certain political setup ranging from individual “nation-states”. It is not uncommon that use of violence by non-state actors to create public fear has been and still is justified on the grounds that the aim of use of violence regarded as terrorism by individual states is a revolt against a social and political system considered to be “unjust and oppressive” i.e., illegitimate. From the standpoint of those treated by the state as terrorists, then, the state itself is seen as “the real terrorist” for the use of violence by the state has no legitimacy because of its oppressive and unjust characteristic.

At this point, I think we should have come to understand that ideological support for terrorism increases as some individuals and groups in a society share the same point of view with the terrorists that the existing order of things in a state is unjust and oppressive. Hence the need for social and political reform to erase the bases of justification of terrorism. The logic I propose here is that the more successful the reform processes to create a just and non-oppressive political order, the less ideological support or legitimacy for terrorism. So, it is necessary now to focus on the guiding principles of creating a just and non-oppressive political order with a strong legitimacy.

Pre-modern definitions of justice, like St. Augustine’s had a transcendental reference, a reference to “divine law” or law as God’s will, hence judging the degree of legitimacy of “earthly power” of the rulers on the basis of divine and eternal law. Under conditions of modernity, however, legitimacy has come to be determined increasingly on the basis of “positive law”, that is “law posited by a human agency”. The nation-state as one of the peaks of political modernity has been a political construct in which the legitimacy of the state is determined by the “sovereign will of the nation” which in turn required the formation of rules and procedures (a constitutional order) involving fundamental rights for individual members of the national polity for adequate “opinion-and-will formation”. Thus, establishment of liberal-democratic political systems (“polyarchies”, to use Robert Dahl’s term) based on rule of law within nation-states marked an important turning point in human history where it seemed quite reasonable to assume that monopoly of the use of violence by a nation-state incorporated a liberal-democratic constitutional system of rule of law has been the closest political form for the Weberian ideal type of legal-rational legitimacy.

In the past century and especially under conditions of Cold War, it has been accepted that any act of or resort to violence to challenge, undermine or destroy the fundamentals of liberal (nation-state) democracies had no base for justification. This conviction reflected a confidence in the fact that liberal-democracies had incorporated also peaceful or non-violent mechanisms for piecemeal or holistic changes in the legal system, provided that the changes do not annul the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual.

Since the final quarter of the 20th century, however, this rather strong self-confidence of liberal (nation-state) democracies have been challenged by what Ronald Inglehart labeled as “the silent revolution”. According to Inglehart, people demanding social, economic and political rights and freedoms which resulted in the formation of liberal-democratic systems with changing degrees of corporatist arrangements of distributive justice have now come to put forward claims for the recognition of their ways of life, i.e. identities. This was a challenge to the legitimation formula of the nation-state which has been established fundamentally on the acceptance as a marriage (Gellner) between the nation representing a homogeneous culture and the state as its political organization.

This challenge making visible publicly different cultural identities defined usually along ethnic and religious lines albeit with other identities relating to issues of gender, class and social status, coincided with the end of the Cold War, emergence of a new order of things across the globe rendering old and long-cherished idea of national sovereignty less viable and gave way to the formation of new political forms like supra- and trans-national entities. In todays world, conventional forms of international relations (that is relations among nation-states) have changed so drastically that there are now non-state actors politically active across the globe and we are witnessing also the emergence of a new (supranational) political form in the European Union.

Within this context of what I wish to call “late modernity,” use of violence by non-state actors for political aims have come to find new support bases usually provided by the denial of multiculturalism by conventional political establishments of nation-states. I am not arguing that nation-states are outdated, or that nationqstate is on the verge of extinction. The point I wish to make is that since the late twentieth century, we have been witnessing the emergence of new bases of ideological support or legitimation for “terrorism”. There should be little doubt that the insistence on the part of the nation-state establishment that cultural differences cannot and should not have public and/or political meaning opens up new and fertile fields in domestic and international relations where the claim of “terrorism” to justify itself as a revolt against an unjust and oppressive order becomes attractive to individuals and groups whose identities or ways of life have been either non-recognized or oppressed, regarding themselves as being subjected at least to what Zizek calls “symbolic violence” coming from the side of the state.

If the considerations mentioned above make sense, then it seems relatively easy to clarify the way to counter the ideological support for terrorism. Just like the process of democratization taken place in the formation of nation-states aided to curb the strength of the ideological attraction of terrorism in liberal-democratic settings, now is the time to further democracy in scope and depth within and across nation-states to find ways to include individuals and groups whose identities are either non-recognized or explicitly oppressed. The guiding principle is to establish institutions and procedures which will enable a  process of public deliberation in which everyone who will be affected directly or indirectly by the adoption of a rule or its application is enabled to participate freely and equally with others where no established privileges or taboos exist. This guiding principle enables us to realize what has been missing and what went wrong in the democratic practices of the nation-states and against this background of “learning process” (Habermas) we will be able to extend the scope of fundamental rights and freedoms to sub-national, or “local” and supranational levels, which means an extension of democratic participation supported by the global institutions of rule of law observing respect for fundamental rights and freedoms of individuals. As the global order gets closer to establish a cosmopolitan democracy (Held) which will include necessarily a constitutional global order with cosmopolitan citizenship, there will be less and less basis for justification of terrorism either on a local, national or global level.

Although this may sound “utopian”, I want to urge you to think that in fact it may not be so. The international legal instruments ranging from the UN Declaration of Human Rights to the twin international conventions of 1966 on social, economic, culural, political and civil rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, international documents on religious freedom (not excluding certainly the IRFA which is not an international legal instrument but has a strong potential of becoming internationally significant) and hence the recognition of identity/difference, etc., have contributed significantly to an optimistic view of a global democracy in the future. What threatens or impedes the realization of a cosmopolitan democracy that would help the process of isolation and marginalization of violence and terrorism in the future is not only the ewistence of terrorism and the social and ideological bases of justification it enjoys in non-democratic, anti-democratic or “inadequately democratic” settings but also the nation-state view of political requisites of multiculturalism as a threat to its very existence resulting in resort to “state of emergency” that is, suspension of democratic rule of law, providing in turn more justification for terrorism. Formation of a supranational rule of law promises to be the most viable and effective mechanism for breaking this vicious circle and eliminate all kinds of ideological spport and justification for terrorism, and it should be a good way to begin by forcing nation-states to apply without any reservations at all the legal instruments providing fundamental rights and liberties to individuals and groups across the globe.
Levent Köker


*Prepared for the Conference on “Exploring Dimensions in Countering Ideological Support for Terrorism”, Sponsored by George C. Marshall European Center for security Studies, in Cooperation with the Royal Jordanian National defence College, 28-30 September 2009, Amman, Jordan.
** Professor of Public Law and politics, Gazi University, Ankara.

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