WORLD POLITICS Lecture 16

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WORLD POLITICS Lecture 16
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Terrorism, Nationalism Democracy
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Religious-based Terrorism

• Terrorism grounded in religion poses special
  problems for modern social science, which has
  paid little attention to religion.
  
•  
• Terrorism can achieve a great deal of disruption
  with relatively little force. Whether the goal is
  revenge, the hope to inflict enough pain to get
  the adversary to change its behavior, or the
  desire to call attention to one's cause, terror
  may be the only tool that might prove effective.
•  
• The American society is now more vulnerable than
  the military. Civilian targets are easier to
  destroy than are military ones. The development
  of air power and, even more, nuclear weapons has
  become irrelevant

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PROMINENCE OF NON-STATE ACTORS

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• September 11 attacks are violence by private
  actors. They represent the failure of states to
  protect their own citizens.
  
• September 11 also represents the declining
  importance of states in two other ways. First,
  terrorist groups are transnational by their
  religious beliefs.
• Second, the attack demonstrates the importance of
  globalization. The hijackers traveled throughout
  the world and depended on the efficient movement
  of information and money.

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ENDURING TERRORISM

•  
• Terrorism will recur unless the grinding poverty
  in the Third World are dealt with (great and
  increasing inequality within and among nations,
  corrupt and unresponsive governments, and
  American policies that too often range it along
  side of the forces of injustice and oppression).
  
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• Poverty and lack of liberties do not appear on
  the list of grievances articulated by terrorist
  leaders, and neither the al Qaeda leadership nor
  the hijackers were poor.  

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ENDURING TERRORISM

• Much of the rage is attributable to their own
  governments, which are unable to provide a decent
  life for their people while sponsoring mass media
  that blame most of their ills on the United
  States.
• The very notion of elevating the rights of
  individuals and the ability to choose one's way
  of life is anathema to terrorists and their
  supporters. Traditions, real or imagined
  community values as they interpret them, and life
  regulated by Muslim clerics who read the Koran
  the way Taliban leaders did are their avowed
  objectives.
•  

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ENDURING TERRORISM

• Even if poverty, inequality, and oppression were
  the root causes of terrorism, there is little
  reason to think that we could deal with them
  effectively.
•  
• The main barriers to democracy in Islamic
  countries is the lack of a separation between
  church and state It is hard to see what outsiders
  could do to effect such a separation.
•  

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WHY WE ARE HATED

• Bin Laden appears to hate the United States both
  for what it is and what it has done. The United
  States exemplifies consumerism, individual
  choice, and a relatively high degree of sexual
  permissiveness and equality.
• The stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia and the
  support for a corrupt Saudi regime.

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WHY WE ARE HATED

• Bin Laden also berates the United States for its
  support of Israel. This position is designed to
  garner support from the widest possible Arab
  audience.
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• Over the long run, the Arab-Israeli dispute and
  the American role in it may play a large role in
  cultivating the next generation of terrorists,
  even if it has not generated the current one.
• More reasonable is the argument that the roots of
  much terrorism lie in the intolerance and hatred
  preached in many mosques and taught in madrases,
  often supported by Saudi money. But for many
  countries, tolerating or sponsoring religious
  extremism is more attractive than domestic
  reform, and it is far from clear how much the
  United States can do to change this landscape.
•  

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IS WAR THE APPROPRIATE RESPONSE? 

• By its nature, terror seeks to utilize political
  and psychological leverage in order to produce
  political effects that are disproportionate to
  the military force deployed. To the extent that
  it is more than mere revenge, it seeks change
  through inducing fear, and generally fear that is
  a magnified rather than a true reflection of what
  else could follow. So reducing fear and making
  Americans feel secure should be a crucial focus
  of American foreign policy.
• Waging war may not be the appropriate answer.
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SENSELESS TERRORISM

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• Actions that are horrible are not necessarily
  irrational.
  
• Bin Laden and his colleagues may have been
  motivated first of all by the desire for revenge
  and what they saw as justice.
  
• The United States had committed great crimes and
  had to be punished. Even if the attacks could not
  set the world aright, they would at least make
  the United States pay a price for its awful
  deeds.
• The importance of revenge should not be
  underestimated.

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Can International organizations help?

• International organizations can help reach
  American goals at minimum cost.
  
• It has not budged from its unilateral rejection
  of the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal
  Court, the ABM Treaty, and the proposed
  arrangements for ensuring that states do not
  develop biological weapons
• The basic logic that it is often advantageous for
  great powers to bind themselves to
  quasi-constitutional rules in order to reassure
  others

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NATIONALISM AND DEMOCRACY

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• Democracy, and free marketshad attained the same
  status as literacy widespread although not
  universal, dominant and unchallenged.
  
• Democracy has won the day, but do we need to
  promote democracy among the recalcitrant to
  ensure not only peace but also prosperity?
  

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DEMOCRACY

• American power will lead to the democratic peace
  envisaged by many liberals. Democracy is also
  being touted as the best way to ensure
  prosperity, as it is argued that it promotes the
  good governance required for economic
  development.
• We need to make a crucial distinction between
  political, civil, and economic liberty (freedom).
  It is now a commonplace that economic liberty as
  embodied in the market is a necessary condition
  for development.
• But is political liberty as entailed by democracy
  also necessary to promote and sustain economic
  and civil liberties?

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Democracy and Liberty

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• Representative democracy arose along with the
  growth of constitutional liberalism. This
  requires not only free and fair elections but
  also the rule of law and the protection of the
  liberties of free speech, assembly, religion, and
  property.
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• In many Muslim countries the autocrats are more
  liberal than the mass of the people, and if the
  majority had their way they would undoubtedly
  suppress even the liberties currently granted by
  the autocrats.

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Democracy and Peace

• While for classical liberals civil and economic
  liberties are the ultimate moral good, comprising
  the content of good governance, they are not
  necessarily served by one form of government,
  representative democracy.
• Hhierarchical societies can more easily maintain
  majoritarian democracies, however corrupt and
  economically inefficientas the notable example
  of India showsdespite continuing social and
  economic inequalities.
• There is nothing in its cosmological views which
  would make Islam incompatible with democracy. But
  despotism and a disjunction between state and
  society have been characteristic features of
  Muslim society.

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CONCLUSION

• Liberal democracy is likely to be a frail flower
  in much of the world, as it is unlikely to fit
  the political habits of many cultures. For
  prosperity, the most important features of a
  government are civil and economic liberties.
• Unlike political freedom whose value is likely to
  be determined by the cosmological beliefs of
  different cultures, the value of economic freedom
  depends on the material beliefs of a
  civilization.
• The gradual spread of globalization around the
  world, and the increasing recognition that
  economic freedom brings prosperity, many
  politically illiberal societies are nevertheless
  gradually changing their material beliefs and
  introducing economic liberty.
•  China is gradually introducing economic
  freedom.
  

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CONCLUSION

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• In the Islamic world, even though democracy is
  unlikely to flourish, there is no reason why
  Muslim countries should not be able to establish
  economic liberty.
• The United States through its imperium should be
  promoting globalization which will lead to
  economic freedom.
  
• The promotion of democracy will not necessarily
  aid this spread of the liberties,
  
• It could lead to a backlash as cultural
  nationalists come to identify globalization with
  an attack on their cosmological beliefs, and
  erroneously come to believe that modernizing is
  going to lead them to lose their souls.