Terrorism, Security and Nationality

An Introductory Study in Applied Political Philosophy

Paul Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134873708
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Terrorism, Security and Nationality shows how the ideas and techniques of political philosophy can be applied to the practical problems of terrorism, State violence and national identity. In doing so it clarifies a wide range of issues in applied political philosophy including ethics of war; theories of state and nation; the relationship between communities and nationalisms; human rightss and national security.
Paul Gilbert identifies conflicting conceptiona of civil strife by different political communities and investigates notions of terrorism both as unjust war and as political crime. He concludes by considering the proper response of the State to political violence.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Political philosophy traditionally concerns itself with the question of what a political community should be like: how justice is to be achieved within it, what degree of equality is compatible with a desirable degree of freedom and so forth. Political philosophy concerns itself for the most part, then, with ethical issues which underlie the political contests between parties contending for power within established states. Yet beneath the ethical questions lurks a metaphysical one: what is a political community?¹

The question of what constitutes a political community is seldom at issue in the politics of established states. Political parties tend to agree on what community it is that they seek to represent and they differ only on what it should be like. But this question is very commonly at issue in nationalist conflicts, where what are to count as the communities to be represented takes precedence over the question of what they should eventually be like. And underlying the political disagreement is commonly a metaphysical one concerning the criteria for identifying distinct political communities.

It is with the metaphysical question that this book is ultimately concerned, though its approach may seem oblique and inconclusive. No doubt a more direct method would be possible. It might, however, be a less illuminating one if our purpose in posing the metaphysical question is to seek an understanding of constitutional conflict, of nationalist causes and of the violence to which they frequently give rise. For this we need an account not purely theoretical, but applicable to the practical problems of creating and sustaining political communities.

The approach adopted here exemplifies in two respects applied political philosophy First, its interest is in grasping how political conflicts can spring from philosophical disagreements. It is, therefore, concerned with identifying and assessing the conceptual assumptions involved, with a view to developing a reflective and critical attitude to these conflicts and their resolution. Second, it draws the philosophical concepts it investigates from the political behaviour to which they are applied, since it would be surprising if this behaviour could be explained in terms of notions that had no place in the thinking of its agents.

Our aim is to seek to understand behaviour that is often, on the face of it, shockingly irrational by reconstructing a pattern of reasoning behind it. In some cases this will draw upon notions acknowledged by its agents to play a part in their deliberations. In other cases it will not: revealing the assumptions we ourselves unreflectively make can often be as illuminating to us, in understanding our own behaviour, as revealing the assumptions of others can be in illuminating theirs. The aim, however, is not only to understand but to criticise—to assess the plausibility of the patterns of reasoning exemplified in political behaviour and to suggest alternatives.

The extent to which understanding and criticism are possible raises a large philosophical question concerning the commensurability of divergent assumptions about the nature of political communities and about the limits of political action. Again my approach will be to abjure a direct answer. Instead I attempt to locate apparently irreconcilable differences in the contrasting roles of political agents contending for power. It is to these contrasts that the Janus-faced character of political action in areas of conflict within the state is referable. What appears to its agents as an heroic stand strikes others as a futile gesture, what is justified by government as the maintenance of law and order is attacked as political repression and so on. Political actions have no single significance; for what people do is determined not only by what they intend but by what behaviour of that kind is understood by others to be, whatever its agents’ intentions. It is those in positions of power who preeminently control the conventions in terms of which political behaviour is understood. Even to succeed in acting in a way that carries a contrary message can be a triumph.

The book begins by discussing a form of political behaviour which epitomises this unsettling phenomenon—terrorism. Is it, as those who undertake it intend, war? Or is it, as the state treats it, merely crime? An understanding of its equivocal nature shows, I shall suggest, why terrorism is so often the resort of nationalists and others who differ with the established state as to the political community to be represented. Terrorism exemplifies, too, a larger uncertainty: is it a legitimate tactic to be employed in the defence of a political community, or is it a mode of behaviour that any community must suppress as threatening to destroy, not just a particular community, but the social relations essential to any political community?

A similar question can be posed concerning the security operations of the state: do they serve to protect communal relations, or do they undermine them in pursuit of sectional interests? Are they legitimate acts of law enforcement, or can they themselves constitute state terrorism? Indeed, is the state, through its provision of security, the foundation of community or an instrument of its oppression?

There is, I believe, no detached point of view from which we can expect definitive answers to these questions. What is clear is that we all do fear unpredictable violence, whether from the state or its opponents, as a threat to the order upon which our communal life depends. Any political organisation aims to maintain social order. But what kinds of group might reasonably expect to have their own ordered and harmonious social life?

This question brings us to the problem of national identity. In a world of nation states the paradigmatic political community is a national one. What, though, constitutes a nation? My answer ties the criteria for nationhood to the requirements of statehood, and finds the traditional accounts presupposed in many nationalist campaigns deficient. Political communities, I conclude, are ethical communities, whose criteria of identity lie in their capacity to provide for a good communal life. Whether the nation, as represented by the modern state, can perform this ethical function must remain an open question.

Chapter 2
Terrorism and unjust war

MINDLESS VIOLENCE

Bombings which cause death and injury to civilian citizens, as in the IRA campaign, may be taken as paradigmatic of contemporary terrorist attacks—attacks arousing outrage and anger in equal measure to the fear and uneasiness they induce. A ‘public’ reaction, drawn from eyewitnesses, police or politicians gives voice to the former rather than the latter. But a public reaction, one reported or broadcast, is selective and formulaic. Incomprehension, to which it frequently resorts, can itself, in place of explanation, be a kind of security. There are many formulae for shutting off the worrisome search for understanding such violence: it can be seen as ‘mindless’, ‘psychopathic’ or ‘animal’ behaviour, for example. Clearly these descriptions require some investigation even if they can do nothing to account for the mood of outrage they are intended to express, since they evidently do nothing to justify it. Mindlessness or mental illness seem rather occasions for pity, while dumb animals of a ferocious temper are shown a respect not accorded to the terrorist.

Is there something wrong with the mind of the terrorist? Or has he put in abeyance human compunctions against a mode of conduct that our deeper drives incline us to? Neither story has any general plausibility.

‘Mindless violence’, on one understanding of the phrase, is that for which no further reason can be offered—which seems, at least, to be engaged in for its own sake, or maybe because it is enjoyed. The ranks of terrorists may include those who are acting this way without espousing any cause; perhaps the cause that they espouse provides only an occasion for or a rationalisation of violence. Yet there is no reason to think that terrorism in itself is of this kind. Its violent acts are mostly done for further reasons and, we should not doubt, often with a heavy heart. The mindlessly violent may be more of a liability than an asset in such a cause.

By the same token the psychopath, while no stranger to terrorist causes, does not exemplify terrorism’s essential character. Acting for reasons which appear in no way to justify the extent and degree of his violence, he sees, at the time, no disproportion and, in consequence, no need for exculpation. The terrorist, on the contrary, seeks to persuade us of the reasonableness of his acts, fantastical as they may sometimes seem. He appeals on the whole to principles in ordinary currency, while even the fanatic appeals to principles that are shared at least by true believers; he does not make himself the measure of the rightness of his acts, however opaque it may be to those beyond his circle.

There is nothing obviously wrong with the mind of the terrorist. Indeed for the most part he does what most of us would do—rightly or wrongly—if called upon to do it. The days are gone when it was thought to be a special calling, or that it required a special stamp of character, to engage in killing one’s fellow men and women; now everyone, or at least, for here lurks a remnant of old belief, all males, may be conscripted to perpetrate acts that result with certainty in death or dreadful suffering. It cannot be a capacity for such acts that sets the terrorist mind apart from others. Nor is it a greater preparedness to perform them. The terrorist characteristically occupies a place within a structure of command analogous to that of a recognised military force. He obeys his orders but takes them from a different source from the serviceman: neither is notable for declining to obey orders that strike him as morally repugnant. There is no evidence that the terrorist shows less repugnance or greater preparedness to obey them. Indeed, perhaps the contrary is true, for terrorist groups frequently fragment over their choice of tactics, including over which are and which are not acceptable from a moral point of view.

There is at least a formal difference between the view that the terrorist mind is abnormal in fostering acts of cruelty or callousness which others similarly situated would not be disposed to commit, and the view that he acts from instincts common to all, but which most people hold in check, recognising and fearing their brutish origins and outcomes or acknowledging the reasons for restraint. Many of the arguments against the former view of terrorism go over to the latter. It is worth pausing briefly however to consider the picture of terrorism as instinctual violence unrestrained.

We cannot here adequately address the large question of whether man in the ungendered or, indeed, the gendered sense, is by nature violent—prone to attacks upon his fellow men generally or, more specifically, upon those who do not form part of some social group within which he is peaceable.¹ It is worth noting, though, that whatever account is offered there is no prospect of providing a good evolutionary argument for it. The identification and explanation of human traits, such as some putative forms of aggressiveness, on the grounds that they conduce to the survival of the species are notoriously perilous. All we know from evolutionary theory is that whatever genetically determined traits we have are not disastrously maladaptive—or have not been up to now. But in that case it is hard to see what might justify us in collecting together a multifarious collection of phenomena—muggings, gang fights, inter-state wars and terrorism, for example—as manifestations of a single trait at all.

One possibility would be to see, behind the apparent variety, some relatively fixed and inflexible pattern of behaviour of the kind which evolutionary theory is well adapted to explain. To do that one would need to identify it as, in at least very many circumstances, irrational, mindless in the sense not of lacking reason, but of being contrary to it—a routine fallen into rather than a means adopted as best fitted to its objective. This was, it seems, Freud’s view, when he wrote² that men’s ‘neighbour is…someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions…to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus’—man is a wolf to man.

Yet it is hard to believe that the terrorist’s tactics are not predominantly judged to be best fitted to his ends, however cruel, or even because so cruel, in execution. Their remorseless repetitiveness is not that of a routine unadapted to particular circumstances, but precisely that of a means adapted as best expressing the terrorist’s implacable determination to achieve his ends. There are no grounds here for detecting the eruption of the beast in man.

To be sure, this notion is more properly a theological than a scientific one. The beast provides a supernatural rather than a naturalistic explanation of the violence attributed to it. And it explains that violence as morally repugnant Only thus could it figure as characterising the culprit responsible for terrorist outrages. How might it do so?

UNJUST WAR

Terrorism, it has been suggested,³ ‘essentially means any method of war which consists in intentionally attacking those who ought not to be attacked’. This is intended as a definition of terrorism. What motivates it is the desire to capture what it is that excites the outrage which we commonly feel about terrorism. The suggestion would be that terrorism transgresses a prohibition on attacking other people unless they fall into some special category of person unprotected from attack. We take it for granted that attacking them is morally wrong, because it is both wicked and unjust. It is wicked because it is pitiless—it fails to betray a recognition of others as fellow human beings whose lives demand a certain kind of respect. It is unjust because it singles out some as victims without good reason, simply because it suits their assailants to do so.

What we take for granted here is something deeply rooted at least in European culture, and no doubt well beyond it. Its roots are partly classical, partly Christian, presupposing a common humanity in virtue of which a certain attitude to people is appropriate, an attitude forfeited only by those who directly or indirectly fail to demonstrate it themselves. Such a presupposition is what underlies the medieval theory of the just war, and it is this theory that motivates many contemporary accounts of terrorism which represent it as something necessarily abhorrent.

I shall term this model of terrorism the unjust war model. It typically assumes—what will later need to be examined—that terrorism is a form of warfare. Or, rather more cautiously, it assumes that it is sufficiently similar to war to be judged in accordance with the rules of war. For it assumes that there is a certain category of violent conflict whose entitlement to be termed ‘war’ stems from the fact that it is normally waged in accordance with certain rules.⁴ The analogy with games may be helpful here. The rules of football support judgements as to what should and should not be done by the participants...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Terrorism and unjust war
• Chapter 3 Terrorism and civil war
• Chapter 4 Terrorism and political crime
• Chapter 5 Community and conflict
• Chapter 6 Reasons for violence
• Chapter 7 Terrorism and nationality
• Chapter 8 Ethnicity and national identity
• Chapter 9 Terror and the state
• Chapter 10 The violence of the state
• Chapter 11 The state’s response to violence
• Notes
• References
• Index