On 11 September 2001 the United States suffered one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in history, when four civil aircraft were directed against civilian and military targets as weapons. Though the United States received much support from international allies of the calibre of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France, it is no less true is that George W. Bush’s administration opened the gates of hell after it led the invasion of Iraq (Kaplan and Cristol 2003). Though Bush and his ‘radcons’ (radical conservatives) were widely criticized for taking such a unilateral decision, the fact is that few studies trace the origin of the current crisis of refugees in Syria and the Middle East back to 9/11. As Sageman (2014) observes, one of the main limitations of terrorism research rests not only in its evident stagnation, resulting from the speculative nature of its approaches, but is a consequence of the gap created between academia and media. In consonance with Sageman, Luke Howie (2012) asserts that the mass media is the haunt of ‘pseudo-experts’ who devote their time to anticipating the next terrorist attack, or simply giving their opinion in the latest edition of the New York Times or Washington Post.
As social scientists we might be thought unable to speak of terrorism unless we infiltrate a terrorist cell, paying attention to our key-informants’ life-stories. If we succeeded in this enterprise, surely we would be pressed – if not tortured – by police and intelligence officials to share our information. Any reluctance in giving security forces further information about our ethnographies would identify us as ‘enemies of the state’, ‘collaborators with terrorists’ or ‘traitors’. Let us cite one excerpt where Allen Feldman reflects on the double dialectics of the state, to demonize (in this case terrorism) what should be sanitized, or ‘eradicated’.
In Northern Ireland violence is covertly performed by clandestine organizations and thus characterized by invisible web of causations. The public construction of a suspected terrorist by the state, through the performance of arrest and subsequent political assassination, creates a personifying imaginary of the origin of violence and disorder. Arrest envisions the terrorist in order to process this juridical object through various system of expulsion and erasure that include breaking the suspect under interrogation, imprisonment, and covert assassination (Feldman 1991: 109)
Howie and Feldman agree that the best channel for our objectivity seems to be exploring the effects of terrorism on our daily lives. After all, what the global audience believes of the Muslim world is far from being accurate: it is historically constructed by the articulation of different stereotypes, allegories, discourses and traits. It is illuminating to classify the romantic reaction to the Muslim community as well as the signs of racism and intolerance as direct consequences of the already-existing climate of terror that lay-people experience in contemporary societies (Werbner 2005; Schryock 2010). The rise of Islamophobia bespeaks of us as a society and of our limitations in understanding the Otherness which functions as a mirror of what is internally repressed. This means that the fear of strangers derives from our repressed image projected on to an external object (Skoll 2016). The formation and subsequent maturation of collective fears corresponds to ‘the repressed self-image’. To offer a clear example: after 9/11 many social scientists and journalists predicted that the United States was in imminent danger of attack by weapons of mass destruction. Not only has this never occurred to date, but it has also nourished dormant anxieties that resulted from the lack of public repentance for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the collective memory, psychoanalysis has shown, fears express invisible forces underlying in our inner world. Each generation loudly replicates the libidinal attachment to the world of ancestors which provides an ever-fresh guideline to resolve the problems of the present (Faimberg 2005; Fromm 2012). Hence, this book reviews not only the aftermath of 9/11 in capitalist culture, but also deepens discussion of how terrorism is affecting the touchstone of Western civilization: hospitality.
It must be emphasized that this project, which has taken many years of my life, is the product of a profound reflection, a deciphering of the interconnection of terrorism and leisure. It is vital to lay out precisely what the main concern of this theoretical approach is. One of the things that impelled me to write in a language which is not my own was the need to reach a global audience. Latin America experienced the devastating effects of political violence and terrorism through the 1970s. Even today there are residual traces of terrorism in the region’s politics. Great changes happen without previous notice: Latin Americans sacrificed their democratic institutions to achieve a more secure society. Red scare overwhelmed a weak checks-and-balances system in nations driven by the pressing need to tackle serious economic problems (Timmermann 2014; Korstanje 2015a; Feierstein 2014). Political scientists in English-speaking countries boasted of more democratic institutions. Though this is partially true, both cause and effect of long political stability, what they ignore is that terrorism may spring up and flourish in prosperous economies and democracies from one moment to another. What is clear is that terrorism erodes the basis of democracy, tightening institutional reactions to the rise of populist discourses. However, there are some significant differences between classic and modern terrorism which merit close attention. Basically, if terrorist cells in the 1970s targeted important politicians like presidents, government ministers or chief police officers, after 9/11 Islamic terrorism appeared to declare a ‘jihad’ against the tourism and hospitality industries. Many policy-makers and analysts in tourism fields were concerned about the advance of terrorism over the preceding decades (Pizam and Fleisher 2002; Fisher 2003; Tarlow 2014; Mansfeld and Pizam 2006). Tourism experts and fieldworkers acknowledged that terrorism ought to be regarded as a looming threat for the industry, but instead of providing a clear diagnosis of the problem, they endorsed and supported an academic platform oriented to risk management. Underpinned by the belief that tourism serves as a peace-builder that would reinforce democracies in the Middle East, specialists paid attention to the effects of terrorism in leisure spots instead of deepening their analysis of its causes. More interested in orchestrating mitigation programmes to strengthen security at international destinations or diminish the negative effects of potential terrorist actions, tourism-related researchers glossed over the historical intersection of leisure and terrorism.
The present book intends to fill this gap, reminding its readers not only how the notion of Otherness was drawn in Western social imaginations, but detailing how anarchism mined the ideological core of capitalism. To put it bluntly, terrorism is modern tourism by other means.
The second chapter analyses how the European intelligentsia imagined the world beyond its borders. While Europe set out to colonize the world, a strange paternalism paved the ways for indexing the new ‘non-Western Other’, as an inferior ‘entity’ in need of protection. This opened the door to a paradoxical situation: while military force conquered the world by means of the orchestration of bloody clashes, social science adopted a romantic plan to discipline ‘rebels’ by non-violent policies. One of the features that defined Western ethnocentrism was to a sentiment of paternalism, in which the ‘cultural difference’ consolidated by the scientific project produced what David Riesman called the ‘Other-oriented gaze’. The Other who does not look like me is treated as a good, though inferior, savage. As a result of this, European expansion coincided with great technological advances that were capitalized by literature and novel industries to flourish as never before. At this juncture, the gap between periphery and center, which had been fostered during the colonization process, widened as European nations adopted capitalism as their economic system.
The third chapter discusses critically the concept of civility. Confronting the Hobbesian thesis and the call for a sense of security, we understand the nation-state to have been legitimated by the law-making process that dissociated the needs of individuality from a third object. Leviathan not only monopolized force to maintain a climate of order and civil security, but educated its populace to accept the impossibility of exercising violence. While the sense of state power was imposed, the varied experiences of the citizenry divided ethnicities that shared the same tradition into two contrasting, occasionally contending, sides. As a disposition of power, the creation of borders (acknowledging the Foucaldian perspective) was of paramount importance in the production of a national sense of well-being. While industrialism emancipated medieval peasants from their attachment to the soil, urbanization impacted heavily on social scaffolding through its slums and ghettos. Against this backdrop, the new concept of civility erected a barrier between the modern city and the external world.
The fourth chapter, on the rise of the nation-state and free transit, outlines the conquest of the Americas as a key event in the expansion of capitalism. Following Anthony Pagden’s thesis, we describe how the discourse of hospitality was politically modulated to validate the idea that aboriginals were subhumans. In part, this was because Spain colonized South America in the same way that Rome did Europe, but what is important to discuss is the extent to which hospitality played a vital role subordinating indigenous to European archetypes at the time when it was endorsing the legitimacy of Spain’s dominance over this New World. In so doing, not only did hospitality participate in the ideological discourse of the nation-state, but free transit became the oxygen of the West.
Cosmopolitanism has its risks, and the fifth chapter is vital in understanding the common thread of the argument in this discussion for two main reasons. Throughout the nineteenth century a powerful force of migrants arrived in the Americas, fulfilling the need for new workers in United States, Brazil and Argentina. The passage from the middle ages to industrialism impoverished thousands of peasants, and this irreversible trend led many people to migrate in quest of better opportunities. Within the cohort of European migrants, a few anarchists advocated radical violence not only against political authority but also against capital owners. While governments struggled to deport them, a more subtle group set about organizing trade unions. A newly emerging workforce was ideologically trained by anarchists coming from Italy, Russia and Germany. At the same time, nation-states experienced the arrival of better working conditions, paving the path for the rise of modern tourism and mobility. Terrorism was expelled beyond the state’s frontiers. This introduces two important assumptions that are examined and developed in the book. The first is the assertion that without terrorism, modern tourism would never have come to exist. The second is that modern tourism is an ‘inoculated’ (if not disciplined) form of anarchist terrorism.
Chapter six focuses on the current interplay between tourism and terrorism insofar as violence is now directed against anonymous civilians. Most recent terrorist attacks have taken place at leisure-spots: malls, beaches, night clubs, promenades or other tourist destinations. Notably, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, at the time leader of ISIS, declared ‘jihad’ against modern tourism. If the sense of mobility was historically manipulated for European nations to show their supremacy over the non-Western world, now terrorism seems to apply a similar concept against the most important centres of consumption of the West. Doubtless, the sentiment of panic each time these leisure-spots are hit is tripled by the coverage of the mass media. This supports the observation made by Howie (2012) and M. Eid (2014) in their seminal books: oddly, the mass media serves as the conduit for terrorists to disseminate their message. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that terrorists do not want a lot of people dying; rather, they want a lot of people watching! In this chapter we coin the term ‘Thana-capitalism’ to denote a new stage of production in late capitalism, where the Other’s death has become the main commodity that mediates dealings between citizens (consumers) and their institutions.
The seventh chapter centres on how psychological fear is stimulated not only to discipline the workforce internally, but also by constructing what Jean Baudrillard dubbed ‘the culture of disaster’. In consonance with this polemical, but still solid, argument, we emphasize the need to break the vicious circle comprising journalism, which seeks to disseminate and amplify news and opinion about terrorism to maintain and increase sales and profits, and terrorist cells, which need mass publicity for their acts and threats. In these times of Thana-Capitalism, one of the paradoxes is that though the mass audience considers acts and threats of terrorism disturbing it cannot stop consuming news about them. Symbolically, this happens because Others’ suffering reinforces the supremacy of self, which remains untouched by the cruelty of terrorists. Others’ deaths remind us not only how special we are, but also that we are chosen to be part of an exclusive class – death-seekers.
Last but not least, the eighth chapter examines how the crystallization of Thana-Capitalism affected the tourism industry changing the ways the unfamiliar, the Other, is contemplated and scrutinized. Needless to say, anthropology plays a leading role in providing new theories to understand ‘cosmopolitanism’, and the position of this globally dangerous Other in Europe. Engaging directly with Derrida and other scholars, this section focuses on how hospitality is dying. The end of hospitality represents a serious challenge to Europe simply because it was ‘the alma matter’ of rationality and social trust. Over time, terrorism targets ‘the exemplary center of consumption’ to extort resources, attention, counter-violence from developed nation-states. Technologies of surveillance deployed at borderlands are strengthened. In the years to come, philosophical discour...