From South Atlantic Quarterly, 2002, vol. 101

 

 

Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror


by John Milbank

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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oncerning the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11, the initial question one should ask is exactly why there was outrage on such a gigantic scale? After all, however unusual and shocking this event may have been, people are killed in large numbers all the time, by terror, politics, and economic oppression. Within a matter of days after the attack on the World Trade Center, the United States already may have killed more people in response to the attacks than died in them, through increased and tightened sanctions in the Near East which bring pressure on governments through the deliberate terrorization of civilian populations. So why this unprecedented outrage? There may be two answers here.

            The first answer is the threat to sovereign power that is involved. It is, after all, sovereign power that is supposed to have the right over life and death, whether in Islam or in the West. The sovereign state can execute people. It can pass laws that increase the lives of some and decrease the lives of others. It can fight wars. It can impose sanctions that kill. Individuals who take upon themselves this right of life and death

 

 

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are considered to be criminals. But to kill on this scale throws everything into confusion. Is this a crime? No, it seems, because killing on this scale is something only the state is supposed to be capable of. Is it then an act of war? Well, if so, then is it a different kind of war, because only sovereign states can wage war. It actually seems to be worse than normal war waged by a state, because it is a threat to the very idea of the state itself, and so to sovereignty itself.

            One must here ignore the pieties about the dreadfulness of terrorism. The West and Israel itself engage in or covertly support many acts of terror all over the globe, and indeed terrorism has only arisen as a tactic of minority resistance in imitation of the new late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century deployment of unabashed physical and psychological terror against civilians as a primary instrument of war in contradiction to all traditional Christian teaching and even practice, up to a certain point. (These horrific new tactics were arguably first taken up during the American Civil War.) The terrorism that is seen here as being uniquely evil is the terrorism that assumes a power that is supposed to belong to states alone. I am not at all saying that the people who blew up the World Trade Center buildings were anarchists. No, they were perhaps indeed Islamic totalitarians who wished to establish something like an Islamic International (this applies to Al-Qaeda; whereas the Egyptian Hamas organization aspires to Islamic nation-statehood). But their mode of action threatens the very idea of the state. So that is my first answer.

            But answer two is that there was a hidden glee in the official outrage on the part at least of some, though certainly not of others. The attack seemed to give an opportunity to do things that some factions in the West have wanted for a long time. What are these things? An assault on so-called rogue states; a continuous war against "terrorists" everywhere; a policing of world markets to ensure that free-market exchange processes are not exploited by the enemies of capitalism. But, above all, the attack provided an opportunity to reinscribe state sovereignty.

            The modern secular state rests on no substantive values. It lacks full legitimacy even of the sort that Saint Paul ascribed to the "powers that be," because it exists mainly to uphold the market system, which is an ordering of a substantively anarchic (and therefore not divinely appointed in Saint Paul's sense) competition between wills to power—the idol of "liberty," which we are supposed to worship. This liberty is dubious, since it is impossible to

 

 

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choose at all unless one is swayed one way or another by an influence: hence a supposedly "pure" free choice will only be a cover for the operation of hidden and uniform influences. People who fondly imagine themselves the subjects of their "own" choices entirely will, in reality, be the most manipulated subjects and the most incapable of being influenced by goodness and beauty. This is why, in the affluent Anglo-Saxon West today, there is so much pervasively monotonous ugliness and tawdriness that belies its wealth, as well as why there are so many people adopting (literally) the sing-song accent of self-righteous complacency and vacuous uniformity, with its rising lilt of a feigned questioning at the end of every phrase. This intonation implies that any overassertion is an impolite infringement on the freedom of the other, and yet at the same time its merely rhetorical interrogation suggests that the personal preference it conveys is unchallengeable, since it belongs within the total set of formally correct exchange transactions. Pure liberty is pure power—whose other name is evil.

 

            The nation-state itself creams off and piles up this pure power in the name of a people. Every modern state therefore is inherently semiracist because it proclaims the supreme interest of a discrete populace, defined by legacy as well as territory. This semiracist holding together of a people requires an exterior—a potential enemy. As Carl Schmitt argued, the occasional emergency of war is crucial for the (one must add, modern) state's legitimacy. But globalization puts the modern state into crisis. There is now the prospect of no more exterior, no more real foes. Sovereign power is consequently threatened. If it remains merely domestic, it will wither away in the face of multiple loyalties. If it exports itself and drives toward the global state, then it still needs an enemy who is other. Without an external enemy, the enemy must now be internal, lurking everywhere. Without the possibility of the occasional emergency of war, there must be perpetual war against an internal danger. As Jean Baudrillard has said, globalization inevitably evokes its own shadow: the irruptive challenge of suppressed singularity, which when all other resources are lost to it, can still make the symbolic gesture of sacrificial death (suicidal self-sacrifice or the sacrificial murder of others; the two being often combined, as on September 11).[1]  A monotonous totality both requires this opposition and tends to provoke its unexpected instance.

            Because of its history of expanding frontiers—its internal wars against native Americans, African Americans, British loyalists, Spaniards in the South and West, the dissenting Confederate states, southern and Central

 

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America, dealers in alcohol and drugs, and Communists in the 1950s, the United States has in a sense been long preparing for this new sort of global conflict. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued in their Empire, American neo-Roman imperialism works by a constant subsumption and inclusion of "others," such that difference is apparently welcomed, yet actually subordinated to an unremitting uniformity. This subsumption coincides with an obliteration of the older distinction between colonies as the extracapitalist sources of "primary accumulation" and the fully capitalized home markets. Now all comes to be within the unrestricted one world market.

            This contrasts with older European imperialism, which held the other at a subordinated distance, permitting its otherness, even while subordinating it for the sake of an exploitation of natural and human resources. And one should I think add to Hardt and Negri that, in the case of Britain and France, there were also many utopian imperialist schemes that went beyond even this subordination and tended to deploy the peripheries and "savage" to mock the center and "civilized" (see for example Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines). Such nuances are often overlooked in pseudo-left-wing American "postcolonial" discourses, which actually assist the ideology of the American Right by implying the original "innocence" of the United States as a once-colonized nation, and it's natural solidarity with all the colonized. (The frequent simplifications concerning Ireland, and the downgrading of the Anglo-Saxon as opposed to the Celtic contributions to the history of liberty—both are real—fall within this paradigm.)

            These implications tend to conceal the fact that American neocolonialism is yet more insidious than the older variety. It does not attend to cultural difference (like, for example, the British law code for India, assisted by the historicist and comparativist work of Henry Maine); it pursues no substantive goals of the political and social good (however deluded the ones of old empire may often have been) and seeks instead both for pure economic exploitation and for the absolute imposition of American signifiers. Under French and British colonial law child labor was banned; now within the "American Empire," but of course with total European connivance, it is everywhere rife. One can also note here that where British imperialism was purely economic, it tended also to be more corrupt and oppressive, as in the case of China and the opium trade (see Kazuo Ishiguro's novel When We Were Orphans), or the ruthless policy of divide and rule pursued in the Near East, which the United States and the UK now perpetuate.

 

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            While Hardt and Negri concede that neoempire in certain ways outdoes old empire in vileness, they still subscribe to a dialectical myth that renders this more nakedly capitalist phase of empire somehow a necessary staging post on the way to socialist utopia. Surely we need instead more sober reflections on the temporary need for some sort of more benignly parentalist assistance for the South from the North? So much of the South is devastated in its internal resources and in any case so bound up with the North that only global solutions enabled by a West newly committed to global equality will be viable. Tony Blair at times appears to have such a vision: unfortunately these times are utterly vitiated by his continuing devotion to the untrammeled market.

            Instead, any enactment of this vision would require a withdrawal by the North from its unqualifiedly capitalist commitments. But what we now see is the very opposite: a fearful extension of American Republican Imperialism, in terms of a logic that is impeccably Machiavellian. The unity of the republic, snatched by fate out of time for the sake of its own negative freedom (and the negative freedom of its citizens insofar as this is maintained through their absolute submission to the republic) can only be secured through constant reunification in the face of a threat to this freedom. Given that the republic is isolationist and has no interest other than its own freedom, it is not able to mediate with the other, even in an old-European hierarchical fashion. Instead, it can only withstand by subsuming, by expanding at least its frontiers of cultural reach. Commentators who have tended to think that Bush was jolted out of isolationism by the catastrophe miss the point that isolation and hysterical expansion are two halves of the American Republican dialectic.

            Moreover, the American sense that what is isolated and expanded is unquestionably the acme of human political achievement, frozen forever in an ideal constitution, disallows the self-denying ordinances, the sense of temporariness, of passing expediency, and of fearful desire to avoid hubris that is expressed, for example, in Kipling's poem "Recessional." American imperialism never supposes that the Captains and the Kings must one day depart.

            This is why, in an emergency that tends to release the unspoken truth, there has been so much apparently insane language concerning "infinite" processes: an infinite war, infinite justice, infinite retribution—sustained in George Bush's terrifying address to Congress. There he declared, for the first time perhaps since Hitler's announcement of the Third Reich, a kind

 

 

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of state of perpetual emergency. He announced a new sort of war without aims or a foreseeable end, often to be fought in secret. Those not with the United States and Britain in the war were declared to be against them and allied with terrorists. This is potentially a license for totalitarianism, and already, for the sake of fighting a vague conflict explicitly projected to last almost forever, it has become unquestionable that basic legal procedures and respect for people's privacy should be suspended.

            The existence of a state of emergency was witnessed in the statement by Donald Rumsfeld (about which many of his colleagues exhibited understandable unease) that non-Afghan Taliban should be "either killed or taken prisoner." This was more or less a license to the Northern Alliance to kill these people like dogs, on the very dubious assumption that they were somehow implicated in the attack on the Twin Towers. Of course even if they had been, the proper response would be to arrest and try them; yet implicit in Rumsfeld's statement was an exceptional suspension of all normal legality: both the norms of criminal legality and the norms of military legality. Because one is dealing with a threat to sovereignty as such, law as such no longer applies, since the merely formal, decisionistic basis of law in a state that exists mainly to undergird the market cannot appeal to a natural equity beyond itself. Without the state, there is, for the modern outlook, no good and evil, and therefore against the enemies of the state, neither morality nor law applies. They are neither warriors for another power (or an internal counterpolitics), whom one must respect as individuals, nor transgressors of the law whom one must respect as malefactors deserving punishment and the instigation of repentance.

            No, they have sunk beneath humanity, as Dick Cheney later confirmed. Captured "terrorists" he declared "don't deserve to be treated as criminals. They don't deserve the same guarantees and safeguards that would be used for an American citizen going through the normal judicial process." This exclusionary logic has been impeccably realized in the confinement of Al-Qaeda suspects in animal cages exposed to the elements off Cuba. This stark denial of the imago dei for "terrorist suspects" tends to expose the concealed racist basis of the usual talk of "human rights." This "universal" notion was originally invoked by the West in order to intervene in the internal affairs of nonwhite countries, from Turkey in the case of the Armenian massacre, onward. But as soon as the white West is threatened, it becomes clear that rights are things that archetypally belong to "American citizens" under "normal,"

 

 

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 which means local and not at all universal, circumstances. This is all a very far cry from Harry Truman in 1945, who insisted, against Churchill's unreflecting proposal to shoot the Nazis in a corner, that "this would not sit easily on the American conscience."

            The suspension of all norms of legality is further confirmed by the stipulation that future secret executions of those covertly convicted of terrorism can be watched by the relatives of victims of September 11. Here one is confronted with the purest barbarism: in the past, or in the Islamic present, public executions possess at least the primitive rationale of visible justice and warning, while unwitnessed modern execution exposes a certain proper shame and hesitancy on the part of the state, but selectively witnessed executions obliterate the line between punishment and vengeance, since all that matters here is the death of the other power threatening "domestic" power and lives. How is one to interpret this as anything other than a kind of sop to a mass psychopathology?

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            Such emergency measures are not really being proposed because of the unique character of terrorism, but rather because of the perception of a new threat to sovereignty and capital. Hence the new European antiterrorist laws, which define as terroristic any actions intended "to destroy [European] political, economic or social structures" and include "the illicit capture of state or government installations, the means of public transport, infrastructures, public places" seem designed more to inhibit militants than to catch terrorists. As Alima Boumediene-Thiery put it in Le Monde, "Bin Laden and his friends aren't in the habit of walking about without papers with bombs in their pockets; nor of occupying usines and banks: they direct them."[2]

            So one is confronted with an unspeakably bizarre turn of events whereby, in a matter of months, one single terroristic assault has led to the permanent suspension of ancient Anglo-Saxon liberties, including habeas corpus, in both Britain and the United States. How does this shockingly abrupt transformation relate to the idea of a war of civilizations, which has for some time been in the air?

            Within the perspective of Samuel Huntington, who first spoke of this type of war, Islam has been seen as the other, outside the Western legacy and somewhat immune to Western post-Enlightenment values. However, Islam should be thought of as both other and yet not other.

 

 

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            Revived Islamic civilization is in some ways a challenge to the Western secular state, but it is also much more like a rival twin than we care to imagine. Recent scholarship is showing just how Islamic the West itself has been. When the University of Oxford was founded in the late twelfth century, some scholars there took over an essentially Islamic project for the experimental control of nature that was at first to do with optics and alchemy. The Cartesian turn to the subject, the idea of knowledge as detached representation of spatialized objects, the exposition of being as univocal, all have their long-term origin in ironically the Oriental thought of Avicenna (ibn Sina). To say, as many do, that Islam was only accidentally, and for a time, the bearer of a Mediterranean civilization to which it was essentially alien is quite untrue. Even though philosophy was less easily assimilated within Islam than in Christendom, Avicenna and other philosophers were still concerned with "prophetology," or the nature of inspiration, and this profoundly inflected their rendering of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic understandings of the soul. In this crucible, protomodern ideas concerning subjectivity were forged and then handed over to the West.

            In the year 1277, the Christian West reached its crisis: certain drastic edicts issued by the archbishops of Paris and Canterbury meant that it decided more or less to outlaw the common Hellenistic legacy of Aristotle fused with Neoplatonism, and blended with allegorical readings of the Hebrew Bible, which it shared with Islam, Judaism, and Byzantium. A common culture of mystical philosophy and theology, focused around analogy and ontological participation—which has also tended to favor social participation—was rendered impossible. The West went in one direction and Islam in another, since Islam, too, inclined in this period to outlaw this perspective. Islam became a doctrinally orthodox, scriptural, and legalistic civilization to the exclusion of dialectics and mystical theology (apart from newly enhanced Sufistic tendencies).

            The conventional view is that from that point forward, the West became secular and Islam became theocratic. But that seems to me to be a half-truth. In fact, by abandoning the shared mystical outlook, Western Christian theology started to look more and more itself like Islamic orthodoxy; it started to read the Bible more like the Qur'an, allowing only the literal meaning and construing that meaning more narrowly than it had. The new stress in the fourteenth century, that only God's will makes things true and right, echoed earlier Islamic Kalam theology and some of the ideas of Al-Ghazali.

 

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            The West's attitude toward evil, with ironically the Cathars safely defeated, started to become more Manichean, again taking over the unfortunate Iranian contamination of Islam by the primordial Zoroastrian tradition. But, above all, in the political domain, the Islamic alliance of the absolute will of the Caliph linked to the will of Allah, and with the right to fight holy wars, was taken over by Christian thought. As earlier in Islam, so now also in the West, a merely de facto grounding of state sovereignty in absolute right to do what it likes is linked to its mediation of the will of God. Thus the early Western nation-state started to fight holy wars within Christendom itself. Modern Islam and Christianity are not after all so dissimilar in certain ways.

            What I am wanting to suggest here is that theocratic notions of sovereignty are not simply something archaic within Islam that stands over against our Western modernity. In many ways theocratic notions are specifically modern in their positivity and formality (as Carl Schmitt indicated). Bush in a crisis has appealed to the supposed divine destiny of America, and it is modern Judaism that has lapsed into a statist, Zionist form.

            There is now a terrible symbiosis arising between Zionism and the American Protestant and un-Christian literalistic reading of the Old Testament in the Puritan tradition, which equates Anglo-Saxondom with Israel. Both ascribe to an idolatrously nontypological and noneschatological reading of God's "free election of Israel," as if really and truly God's "oneness" meant that he arbitrarily prefers one lot of people to another (as opposed to working providentially for a time through one people's advanced insight—as Maimonides rightly understood Jewish election); and as if he really and truly appoints to them, not just for a period, but for all time, one piece of land to the exclusion of others. (Regina Schwartz's The Curse of Cain, which tries to distinguish true from idolatrous monotheism in the Hebrew Bible, is highly relevant here.) There is also an unfortunate tendency within contemporary theology to play down the Christian "going beyond the law," which incoherently and anachronistically seeks a kind of alignment with post-Biblical Rabbinic law, as if this somehow had obviously more status for Christianity than Islamic law (even if we may well often find the former to be nearer to Christian charity).

            Meanwhile, the Islamic Wahhabi, to whom bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda belong, are themselves in some ways very modern. They are opposed to all iconic images, all auratic manifestations of religion; they are urban, middle-class, fanatically puritanical. They are prepared to compromise the Islamic

 

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 tradition insofar as it stands firmly against usury. And they are thoroughly in love with technology. Bin Laden in the desert with his gun is surely an American antihero: perhaps a sectarian first cousin to Joseph Smith. For it is not an accident that the Mormons—that archetypical American sect, according to Harold Bloom—express such explicit kinship with Islam.

            But of course the West and Islam have construed the legacy of theocratic sovereignty in very different ways. The West has invented a secular sphere that is neutral and unmystical: the sphere of a pure balance of power whose control is still nevertheless, in the last analysis, divinely sanctioned. Strict Islam knows only an expression of sovereignty through sacred laws. One may not much care for either variant. But on what basis can one decide that an Islamic sacral state, especially if it took a more sophisticated form than that envisaged by the Taliban, is not permissible? In reality our apparent concern for women and others persecuted by these unpleasant people is fantastically hypocritical: as recently as 1998 the Californian oil giant UNOCAL, with the backing of the United States, was trying to enlist Taliban support in building an oil pipeline through Afghanistan from the former Soviet territories to the north. Meanwhile, the manifestations of asharia law in Saudi Arabia have not appeared troublesome to Western economic interests.

            The only possible basis for refusing the legitimacy of an Islamic state would be if Islamic men, and especially Islamic women, themselves decided that they no longer wanted such a thing. This decision would amount though to a new construal of Islam, and a redefinition of Islamic community apart from the sanction of coercive law. Islam would then have to proceed in a more Sufistic direction. It is certainly not in principle up to the West to decide, but I do not think that the West as it is presently constituted can tolerate this forbearance and all its implications.

Yet properly speaking, this is a debate that Islam should be able to conduct with itself without external impediment. Such a debate could even help us in the West to realize that genuine religious pluralism and tolerance means far more than merely respecting the private beliefs of the individual. Communities also are collective realities that we should respect, within certain bounds of discrimination.

            A perpetual war against terrorism can be seen as an effort to resolve the crisis of state sovereignty in the face of globalization. Since in a real sense both the Western and the different Islamic state forms face the same crisis, one can go further and say that both terrorism and counterterrorism, which

 

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 will quickly become commingled and indistinguishable, are attempts to resolve this crisis. To see globalization on one side and anti-globalization on the other (as Baudrillard perhaps tends to do) is too simple.

            But there is also another aspect to the crisis of globalization—the economic rather than political. The West, especially the United States, has expanded its economic hegemony since the end of the cold war. Once there was no longer any need to pander to third world regimes in order counter Soviet influence, the United States, mostly supported by Europe, proceeded to set up economic structures that operated entirely in its own interests, with the result that global inequality has vastly increased as well as environmental damage, which is sometimes the direct result of U.S. intervention, as in Columbia at the present moment. These structures have included the liberalization of markets and the removal of all inhibitions on stock exchange speculation, as well as the scandalous patenting of genetically altered (and thereby probably contaminated) crops allied to the outlawing of the natural varieties produced, particularly in South America.

            But now these hegemonic economic structures show signs of impending implosion: supply has been outrunning demand; computer technology has been overinvested; Western interests in older manufacturing have been possibly rashly sold off; and domestic shares and economically crucial information has gotten into the hands of people who are potential enemies. The United States and Europe are consequently faced with a need to implement more internal regulation—but also with the specter of having already let things slip beyond their control. We seem to have reached the moment in history prophesied by Franz Steiner in his essay "On the Civilising Process," when so many forces of danger have been unleashed in a "civilised" society without taboos, that these dangers must be relentlessly policed. Steiner conjectured that this would simply drive the dangers "inwards," so that as humans become more and more subject to terroristic counterterror, the more they will all tend to become pathological, potentially terroristic subjectivities.

            The assumption prior to this new turn has been that the market and freedom simply line up with Western dominance. Now, however, we are beginning to see how a small number of hostile, politically motivated investors can reap devastating effects. September 11 was a kind of chiasmus—a crossing over and reversal. During the 1990s, Western power became more and more abstracted and virtual in character: dominating the pathetically real

 

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 and material lives of people in the South. Now suddenly the West was reduced to the Paleolithic. We saw that the abstract was still partly stored in two fragile standing totems with less resilience even than neolithic standing stones. This still-fixed capital was simply knocked over. But meanwhile, in the face of the failure of Western information to stop this catastrophe, the terrorists, whoever they are, were manipulating information in order to seize the maximum abstract advantage.

            Given the sheer convenience of war and military emergency to forces wishing to resolve the twin crises of Western sovereignty and Western capitalism, one has to ask to what extent these forces were, subconsciously or consciously, urging war before September 11? The current war is a war against terrorism we are told, which has suddenly become a global and immediate threat, though we were not generally told this before the catastrophe. And in fact there is much evidence that global terrorism has been recently in decline rather than to the contrary. Therefore there is every reason to suspect that this war is not simply a war against terrorism, but is also a war against multiple targets, designed to ensure the continued legitimacy of the American state and the global perpetuation of the neocapitalist revolution of the 1980s.

Ever since January 2001 at the very least, crisis has surely been in the air. Bush withdrew from international agreements on ecology, weaponry, debt, and the pursuit of justice—most ironically of all he refused to acknowledge that any American could ever be a war criminal, thereby undercutting the legitimacy of international juridical procedures against someone like bin Laden. Meanwhile Communism in the East had been reemerging, anticapitalism was reasserting itself in Western Europe and under the banner of antiglobalization it was starting to coalesce with resistance movements in the South. Right along the Atlantic seaboard from Britain to Portugal a growing irritation with America in the face of economically disastrous flooding probably linked with global warming was evident, but was scarcely reported in the United States at all. Anti-Americanism in France and Italy was increasing at an alarming rate. In Great Britain the conservative party faced possible extinction and public opinion, moving to the left of Tony Blair, now favored action to reduce drastically corporate greed.

            More seriously still, the socialist president of Venezuela (and friend of Fidel Castro), Hugo Chavez, had been flexing considerable political muscle in the face of the general failure of neoliberal regimes in his subcontinent.

 

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 In the face of American and European opposition, he had encouraged the OPEC countries to sustain a middling level of oil prices where market demand would have forced a drop. This, obviously, had implications for Middle Eastern politics and for the U.S. hegemony in that region. For some time now, reliance even on Saudi oil had become dubious.

            Suddenly then, American and capitalist hegemony looked surprisingly fragile—although of course this should not be exaggerated. But it must have appeared fragile enough to powerful right-wing think tanks, who are in any case prone to apocalyptic scenarios: a frightening possible convergence of a protesting South America, Islamic nations rich in oil, revivified communism, and a Europe more wobbly and more prone to anti-U.S. sentiment than at any time since World War II.

            Finally, the United States was and is itself a potentially unstable polity. Cultural and political shifts in South America would have ripple effects among Latino populations in the United States; low election turnout reveals a vastly indifferent and often alienated population; an eighteenth-century constitution produces constant stasis and deadlock that cannot deliver normal modern state infrastructures and welfare provisions that form a buffer against dangerous discontents of the underprivileged; the cultural gap between coastal and middle America could erupt into something serious; edgy rival oligarchies do not trust democracy to deliver security, but believe they have to manipulate the outcome of elections (as occurred in November 2000). In the face of this potential hydra, it is clear that the U.S. establishment and the Bush administration were deeply divided and inconsistent. Pure isolationism had been one response, yet it was clear to many that this is a very risky course. Those advocating a more aggressive and interventionist strategy on the assumption that American supreme power must never be challenged (a doctrine initiated by Madeleine Albright: the Democratic Party is as guilty as anyone else in all this) were delivered, by good fortune or otherwise, a supreme present on September 11.

            Not only could national security henceforward override democracy without question, but the immediate threat of terror for the moment pulled Europe, Russia, South America, moderate Arab States, and China in line behind the United States. They have been enlisted with varying degrees of enthusiasm and begrudgingness behind a military action that will assault all those who resist the sway of the global market, as well as behind police deployments to ensure that the market and flow of information are not themselves

 

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 used against the market and against this flow. In addition, a new unity of Americans, rich and poor, behind a resurrected patriotism, has been put into place. The fractures lurking ever since November 2000 are for the moment sealed, although any manifest failure of "the war" might cause them to appear again with a vengeance.

            At the very center of this strange and multiple conflict stands oil. Detailed and objective analyses by Le Monde and many other reliable sources show that what is currently being played out in Afghanistan is not a war against terrorism nor a response to the attack on the Twin Towers, but le nouveau grand jeu de Kipling. Multiple interests are trying to seize control of one of the largest pools of natural resources in the world in the former Soviet and largely Islamic territories to the north. There is also an attempt by the gulf states to reestablish the ancient silk route to China, which would link these states all the way to Islamic Chinese communities; an attempt that the West is clearly anxious to resist. Perhaps this is partly why even Iran has now been declared by Bush to be a problem state, even though this statement has immediately led to a resurgence of conservative Islamic elements in its government. Hence the economico-political stakes are enormous and also deeply confused. I have already mentioned that the United States initially sought to cooperate with the Taliban in building oil pipelines. But they proved to be far too unreliable, especially after the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

            It has become instead imperative for the United States to lay oil and gas pipelines through a more manipulable Afghanistan, and one can note that Iran would provide a far more direct route. In the face of a rebellious OPEC, the United States badly needs a new pool of tame oil suppliers besides the increasingly edgy Saudis. At the same time this new North-South resource route will cut through the middle of the potential Islamic East-West trade and political axis. The new Afghan wedge that is being established involves also a new cooperation between the United States and Russia: the naive British were surprised to discover after the retaking of Kabul that they were not much welcome; and Russian forces were creeping back in. The trade-off for the Russians is, of course, license to pursue their own brutal policies in Chechnya; just as the trade-off for India is a stepping-up of its quarrel with Pakistan.

            Oil, therefore, is the clear focus of a crisis that has wider political and economic dimensions of the kind that I have described. As long ago as December 2000, experts in the United States were suggesting that an American-Russian

 

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 action against bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan was being planned. "The war" is therefore not simply in response to September 11, which may even have been a preemptive strike by some Islamic forces. There are also unanswered questions about the somewhat implausible tardiness of the U.S. reaction to the terror strike at every level.

            However, one does not need to suppose any sort of conspiracy theory for my main theses to stand, even if this cannot as yet be entirely ruled out. Reaction to September 11 in the U.S. government were admittedly various and variously motivated. Even George Bush kept on changing his tune as to whether a police or a military response was the more appropriate. However, one does have to ask why so universally and immediately the attack was compared to Pearl Harbor, when, after all, it was only a terrorist attack, albeit of an unprecedented appalling kind. One man destroying New York with a nuclear bomb would still be a criminal and not a warrior, and one treats all warriors with more respect than criminals. Usually one avoids seeing terrorists as engaged in war, because that is just how they want to be seen and starting a war is generally their aim. In the annals of terrorism, Al-Qaeda has now been uniquely successful: the West has played their game at every turn. For as Baudrillard says, they aim to pose against the regime of formal exchange and technological war without losses, the symbolic capital of death for a singular and substantive cause, gambling on the likelihood that, pushed to the limit of questioning, the West must still trade in the capital of death if it is to legitimate itself, which has indeed proved to be the case. Yet, as Baudrillard further contends, the West tends to lose in this exchange: the extermination of innocents with zero loss of combatants on a somewhat arbitrarily chosen stage (Afghanistan) cannot really outweigh the suicidal targeting of a supremely significant site. For this reason it must inevitably foster many more potentially self-sacrificial terrorists in the future, and in this way the West is itself sucked down a suicidal path, and led away from formal equilibrium.

            Thus, while indeed in one respect "the war" is not simply to do with September 11 and is commanded by the West's pursuit of its own economic interests, in another respect its specific mode has been dictated by the need to react symbolically and cathartically in the face of public outrage, and in this respect the terrorists have truly dictated the pace and character of recent events. A balanced analysis must do justice to both the economic and the symbolic aspects, and try to comprehend just how they interact.

 

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            In neither aspect, however, is one really talking about the tracking down of evildoers, as we have been led to believe. Supposedly "the war" in Afghanistan was pursued against bin Laden, and yet it doesn't seem likely that if he were ever caught he would be treated in accord with the Geneva Convention. If terrorism were really the issue, then much the safer thing would be to stick to the discourse of crime and the practice of regular policing and due juridical process. Anything else, as the bitter experience of the French and British shows, only tends to increase the support of terrorist groups and legitimate their operations. The ethical evil of terrorism is that, more than certain modes of conventional warfare, it directly instrumentalizes human life. But as Kenneth Surin and Rowan Williams, the Anglican Archbishop of Wales, have pointed out, this means that any response that tends to do the same thing is uniquely ineffective: in losing the ethical high ground, it also tends to lose the strategic high ground.[3] This has already happened to America, who has now bombed and killed innocent villagers supposed to be "harboring" terrorists (the results could not be seen on American television); who, together with Britain, has bombed a prisoner of war camp at Qala-i-Jhangi fortress from the air; who has caused all the major aid agencies to flee Afghanistan for the duration of the conflict, and who has delayed the arrival of humanitarian aid even after the fall of Kabul—thereby cumulatively causing thousands of innocent deaths. Even were those who say that only "massive force" stops terrorism correct (and they are unlikely to be proved right in the long term because of the delayed "blowback" phenomenon), the implication would be that only a permanently terroristic state can stop terrorism—once again wiping out all moral distinctions between the respective parties. Baudrillard rightly points out that this leveling effect between crime and punishment is vastly reinforced by the power of filmed images (when they are available), which tend to convey violence and its results rather than the reasons for violence. In this way they assist the human propensity to sustain a spiral of revenge.

            The use of cluster bombs, of heavy bombers where there were no hard targets, and the attack on unquestionably non-Taliban places like the village of Gardez show that one is not even speaking about "collateral damage" here. Most crucial of all has been, not capturing bin Laden, nor even overthrowing the Taliban, but rather exhibiting a show of terror intended to cow the entire region for the foreseeable future and bend it and parallel terrains to the Western will. From the war against Spain to capture the Philippines,

 

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 through Hiroshima and Vietnam and the Gulf conflict (where bombing has secretly continued) the United States has deployed the terrorizing and murder of civilians (five million dead in the Vietnam conflict in the whole of Southeast Asia), the massacre of disempowered individual combatants, and the use of poisonous or torturing weapons (condemned ever since antiquity by civilized nations) as a primary instrument of military and political policy. Cumulatively, this reveals the relatively genocidal tendency of specifically Republican imperialism (commencing domestically with the treatment of native Americans—who, in Virginia at least, had been significantly chary about the original break with Britain), and it amounts to an atrocity almost on a level with the Holocaust and the Gulags—raising the suspicion that U.S. and indeed European domestic democracy is a kind of harmless theatrical indulgence for the globally privileged. And this circumstance reveals to us that the trouble is not "totalitarianism" pure and simple, but the emptiness of the secular as such, and its consequent disguised sacralization of violence. There is a desperate need for the United States to reach behind its current Machiavellian, Hobbesian, and Lockean norms for its deeper and more truly radical legacy of Christian (and at times Jewish) associative agrarian and civic Republicanism, which has truly to do with just distribution and the inculcation of social virtue. Among much of the American populace, the spirit of this legacy is still extraordinarily and creatively alive, as anyone who has lived in the United States can testify. Yet it is today rarely able to achieve any conscious political articulation.

            But if we have, in the case of America's latest imperialist war, renewed instances of unjust jus in bello, is there not surely a just jus ad bellum? Well, the oft-used analogy here with medieval wars against pirates is not really right. Pirates in the Middle Ages were in many cases treated like criminals, in a period in which war itself was seen as a kind of police action—at least justified war. And because pirates were mostly afloat, they were a kind of isolatable antistate in any case. Terrorists, by contrast, live like criminals in the pores of society, and cannot readily be reached by military means. There cannot be a just war against terrorists, because they are neither a sovereign state, nor do they necessarily represent a true rebel cause that will justify talking about civil war in some sense. Thus it is not surprising that, as the fairly conservative politician Wayland Kennet pointed out in Britain, there was only a "rhetorical declaration of war" in Afghanistan, rendering it an illegal conflict from the point of view of international law.

 

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            Were this a war against terrorists it would not be a just one, primarily because it would be a lunatically "disproportionate" action. A case against Al-Qaeda should have been brought before the International Court in the Hague, which could have sponsored many effective means to reduce their influence. In any case, not the perpetrators (still at large after thousands of deaths and the sowing of the seeds of untold future misery and future terroristic movements) but a sovereign state—which was ready to hand over the supposed perpetrators, and with whom the British Foreign Office recommended a deal—have been attacked. As I have already said, the idea that Britain or the United States cares about the iniquities of the Taliban is ludicrous: they helped to create them; they are happy to tolerate the convenient Islamic atrocities of the Saudis; and having totally failed to carry out their own ground war, they were ready to let the Taliban be displaced by the equally obnoxious Northern Alliance.

One must assume that the powers that be are cynically aware of all this. So one must also assume that the war against terrorism is a cover for other operations and purposes of the kind that I have described, as well as being an unpremeditated symbolic response to an overwhelmingly symbolic event. Indeed, as Rowan Williams points out, since terrorism is a now permanently possible form of behavior, the idea of a "war" against it is as absurd as the idea of a "war on drugs."[4]

            Unfortunately, the chance for the Western state and the Western market to ensure its continued hegemony in the face of dire symbolic and real threat is also the chance of specifically modern Islamic fanaticism. Bin Laden's following among those who in other circumstances would deplore him has probably been vastly increased by the recent actions of the West and Israel.

            A war against a civilization cannot be won. And Islam could prove to be more united, less decadent, and more resilient than we imagine. Prophecy is perilous, but we may have reached the point where the only way out of a catastrophe that could potentially destroy the West is to abandon our global idolatrous worship of sacralized absolute sovereignty, and the formally neutral market, with their empty pursuit of power, in West and East alike.

            Both empty secular power and arbitrary theocratic power, in their secret complicity, show us no way forward. Neither enlightenment nor "fundamentalism" can assist us in our new plight. Instead we need to consider again the Biblical and Platonico-Aristotelian metaphysical legacy common

 

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 to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We should ponder ways in which this legacy may provide us with a certain area of common vision and practice, while at the same time respecting social and cultural spaces for exercised difference.

            Such a common vision would eschew all idolizations of formal power, whether in the case of individual "rights" or of absolute state sovereignty. Instead it would trust that human wisdom can intimate, imperfectly but truly, something of an eternal order of justice: the divine rapports of Malebranche and Cudworth. A shared overarching global polity would embody this intimation in continuously revisable structures dedicated to promoting the common good insofar as this can be agreed upon. It would also embody this imperfection through the maximum possible dispersal and deflection of human power.

            Perhaps then the noble and at times heroic perpetuation of the local and embedded also could be a proffered gift to the whole globe, which would reciprocate with a measured influence and support, instead of an obliterating equivalence. Perhaps then we would cease to sacrifice the substantively particular to the generally vacuous, ensuring that there was no need for the particular to incite in response the suicidal sacrifice of everything, forever.

 


John Milbank is Frances Myers Ball Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Virginia. He was previously a Reader in Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse. He is the author of, among other works, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason; The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture; Truth in Aquinas (with Catherine Pickstock); and a book of poems, The Mercurial Wood. Together with Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward he is a coeditor of Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, and of Routledge's Radical Orthodoxy series. His new book, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, will be published in November 2002. He is an Anglo-Catholic and a Socialist.



Notes

 

 

[1] Jean Baudrillard, "L'Esprit du Terrorisme," trans. Donovan Hohn, Harper's, February 2002, 13–18.

[2] Alima Boumediene-Thiery, Alain Krivine, and Giuseppe di Lello Finuoli, "Europe: vers l'état d'exception?" Le Monde, November 29, 2001.

[3] Kenneth Surin, "September 11th and the Ethics of Violence," in Strike Terror No More, ed. Jon L. Berquist (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002); Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002).

[4] Williams, Writing in the Dust, 37