Section
2 2. Globalization's Threat
to Domestic Order William Clinton, the 42nd
president of the United States, recently wrote in a
newspaper opinion article on the new century of
interdependence, "The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were
just as much a manifestation of this globalization and
interdependence as the explosion of economic growth." How
can globalization facilitate terrorism? [26] Globalization
defined: In its simplest terms, globalization refers to
the increasing interdependence of citizens and nations
across the world. In 2001, an international consulting firm,
A.T. Kearney, reported the extent of "globalization" for
fifty countries with "advanced economies" across the world
based on data from 1995 through 1998.[27]
Recently, the same firm revised its measures and updated its
study with data for 1999 and 2000 while extending it to 62
nations.[28] Briefly, the latest
methodology involved using multiple indicators grouped into
four dimensions: 2. Personal
contacts: international travel and tourism,
international telephone calls, and cross-border
transfers; 3. Technology:
number of internet users, internet hosts, and secure
servers; 4. Political
engagement: number of memberships in international
organizations, participation in U.S. Security Council
missions, and foreign embassies.[29] A.T. Kearney's ambitious and
laudable attempt to measure globalization may not be
perfect, but it captures the concept rather fairly. The
economic aspect of globalization, which early attracted wide
attention, is represented by various indicators of "economic
integration." The next two elements in A.T. Kearney's
model--international indicators of "personal contact" and
international applications of "technology"--extend the
thinking behind economic integration to social integration.
The last element-- "political engagement" in international
bodies--seems to round out the concept. Taken together,
these indicators all seem to reflect rather benign aspects
of interdependence among people and nations. Table 1 shows all 62 nations
rank-ordered by their combined scores on the A.T. Kearney
index of globalization. Although the United States, does not
rank at the top of the list, it does rank twelfth, which
puts it in the top 20 percent. The two Middle Eastern
countries on the list (Saudi Arabia and Egypt) are in the
bottom half. Globalization was expected
to present challenges to American government, but none that
would leave thousands of citizens dead from an attack by
non-state actors, in this case, an international
organization of terrorists. The dark side of
globalization: Many of the benign aspects of
globalization--economic integration, international travel
and communication, and technological advances--open the most
globalized nations to unanticipated, external, crippling
attacks. Global societies are wide-open targets that,
according to Homer-Dixon, are Homer-Dixon argues that the
destructive capability of small groups of individuals is
steadily increasing, "driven largely by three technological
advances: more powerful weapons, the dramatic progress in
communications and information processing, and more abundant
opportunities to divert nonweapons technologies [e.g.,
passenger airplanes] to destructive
ends."[31]
History has shown that authorities have found it hard to
prevent, much less defeat, domestic sources of terrorism
(e.g., in Northern Ireland, in the Basque region of Spain,
in Egypt, and in Israel). The ominous specter of
international terrorism poses huge threats to order in all
nations in a global world. Terrorism defined:
Political actors whom one government might call terrorists
(e.g., India's term for those who wage armed struggle
against its authority in Kashmir), another government may
call "freedom fighters" (which is how Pakistan has viewed
the same people). For governmental officials, the actor's
politics determines a terrorist versus a freedom fighter.
For neutral scholars consulting the Historical Dictionary
of Terrorism, terrorism is essentially "armed
propaganda," which involves using violence to send a
message.[32]
The more widely the terrorist act is disseminated in the
mass media, the more effective terrorism becomes as
propaganda--which makes international terrorism well-suited
to achieving political ends in a globalized
world. Although governments tend to
judge acts of "armed propaganda" as much by their motives as
their means, governments nevertheless need legal definitions
of terrorist acts in their law books. Accordingly in late
December, 2001, the European Union solemnly defined a
"terrorist act" as ii. unduly compelling
a Government or an international organisation to
perform or abstain from performing any act,
or iii. seriously
destabilising or destroying the fundamental political,
constitutional, economic or social structures of a
country or an international
organisation.[33] Point iii was followed by a
list of specific acts, including (a) attacks on a person
that may cause death; (b) attacks on a person's physical
integrity; (c) kidnapping or hostage-taking; (d) extensive
destruction to a public facility or infrastructure
(including an information system); (e) seizing an airplane
or ship; (f) manufacturing, transporting, or acquiring
weapons of any sort; release of dangerous substances that
endanger human life; (h) interfering with water supplies;
(i) threatening any above acts; (j) directing a terrorist
group; and (k) participating in the activities of a
terrorist group, including by funding or supplying
information. Note that the European Union
avoided mentioning motives in defining terrorism, being
content to define specific acts that threaten to destroy
order. Maintaining domestic
order: the first purpose of government: Throughout
history, government has served two major purposes:
maintaining order (preserving life and protecting property)
and providing public goods. More recently, some governments
have pursued a more controversial third purpose: promoting
equality. Terrorist attacks threaten order--the first
purpose of government. To the seventeenth-century
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, preserving life was the
most important function of government. In Leviathan
(1651), Hobbes described life without government as life
in a "state of nature." Without rules, people would live as
predators do, stealing and killing for their personal
benefit. In Hobbes's classic phrase, life in a state of
nature would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
He believed that a single ruler, or sovereign--which he
named Leviathan after a biblical sea monster--must possess
unquestioned authority to guarantee the safety of the weak,
to protect them from the attacks of the strong. Most of us can only imagine
what a state of nature would be like, but, from all reports,
life in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of Soviet
forces in 1989 amounted to living in a state of nature. The
disparate group of warlords and their bands of fighters that
drove out the Soviets quickly fell to fighting among
themselves in pursuit of territory, money, and even women,
which resulted in pillage, murder, and rape. Indeed,
ordinary Afghans (and even western countries at the time)
came to welcome the radical Islamic Taliban movement for
putting an end to the lawlessness. One story attributes
Mullah Omar's rise as leader of the Taliban to his leading
an attack on a group of warlords who had raped and shaved
the head of a girl.[34]
In establishing order, however, the Taliban functioned like
a religious Leviathan, enforcing an extreme interpretation
of Islamic law. Maintaining international
order: the need for a global Leviathan? In the first
half of the twentieth century, people thought of government
mainly in territorial terms. Indeed, a standard definition
of government was the legitimate use of
force--including firearms, imprisonment, and
execution--within specified geographical boundaries to
control human behavior. For over three centuries, since the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years War in
Europe, international relations and diplomacy have been
based on the principle of national sovereignty, defined as
"a political entity's externally recognized right to
exercise final authority over its affairs."[35]
Simply put, national sovereignty means that each national
government has the right to govern its people as it
wishes, without interference from other
nations. Some scholars argued
strongly early in the twentieth century that a body of
international law controlled the actions of supposedly
sovereign nations, but their argument was essentially
theoretical.[36]
In the practice of international relations, there was no
sovereign power over nations. Each enjoyed complete
independence to govern its territory without interference
from other nations. Although the League of Nations and later
the United Nations were supposed to introduce supranational
order into the world, even these international organizations
explicitly respected national sovereignty as the guiding
principle of international relations. The U.N. Charter,
Article 2.1, states: "The Organization is based on the
principle of the sovereign equality of all its
Members." As we enter into the
twenty-first century, the principle of national sovereignty
has eroded before the forces of globalization. For example,
after the European Union defined terrorism for its member
nations, it published a list of terrorist organizations that
included Irish, Basque, Greek, and Middle Eastern extremist
groups and required all member countries to freeze their
assets and arrest their members.[37]
Responding to the September 11 attack, the United States
decided to act as policeman for the world, if not quite the
world's Leviathan, to eliminate global terrorism, thus
protecting itself and other nations against similar
attacks.
1. Economic
integration: trade, foreign direct investment and
portfolio capital flows, and income from nonresident
employees and from foreign assets;
