The Threat of Jihadist Terror to Liberal Democracies

Confusion and incoherence in the theory and practice of war—who or what precisely is the enemy, how war should be prosecuted and legally addressed, and what the answers to these questions might entail for our future political and social organisation, both globally and locally—preoccupy the Western liberal mind. These critical questions arise from the long war on terror.

Since 2001, we can identify participants in the “coalition of the willing” against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, pursuing a reasonably robust, if flawed, global strategy abroad. Yet this is offset by the tolerance afforded to illiberal ideologies at home. In some cases, official tolerance has even extended to appointing illiberal ideologues to commissions advancing racial and religious harmony in the interest of promoting an official post-national politics of multicultural diversity.

There is a paradox at the heart of the Western secular faith in multicultural pluralism. This faith assumes that policies promoting diversity and the distinctiveness of cultural attachments will build an integrated yet diverse community, and speed the inexorable global movement to a harmonic end of history rather than its opposite—separatism, civilisational clash and communalism. But an illiberal ideology like Islamism does not play by the same pluralist rules. How has this paradox evolved and what are its political implications for the liberal democratic state?

More precisely, if the long war of the twenty-first century is not against an abstraction termed “terror” but should be targeted at a distinctly modern ideological phenomenon that has evolved into its most dangerous form not in the Middle East, but in modern cosmopolitan cities such as London, Paris, New York and Sydney, what features of the post-Cold War economic and political order afford it succour and encouragement? Moreover, how can developed liberal democratic market states respond to this phenomenon without undermining the pluralist and secular conditions of their own emergence?

The new catastrophic terror that has come to shape the post-Cold War democratic state order is, it has been argued, the price paid for the way the Cold War ended. The somewhat limited strategy of Cold War terrorism, which sought media attention but limited casualties, mutated into a transnational form facilitated by the end of the Cold War balance and the spread of low-intensity ethno-religious conflicts in failing states and states of concern. The new interconnectedness brought about by the revolution in communications facilitated trade, population flows and economic growth, but it also fuelled anxiety and transnational crime, in other words, an emerging “borderless world” that some commentators in the 1990s naively welcomed.

Initially, the new warfare scenario confined itself to states or regions “of concern”—Afghanistan, the Balkans, the Middle East—but circumstances and technology afforded the opportunity for the failed-state world, characterised by myths of ethno-religious purity and primal attachments, to hit back violently at the cosmopolitan world. Whilst an EU-style post-national, managerial bureaucracy sought through endless discourse to erase the potential for conflict, the new terror aimed at catastrophic impact rather than tactical civilian casualties.

As the strategy became more unpredictable and asymmetric, it also became amorphous and protean. Al Qaeda—or what we call Al Qaeda—for instance, represents the most significantly evolved proponent of this demassified, polymorphous, internetted strategy. It operates increasingly as a franchised and deterritorialised arrangement in states of concern, but situates elements of its command and control in multicultural cities like London, Kuala Lumpur or Melbourne.

In fact, the congeniality of multicultural global cities for the support networks of transnational ethno-religious struggle has over time promoted a sui generis militancy in the diaspora characterised by groups like Al Muhajiroun (the migrants), based in London from the mid-1990s until the UK government banned their activities in the wake of the July 2005 attack on the London Underground. Its ideology continues through the good offices of the officially non-violent, but equally intransigent pan-Islamist organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir, headquartered in London but with branches throughout South-East Asia and Australia. The tendency to write the threat off as either a minority avocation that had nothing to do with Islam, or to offer its more articulate spokespersons grants or appointments to commissions addressing diversity issues and ethnic and religious exclusion, has only facilitated its appeal.

It also evinced the curious Western elite desire to build bridges where none can exist. Many academic commentators of a supposedly critical perspective discountenanced the political religion (to use Eric Voegelin’s useful term) informing the actions of homegrown adherents of jihad, in favour of second-order explanations that attributed “root causes” of violence to factors like alienation and social deprivation, again in a misunderstanding of the nature of the ideology. In a similar spirit of wishfulness, common lawyers and their media offshoots regularly bewailed the extension of powers of detention and pre-emption extended to police and security agencies, despite the fact that such powers were subject to parliamentary oversight and review. In fact, without the powers of detention and surveillance granted under the UK Terrorism Act 2006 and extensions to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979, and the Australian Anti-Terrorism Act 2006, homegrown jihadi attacks like those planned on Heathrow airport in 2006, by the Birmingham terrorists in 2013 and the Benbrika group in Melbourne in 2005 or the Holsworthy barracks plot in Sydney would not have been prevented.

In this evolution of jihadist practice, Al Qaeda and its offshoots are influenced not only by the modern business theory of franchising, but also significantly by the tactics evolved by groups equally opposed to pluralist, secular, liberal modernity. These take the form of cults like Aum Shinrikyo, or racial purists like Aryan Nation and its European neo-Nazi affiliates, or lone wolves like the Unabomber or Anders Breivik. It was the US Aryan Nation strategist Louis Beam who first identified the potential of a protean leaderless resistance devising random acts of violence in the name of a liberation struggle.

Ironically, this strategy and Beam’s thinking currently shape post-Abbottabad Al Qaeda practice, as recent attacks in Boston and South-East London demonstrate. Beam based his strategy for liberating the American fatherland from decadent socialist pluralism on what he termed the Phantom Cell, an arrangement he derived from the Correspondence Societies of the American Revolution. The strategy assumes that “the purpose of leaderless resistance is to defeat state tyranny, [in this] all members of phantom cells will react to objective events in the same way”. This approach, fed by access to modern news media, makes previous modes of revolutionary organisation, based on a pyramid structure, inefficient and ultimately unsuccessful.

This postmodern leaderless strategy organises itself via information networks, an intelligence revolution that the internet makes possible, and facilitates protean resistance via an informal networked structure with operations carried out in the name of the ideology (a strategy also favoured by other militant single-issue extremist groups like the Animal Liberation Front), by actors who have only a virtual affiliation with the ideology or its leadership. This is how the “cleanskins” problem arises in the case of the British 7/7 bombers or more recent home-grown cells. This is facilitated by the still largely unsupervised activities of radical imams at mosques like Finsbury Park in London before 2005 or the community centre mosque in Plumstead in South London where the home-grown jihadist Michael Adebolajo, born in Lambeth, was recruited to fight by radical cleric Usman Ali for “our Muslim land”.

Similarly in Lakemba in Sydney’s west, radical mosques recruit disaffected youth for jihad in Syria against the interests or long-term security of Australia. In this way, the latest globalisation-friendly version of polymorphous violence has adapted to the character of post-Fordist economic organisation, and the post-nation-state networked world order. It has nourished itself on the very structure it sets out to attack. Its post-state manifestation in London, Hamburg, Sydney or New York is therefore more, not less, effective than the locally or nationally focused variety. The increased anxiety characteristic of the post-national state in fact enhances the strategic appeal of an emancipatory or apocalyptic fundamentalism. It is particularly attracted to the post-national global cosmopoli, and especially Londonistan, whose diversity it defines itself against, but whose tolerance and openness it finds highly congenial for organisational purposes.

The unpredictable character of these new de-territorialised strategies, promoted by those who find the character and values of liberal democratic secularism deeply uncongenial, presents a significant and misunderstood challenge. It is a challenge that academic and media elites would prefer to overlook, fearing perhaps the loss of even the promise of control that pluralism would like to offer. How then does the liberal democratic state, the secular product of modernity and enlightenment, respond to this postmodern and illiberal challenge?

The success of jihadism in its ability to attract publicity and gain recruits resides in its adjustment to the character of globalisation and the opportunity it affords to re-create in late modernity the caliphate of the Islamic first century. This virtual alternative attracts disciples by promoting an interpretation of the politico-religious vision of the first successors of Mohammad—the rashidun, but now adapted technologically and ideologically towards a neo-medieval condition of competing jurisdictions made possible by globalisation and the porosity of state boundaries in Western democracies. This neo-traditionalist alternative flourishes not only in states of concern but also in modern cosmopolitan cities. In fact, it is in these re-tribalised cosmopolitan hubs that the ideology encourages a new anomic generation, through sympathetic religious and educational structures, to act unpredictably and violently, rather like the attraction of anorexia or self-harm to emotionally unstable youth. However, where the government and its welfare agencies condemn or intervene in such “lifestyle” choices, adherence to a non-negotiable political religion is still officially viewed, somewhat curiously, as a matter for dialogue.

The structure and the strategy of this violence therefore require a suitably calibrated ideology. Thus, although Aum Shinrikyo, Aryan Nation, Greenpeace, the Animal Liberation Front and more recently the English Defence League have developed tactics suitable to disrupting the evolving transnational world order, Al Qaeda-style jihadism has proved most successful in devising a trans­national ideology supported by a sophisticated media strategy to win hearts and minds locally and globally to overthrow this order. The structure and the strategy, in other words, require an ideology.

This ideological development is essentially the product of the slow-motion collision between the Muslim world and the challenge presented by modern technology since the nineteenth century. This collision has been fateful, but little understood. We can, however, provisionally suggest the lineaments of a plausible sociology, based on the neglected insights of Ernest Gellner.

From at least the early nineteenth century those who thought about the predicament of Islam (its evident political and economic weakness and the psychic pain this engendered) required re-opening the gates of ijtihad or interpretation of what the Prophet’s message might entail for the challenge of modernity. The challenge elicited a range of responses that varied from a requirement to privatise religion in order to create an Arab equivalent of the modern European nation-state, through a moderate program of moral reform, to a radical program that sought to rid Islam of various cultural accretions, so that the message could clearly transmit. It is this latter response, taken in a notably ideological direction in the course of the twentieth century, that particularly perplexes and challenges the modern liberal market state with its openness to trade and communications and its porous borders.

This neo-orthodoxy became associated with greater piety as well as upward mobility. Authority moved from clan elder to mullah, mosque and madrassa, while standards were transmitted via the printed page and website rather than via oral tradition leavened by local customary practice. In Islamic terms, this was advancement. Indeed it was modernisation. In the postmodern, post-colonial, globalised world, identification with scripturalist high culture becomes the hallmark of urban sophistication—the bourgeois Muslim woman in London, Sydney or Jakarta wears the hijab not because her mother did, but precisely because she did not. It exemplified a network-based social order without a real society (a deterritorialised umma) that is atomised without individualism. Nonetheless, the paradox of Islamic neo-orthodoxy especially in its more aggressively militant form is that it proliferates under conditions of multicultural, liberal tolerance. This in turn has occasioned a further paradox, this time for secular faith in a global democratic project.

The first problem for liberal tolerance and a relaxation of counter-terror laws, as a means to address a resurgent Islamist ideology prepared to use that tolerance for its own illiberal ends, is that the Enlightenment faith in reason and progress overcoming tradition has not been fulfilled. Instead, technology, particularly the modern media and the internet, has fuelled a retreat into faith-based identity politics and primal narcissism to address the anxiety created by globalisation.

In fact, the recourse to neo-orthodoxy with boots on evolved out of the failure of a variety of illiberal nationalist and pan-nationalist projects in the Muslim world, further exacerbated in the Middle East by the goad of Israel and the enduring sore of Palestine. In order to address this failure in the post-colonial Muslim world, various groups began to view jihad as a necessary physical struggle undertaken by an umma that constituted a trans-territorial ideocracy.

The Afghan war against the Soviet occupation (1979 to 1989) and its success in defeating the lesser Soviet Satan, enabled the networking of disparate groups via an evolving Islamist international network, which the end of the Cold War made possible. It was in this context that Al Qaeda’s strategist Ayman al Zahwari decided to internationalise the jihad. Al Qaeda thus constituted itself as “a new force outside the international order”.

The non-Arab Muslim world, particularly its Eurabian extension, has increasingly generated a particularly intractable version of this ideology and its legitimation of catastrophic violence, that as Olivier Roy observes, “has nothing to do with importing Islamic radicalisation to Europe”. On the contrary it has evinced a sui generis process of ideological radicalisation with the potential for projecting catastrophic extremism globally.

The development of liberal democracy into transnational markets and away from its nation-state form has engendered what Walter Russell Mead has termed a millennial capital order, the lineaments of which we are only now beginning to discern. Millennial capital, with its wide, deep and increasingly global financial markets, has not facilitated global economic or political integration. Rather, it has thrown up a postmodern, chiliastic, millennial antithesis to the market state, capable of employing the technology fashioned by modular association, in order to overthrow and replace it with a totalistic alternative. (Not, it should be emphasised, confined to Al Qaeda or Islam—it is easy to envisage a viridescent Green or hardcore White-Right version equally atomised, without individualism and with a cult leader conveniently located in cyberspace.)

How does democracy in its liberal or pluralist sense respond? From the US, UK and Australian perspectives, we would have to say, not very well. In Britain, Blairite multiculturalism, which assumed a quasi-official status after 1997, led to an incoherent vacillation between prosecution of extremist communities prepared to wage external and internal jihad as a reflection of their culture, and a celebration of diversity as “cool”.

Policy responses after the London 7/7 attacks have consequently combined tyranny, expanding bureaucracy, anarchy and indifference. Worryingly, the panic and media-driven responses evident in post-9/11 policy-making often fail to build upon those elements that have sustained the integrity and success of market-state democracy. Most notable in this respect had been the neglect of credible and functioning sovereign state institutions. As Thomas Hobbes might have observed, there are only two things you can do with sovereignty, use it or lose it. More particularly, as Leo Strauss and others have pointed out, at the beginning of modern statecraft in Europe in the sixteenth century, those who understood the dire political consequences of religious enthusiasm also recognised the necessity of maintaining the state and its right to determine these matters.

The often misunderstood doctrine of raison d’état actually assumed that the res publica was the public thing that involved the whole citizen body and as such possessed a right to self-preservation. From a liberal democratic perspective, moreover, it is the common law that constitutes the sinews of the body politic of the state, and this should be carefully adapted to the new security environment whilst maintaining the basis of civil association. It should neither be arbitrary nor hostage to ethical abstractions maintained in pre-millennial-era conventions.

It is via the common law made by a sovereign parliament equally applied without cultural exemption that a shared political association may be maintained and membership sustained—this might entail identity cards and controlled skilled immigration (old Europe increasingly looks to Australia and Canada here). At the same time, as democratic arrangements will be forced to devise new security operations both at home and abroad, this will entail increased government and increased cost. The minimal state is at a discount even though, paradoxically, the libertarian agenda is likely to be carried through in areas like health, education and pension provision.

All these developments imply the evolution of a less egalitarian, more provisional and modular understanding of citizenship than that envisaged by Tom Paine or Thomas Jefferson. We could plausibly see market states evolving categories of temporary membership with perhaps lesser rights and lesser commitments. It will also require an increased attention to the media, particularly the new media of the internet, to fashion technologically new understandings that breed illiberal selves. The “e-democratic” potential of the internet has yet to be effectively exploited by modern democracies, whilst the cyber-caliphate and virtual terror already constitute a new reality. Thoreau observed that the modern condition created lives of quiet desperation; the networked world of millennial capital creates instead unquiet desperation that the new trans­national illiberalism endlessly exploits.