Media Representations of Globalization
Ecause the set of historical developments collectively known as globalization are so complex and because the local effects of these developments have often been felt as disruptions of well-entrenched habits or ways of life, debates about globalization are particularly open to manipulation through the presentation of charged imagery. Since the end of the Cold War, provocative images that capture certain aspects of the world's new interconnectedness-and the accompanying need for new kinds of boundaries-have become ubiquitous in the media. The movement of peoples and goods are variously defined as necessary to maintain standards of living or a threat to local jobs and local production. Globalization is defended as good for the economy, good for the consumer, and good for competition, but it is also blamed for hurting workers, destroying local cultures, and eroding long-standing definitions of national identity.
The images here all illustrate essential aspects of globalization. Image A shows ships waiting for loading and unloading at one of the largest container terminals in the world, in Hong Kong. Most of the shipping from China comes
Through this terminal. Image B shows family members separated by the border fence between the United States and Mexico in Mexicali, Mexico. In the twentieth century, Mexicali grew to be a city of 1.5 million people, in large part on the
A. Cargo ships in Kowloon Bay, 2002.
And armed Israeli security forces. The street fights escalated into cycles of Palestinian terrorism, particularly suicide bombings of civilian targets, and reprisals from the Israeli military. International efforts to broker a peace produced the Oslo Accords of 1993, which established an autonomous Palestinian Authority led by the PLO chief, Yasser Arafat. Yet the peace was always fragile at best— suffering perhaps fatal damage from the assassination of Israel’s reformist prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by a reactionary Israeli and from continued attacks by Islamist terrorists. By the turn of the twenty-first century the cycle of violence flared again, with a “second intifada” launched by Palestinians in late 2000. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has remained without a solution. The second intifada came to an end after Arafat’s death in 2004 and the election of Mahmoud Abbas as the president of the Palestinian Authority in 2005. The electoral victory of a more militant Palestinian organization, Hamas, in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006, however, limited Abbas’s power to negotiate with Israel. Meanwhile, continued attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas—labeled a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union—led to an Israeli military operation against Palestinians in the Gaza strip that produced at least a three-year suspension of major hostilities along the frontier. In 2013, the UN
B. Mexican family members talk through border fence, 2003.
C. Filipino protester on Labor Day, 2003.
Prosperity generated by sending field workers across the border to the United States. Image C shows a Labor Day protester in Manila, Philippines, at a demonstration in which globalization was blamed for amendments to the labor code favorable to employers, a ban on strikes, and antiterrorist measures that were perceived to be an infringement of personal liberties. The medical mask is a reference to the SARS epidemic.
Questions for Analysis
1. Image A is typical of images that emphasize the economic consequences of globalization. Does globalization appear to be a force subject to human control in this image? How do such images shape perceptions of China's place in the global economy?
2. Compare images A and B. Is there a connection between the accelerating
Flows of money and goods between different parts of the world and restrictions on the movements of people?
3. In image C, the woman's medical mask names globalization as the enemy of Filipino workers. In so doing, who is being targeted? What does this say about the local contest over the conditions of labor in the Philippines?
General Assembly recognized the state of Palestine and granted it nonmember observer status, but a solution to the crisis is still not in sight.
The struggles between the state of Israel and its neighbors have been important in their own right. Yet one of the most compelling reasons that this conflict mattered to outside powers was material: oil. The global demand for oil skyrocketed during the postwar era and has accelerated since. Starting with the consumer boom in the Cold War
West, ordinary citizens bought cars and other petroleum-powered consumer durables, while industrial plastics made from petroleum by-products were used to manufacture a wealth of basic household items. Those needs, and the desires for profit and power that went with them, drew Western corporations and governments steadily toward the oil-rich states of the Middle East, whose vast reserves were discovered in the 1930s and 1940s. Large corporations conducted joint diplomacy with Middle Eastern states and their own home governments to design concessions for drilling, refining, and shipping the oil. Pipelines were laid by contractors based around the world, from California to Rome to Russia.
THE ARAB-ISRAELI WARS OF 1967 AND 1973. ¦ What were the major changes in the political geography of the Middle East as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1967? ¦ Why did the Israelis wish to occupy the Sinai and West Bank regions at the end of the 1967 war? ¦ What problems did this create, and how might it have led to the conflict in 1973?
The enormous long-term economic value of the Middle Eastern oil reserves made oil a fundamental tool in new struggles over political power. Many producer states sought to turn their resources into leverage with the West’s former imperial powers. In 1960, the leading Middle Eastern, African, and Latin American producers banded together in a cartel to take advantage of this vital resource, forming the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to regulate the production and pricing of crude
Oil. During the 1970s, OPEC played a leading role in the global economy. Its policies reflected not only the desire to draw maximum profits out of bottlenecks in oil production but also the militant politics of some OPEC leaders who wanted to use oil as a weapon against the West in the Arab-Israeli conflict. After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, an embargo inspired by the hard-liners sparked spiraling inflation and economic troubles in Western nations, triggering a cycle of dangerous recession that lasted nearly a decade.
In response, Western governments treated the Middle Eastern oil regions as a vital strategic center of gravity, the subject of constant Great Power diplomacy. If conflict directly threatened the stability of oil production or friendly governments, Western powers were prepared to intervene by force, as the 1991 Gulf War demonstrated. By the 1990s, another new front of competition and potential conflict emerged as the energy demands of other nations also grew. In particular, the new industrial giants China and India eyed the Middle
GAMAL ABDEL NASSER AND SOVIET MINISTER ALEKSEY KOSYGIN, 1966. As the most prominent spokesman for secular pan-Arabism, Nasser became a target for Islamist critics, such as Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood, angered by the Western-influenced policies of his regime.
Eastern oil reserves with the same nervousness as the West. The oil boom also generated violent conflict inside Middle Eastern producer states. Oil revenue produced an uneven form of economic development. The huge gaps between or inside Middle Eastern societies that divided oil’s haves and have-nots caused deep resentments, official corruption, and a new wave of radical politics. With the pan-Arab nationalists fading from the scene, the rising revolutionary force gathered instead around modern readings of Islamic fundamentalism, now tied to postcolonial politics.
In North Africa and the Middle East, processes of modernization and globalization produced tremendous discontents. The new nations that emerged from decolonization often shared the characteristics of the “kleptocracies” south of the Sahara: corrupt state agencies, cronyism based on ethnic or family kinship, decaying public services, rapid increases in population, and constant state repression of dissent. Disappointment with these conditions ran deep, perhaps nowhere more so than in the seat of pan-Arabism, Nasser’s Egypt. During the 1960s, Egyptian academics and cultural critics leveled charges against Nasser’s regime that became the core of a powerful new political movement. Their critique offered modern interpretations of certain legal and political currents in Islamic thought, ideas linked loosely across centuries by their association with revolt against foreign interference and official corruption. They denounced Egypt’s nationalist government as greedy, brutal, and corrupt.
There was a twist to their claims, however: that the roots of the Arab world’s moral failure lay in centuries of colonial contact with the West. The most influential of these Islamist critics, Sayyid Qutb (Kutb, 1906-1966), presented these ideas in a series of essays for which he was arrested several times by Egyptian authorities and ultimately executed. His argument ran as follows. As a result of corrupting outside influences, the ruling elites of the new Arab states pursued policies that frayed local and family bonds, deepening economic divides while abandoning the government’s responsibility for charity and stability. What was more, the nation’s elites were morally bankrupt—their lives defied codes of morality, self-discipline, and communal responsibility rooted in Islamic faith. To maintain power, the elites lived in the pockets of Western imperial and corporate powers. From Qutb’s point of view, this collaboration not only caused cultural impurity but also eroded authentic Muslim faith. This dire judgment of Arab societies—that they were poisoned from without and within—required an equally drastic solution. Arab societies should reject not only oppressive postcolonial governments but also all the political and cultural ideas that traveled with them, especially those that could be labeled “Western.” After popular revolts, the Arab autocracies would be replaced by an idealized form of conservative Islamic government—a system in which a rigid form of Islam would link law, government, and culture.
In a formula familiar to historians of European politics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this particular brand of Islamist politics combined popular anger, intellectual opposition to “foreign” influences, and a highly idealized vision of the past. By the 1970s, it began to express itself openly in regional politics. Qutb’s ideas were put into practice by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a secretive but widespread society rooted in anticolonial politics, local charity, and violently fundamentalist Islam. The same ideas spread among similar organizations in other urbanized Arab countries and leading Islamic universities, which were historically centers of debate about political theory and religious law. Radical Islam emerged as a driving force in criticism and defiance of autocratic Arab regimes. Secular critics and more liberal Islamists, who called for open elections and a free press, were more fragmented and thus easier to silence, whereas the new wave of fundamentalists gained concessions that allowed them to preach and publish in public as long as they did not launch actual revolts. Despite the movement’s steady rise, the most dramatic turn still managed to surprise observers. Like Protestantism’s emergence in the fractious German states, for example, or communism’s successful revolution in Russia, radical Islam’s defining moment as a political force came in an unexpected place: Iran.
IRAN’S ISLAMIC REVOLUTION
Iran offered one of the most dramatic examples of modernization gone sour in the Middle East. Despite tremendous economic growth in the 1960s and 1970s, Iranians labored with legacies of foreign intervention and corrupt rule at the hands of the shah, Reza Pahlavi, a Western-friendly leader installed during a 1953 military coup supported by Britain and the United States. In exchange for the shah’s role as a friend to the West during the Cold War and for providing a steady source of reasonably priced oil, the Iranian government received vast sums in oil contracts, weapons, and development aid. Thousands of Westerners, especially Americans, came to Iran, introducing foreign influences that not only challenged traditional values but also offered economic and political alternatives. The shah, however, kept these alternatives out of reach, consistently denying democratic representation to westernizing middle-class Iranian workers and deeply religious university students alike. He governed through a small aristocracy divided by constant infighting. His army and secret police conducted regular and brutal campaigns of repression. Despite all this, and the public protests it spurred in the West, governments such as the conservative Nixon administration embraced the shah as a strategically vital ally: a key to anti-Soviet alliances and a safe source of oil.
Twenty-five years after the 1953 coup, the shah’s autocratic route to an industrial state ended. After a lengthy economic downturn, public unrest, and personal illness, the shah realized he could not continue in power. He retired from public life under popular pressure in February 1979. Eight months of uncertainty followed, most Westerners fled the country, and the provisional government appointed by the shah collapsed. The strongest political coalition among Iran’s revolutionaries surged into the vacuum—a broad Islamic movement centered on the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989), Iran’s senior cleric and theologian, returned from exile in France. Other senior clerics and the country’s large population of unemployed, deeply religious university
THE SHAH'S DOWNFALL. Two Iranians symbolically substitute a picture of the shah with one of the ayatollah Khomeini after the Iranian revolution, 1979. ¦ What did the Iranian revolutionaries who overthrew the shah have in common with the anti-colonial nationalists in other former European colonies?
POPULAR SUPPORT FOR IRAN'S ISLAMIC REVOLUTION.
A massive crowd awaits the ayatollah Khomeini after the Iranian Revolution, 1979.
THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR. Iranian guards keep watch over Iraqi prisoners.
Students provided the movement’s energy. Disenfranchised secular protesters joined the radical Islamists in condemning decades of Western indifference and the shah’s oppression. Under the new regime, some limited economic and political populism combined with strict constructions of Islamic law, restrictions on women’s public life, and the prohibition of many ideas or activities linked to Western influence.
The new Iranian government also defined itself against its enemies: against the Sunni religious establishment of neighboring states, against “atheistic” Soviet communism, but especially against Israel and the United States. Iranians feared the United States would try to overthrow Khomeini as it had other leaders. Violence in the streets of Tehran reached a peak when militant students stormed the American embassy in November 1979 and seized fifty-two hostages. The act quickly became an international crisis that heralded a new kind of confrontation between Western powers and postcolonial Islamic radicals. Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s administration ultimately gained the hostages’ release, but not before the catalog of earlier failures led to the election of the Republican Ronald Reagan.
Iran, Iraq, and Unintended Consequences of the Cold War
Iran’s victory in the hostage crisis was fleeting. During the later part of 1980, Iran’s Arab neighbor and traditional rival Iraq invaded, hoping to seize Iran’s southern oil fields during the revolutionary confusion. Iran counterattacked. The result was a murderous eight-year conflict marked by the use of chemical weapons and human waves of young Ira-man radicals fighting the Soviet-armed Iraqis.
The war ended with Iran’s defeat but not with the collapse of Its theocratic regime. In the short term, their long defense of Iranian nationalism left the clerics more entrenched at home, while abroad they used oil revenues to back grass-roots radicals In Lebanon and elsewhere who engaged In anti-Western terrorism. The strongest threats to the Iranian regime ultimately came from within, from a new generation of young students and disenfranchised service workers who found their prospects for prosperity and active citizenship had not changed much since the days of the shah.
The Iran-Iraq conflict created another problem for Western Interests and the governments of leading OPEC states: Iraq. Various governments—
Including an unlikely alliance of France, Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, and the United States— supported Iraq during the war in an effort to bring down Iran’s clerics. Their patronage went to one of the most violent governments in the region, Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Iraq exhausted itself in the war, politically and economically. To shore up his regime and restore Iraq’s influence, Hussein looked elsewhere in the region. In 1990, Iraq invaded its small, oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. With the Cold War on the wane, Iraq’s Soviet supporters would not condone Iraqi aggression. A number of Western nations led by the United States reacted forcefully. Within months, Iraq faced the full weight of the United States military—trained intensively since Vietnam to rout much more capable Soviet-armed forces than Iraq’s—along with forces from several OPEC states, French troops, and armored divisions from Britain, Egypt, and Syria. This coalition pummeled Iraqi troops from the air for six weeks, then routed them and retook Kuwait in a brief, well-executed ground campaign. This changed the tenor of relations between the United States and Arab oil producers, encouraging not only closeness between governments but also anti-American radicals angry at a new Western presence. It was also the beginning rather than the end of a Western confrontation with Iraq, centered on Hussein’s efforts to develop nuclear and biological weapons.
Elsewhere in the region, the proxy conflicts of the Cold War snared both superpowers in the new and growing networks of Islamic radicalism. In 1979, the socialist government of Afghanistan turned against its Soviet patrons. Fearing a result like Iran, with a spread of fundamentalism into the Muslim regions of Soviet Central Asia, Moscow responded by overthrowing the Afghan president and installing a pro-Soviet faction. The new government, backed by more than 100,000 Soviet troops, found itself immediately at war with fighters who combined local
Competing Viewpoints
The Place of Islam in Modern Societies
The end of the colonial era and the impact of postcolonial migrations provided the backdrop for a renewed discussion in Europe and the Middle East about the presence of Muslim peoples in European nations and the relationship of religion to politics in traditionally Muslim societies. Among Muslim scholars and clerics, a wide range of opinions have been expressed about the place of Islam in the modern world, and the two figures here represent two distinct voices within this discussion.
Born into a family of Shi'ite Muslim religious leaders, Ruhollah Khomeini (c. 1900-1989) was recognized as the leading Iranian religious authority in the 1950s. He represented a highly conservative Islamic fundamentalism intended to unite Iranian Muslims in violent opposition to the Western-supported government of the shah of Iran and had a powerful influence on Muslims seeking an alternative to Western cultural, political, and economic domination.
Tariq Ramadan (born 1962 in Geneva, Switzerland) is a professor of religion and philosophy and a leading voice speaking for the increasingly large number of Muslims who live in Europe and North America as members of a religious minority in non-Muslim societies. He has taught at the University of Fribourg, the College de Saussure in Geneva, and St. Antony's College, Oxford. In 2004, he was forced to decline an offer to become a professor at the University of Notre Dame in the United States when the State Department denied him a visa. Ramadan argues that Muslims can and should be productive and active citizens in Western societies while remaining true to their religious beliefs.
Ruhollah Khomeini, Islamic Government (1979)
He Islamic government is not similar to the well-known systems of government. It is not a despotic government in which the head of state dictates his opinion and tampers with the lives and property of the people. The prophet, may God's prayers be upon him, and 'Ali, the amir of the faithful, and the other imams had no power to tamper with people's property or with their lives.1 The Islamic government is not despotic but constitutional. However, it is not constitutional in the well-known sense of the word, which is represented in the parliamentary system or in the people's councils. It is constitutional in the sense that those in charge of affairs observe a number of conditions and rules underlined in the Koran and in the Sunna and represented in the necessity of observing the system and of applying the dictates and laws of Islam.2 This is why the Islamic government is the government of the divine law. The difference between the Islamic government and the constitutional governments, both monarchic and republican, lies in the fact that the people's representatives or the king's representatives are the ones who codify and legislate, whereas the power of leg
Islation is confined to God, may He be praised, and nobody else has the right to legislate and nobody may rule by that which has not been
Given power by God____
The government of Islam is not monarchic, . . . and not an empire, because Islam is above squandering and unjustly undermining the lives and property of people. This is why the government of Islam does not have the many big palaces, the servants, the royal courts, the crown prince courts and other trivial requirements that consume half or most of the country's resources and that the sultans and the emperors have. The life of the great prophet was a life of utter simplicity, even though the prophet was the head of the state, who ran and ruled it by himself. . . . Had this course continued until the present, people would have known the taste of happiness and the country's treasury would not have been plundered to be spent on fornication, abomination and the court's costs and expenditures. You know that most of the corrupt aspects of our society are due to the corruption of the ruling dynasty and the royal family. What is the legitimacy of these rulers who build houses of entertainment, corruption, fornication and abomination and who destroy houses which God ordered be raised and in which His name is mentioned? Were it not for what the court wastes and what it embezzles, the country's budget would not experience any deficit that forces the state to borrow from America and England, with all the humiliation and insult that accompany such borrowing. Has our oil decreased or have our minerals that are stored under this good earth run out? We possess everything and we would not need the help of America or of others if it were not for the costs of the court and for its wasteful use of the people's money.
1 "The prophet” refers to Muhammed; 'Ali was Muhammed's son-in-law and, according to the Shi'ite tradition, his legitimate heir; an amir is a high military official; and an imam, in the Shi'ite tradition, is an important spiritual leader with sole power to make decisions about doctrine.
2 The Koran is the book of the holy scriptures of Islam; the Sunna is the body of customary Islamic law second only to the Koran in authority.
Source: Ruhollah Khomeini, Islamic Government, trans. Joint Publications Research Service (New York: 1979, pp. 17-19.
Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (2002)
... [W]ith the emergence of the young Muslim generation. . . it has been deemed necessary to reanalyze the main Islamic sources (Qu'ran and Sunnah) when it comes to interpreting legal issues (fiqh) in the European context. Many of these young people intend to stay permanently in a European country, and a large number have already received their citizenship. New forms of interpretation (known as ijtihad) have made it possible for the younger generation to practice their faith in a coherent manner in a new context. It is important to note that this has been a very recent phenomenon. Only within the past few years have Muslim scholars and intellectuals felt obliged to take a closer look at the European laws, and at the same time, to think about the changes that have been taking place within the diverse Muslim communities . . . [F]ive main points. . . have been agreed upon by those working on the basis of the Islamic sources and by the great majority of Muslims living in Europe:
1. Muslims who are residents or citizens of a non-Islamic state should understand that they are under a moral and social contract with the country in which they reside. In other words, they should respect the laws of the country.
2. Both the spirit and the letter of the secular model permit Muslims to practice their faith without requiring a complete assimilation into the new culture and, thereby, partial disconnection from their Muslim identity.
3. The ancient division of the world into denominations of dar al-harb (abode of war) and dar al-Islam (abode of Islam), used by the jurists during a specific geopolitical context, namely the ninth-century Muslim world, is invalid and does not take into account the realities of modern life. Other concepts have been identified as exemplifying more positively the presence of Muslims in Europe.
4. Muslims should consider themselves full citizens of the nations in which they reside and can participate with conscience in the organizational, economic, and political affairs of the country without compromising their own values.
5. With regard to the possibilities offered by European legislation, nothing stops Muslims, like any other citizens, from making choices that respond to the requirements of their own consciences and faith. If any obligations should be in contradiction to the Islamic principles (a situation that is quite rare), the specific case must be studied in order to identify the priorities and the possibility of adaptation (which should be developed at the national level). . . .
For some Muslims, the idea of an "Islamic culture," similar to the concepts of identity and community, connotes the necessity of Muslim isolation from and rejection of European culture. Such an understanding suggests that Muslims are not genuine in their desire to integrate into the society in which they live. They play the citizenship card, while trying to maintain such cultural particularities as dress code, management of space when it comes to men and women, concern about music, and other issues. For them, real integration means becoming European in every aspect of one's character and behavior. This is, in fact, a very narrow vision of integration, almost resembling the notion of assimilation. One admits theoretically that Muslims have the right to practice their religion but revokes these
Rights when expression of faith becomes too visible.
In actuality, the future of Muslim presence in Europe must entail a truly "European Islamic culture" disengaged from the cultures of North Africa, Turkey, and Indo-Pakistan, while naturally referring to them for inspiration. This new culture is just in the process of being born and molded. By giving careful consideration to everything from appropriate dress to the artistic and creative expression of Islam, Muslims are mobilizing a whole new culture. The formation of such a culture is a pioneering endeavor, making use of European energy while taking into account various national customs and simultaneously respecting Islamic values and guidelines.
Source: Tariq Ramadan, "Islam and Muslims in Europe: A Silent Revolution toward Rediscovery," in Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad (New York: 2002), pp. 160-163.
Questions for Analysis
1. What prevents Islamic government from being despotic, according to Khomeini? Why is there no legislative branch in an Islamic government, in his view?
2. What criticism does Ramadan make of those Muslims who seek to isolate themselves from European culture while living in Europe? What does he mean by "European Islamic culture"?
3. In what ways do these two Muslim thinkers show an engagement with European traditions of political thought?
THE LIBERATION OF KUWAIT. After Am erican forces drove out his Iraqi occupiers, a Kuwaiti celebrates with the victory sign, 1991. Behind him, a defaced poster of Saddam Hussein sits in a garbage heap.
Conservatism with militant Islam and who attracted volunteers from radical Islamic movements in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. These fighters, who called themselves mujahidin, viewed the conflict as a holy war. The mujahidin benefited from advanced weapons and training, given by Western powers led by the United States. Those who provided the aid saw the conflict in Cold War terms, as a chance to sap Soviet resources in a fruitless imperial war. On those terms, the aid worked; the war dragged on for nearly ten years, taking thousands of Russian lives and damaging the Soviet government’s credibility at home. Soviet troops withdrew in 1989. After five years of clan warfare, hard-line Islamic factions tied to the foreign elements in the mujahidin took over the country. Their experiment in theocracy made Iran’s seem mild by comparison.
WAR AND TERRORISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The global networks of communication, finance, and mobility discussed at the beginning of this chapter gave radical political violence a disturbing new character at the end of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, organized sectarian terrorist tactics had become an important part of political conflict in the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. Most of these early terrorist organizations (including the Irish Republican Army, the Italian Red Brigades, and the different Palestinian revolutionary organizations) had specific goals, such as ethnic separatism or the establishment of revolutionary governments. By the 1980s and increasingly during
The 1990s, such groups were complemented and then supplanted by a different brand of terrorist organization, one that ranged freely across territory and local legal systems. These newer, apocalyptic terrorist groups called for decisive conflict to eliminate their enemies and grant themselves martyrdom. Some such groups emerged from the social dislocations of the postwar boom, others were linked directly to brands of radical religion. They often divorced themselves from the local crises that first spurred their anger, roaming widely among countries in search of recruits to their cause.
A leading example of such groups, and soon the most famous, was the radical Islamist umbrella organization al Qaeda. It was created by leaders of the foreign mujahidin who had fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Its official leader and financial supporter was the Saudi-born multimillionaire Osama bin Laden. Among its operational chiefs was the famous Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose political career linked him directly to Sayyid Qutb and other founding thinkers in modern revolutionary Islam. These leaders organized broad networks of largely self-contained terrorist cells around the world, from the Islamic regions of Southeast Asia to Europe, East Africa, and the United States, funded by myriad private accounts, front companies, illegal trades, and corporate kickbacks throughout the global economy. Their organization defied borders, and so did their goals. They did not seek to negotiate for territory, or to change the government of a specific state. Instead, they spoke of the destruction of the state of Israel and American, European, and other non-Islamic systems of government worldwide and called for a united, apocalyptic revolt by fundamentalist Muslims to create an Islamic community bounded only by faith. During the 1990s, they involved themselves in a variety of local terrorist campaigns in Islamic countries and organized large-scale suicide attacks against American targets, notably the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, al Qaeda’s organizers struck again at their most obvious political enemy, the symbolic seat of globalization: the United States. Small teams of suicidal radicals, aided by al Qaeda’s organization, planned to hijack airliners and use them as flying bombs to strike the most strategically important symbols of America’s global power. On September 11, 2001, they carried out this mission in the deadliest series of terrorist attacks ever to occur on American soil. In the span of an hour, hijacked planes struck the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U. S. military, and the World Trade Center towers in New York City. A fourth plane, possibly aimed at the U. S. Capitol, crashed in open farmland in Pennsylvania, its attack thwarted when the passengers fought back against their captors. The World Trade Center towers, among
The tallest buildings in the world, crumbled into ash and wreckage in front of hundreds of millions of viewers on satellite television and the Internet. In these several simultaneous attacks, roughly 3,000 people died.
The attacks were at once a new brand of terror, deeply indebted to globalization in both its outlook and its method, and something older: the extreme, opportunistic violence of marginal groups against national cultures during a period of general dislocation and uncertainty. The immediate American response was action against al Qaeda’s central haven in Afghanistan, a state in total collapse after the warfare of the previous thirty years. The United States’ versatile professional soldiers and unmatched equipment, along with armed Afghan militias angry at the country’s disarray quickly routed al Qaeda’s Taliban sponsors and scattered the terrorists. The search for Osama bin Laden took a decade, during which time the United States and its allies in the war in Afghanistan faced a renewed insurrection by the Taliban beginning in 2003. U. S. forces killed Osama bin Laden at his home in nearby Pakistan in 2011. During the intervening years, the United States succeeded in disrupting, though not completely eliminating, many of the hidden networks of leadership, finance, and information that made Al Qaeda’s apocalyptic terrorism possible. Meanwhile, the economic and political rebuilding of Afghanistan, a necessary consequence of American and Euro-
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY TERRORISM. New York City's World Trade Center Towers under attack on September 11, 2001.
Pean military action, began from almost nothing in terms of administration and infrastructure. These efforts were hampered by challenging political circumstances within the country, which made it difficult for the Afghan government to position itself between its U. S. ally and a population with a long tradition of mistrusting foreign powers intervening in their land. U. S. forces are scheduled to leave Afghanistan during 2013, but the stability of the nation after more than three decades of war remains an open question.
One reason for the persistent fears about such groups as al Qaeda has to do with the increasing power and availability of weapons they might use: chemical substances, biological agents that could kill millions, even portable nuclear weapons. With the end of the Cold War, methods and technologies that the superpowers employed to maintain their nuclear balance of power became more available on the margins to displaced groups with the financial or political leverage to seek them out. Other major arms races, centered, for example, around Israel or the conflicts between India and Pakistan, helped spread the availability of production sites and resources for weapons of horrific power, no longer governed absolutely by the legal conventions and deterrent strength of superpowers. Fear that the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein was reaching for biological and nuclear capabilities helped propel the Gulf War of 1991 and active international efforts to disarm Iraq thereafter. Anxiety that states such as Iraq might transfer such weapons to apocalyptic terrorists, a fear given new life after the attacks on New York and Washington, provided the rationale for an American-led invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. The campaign, which used a remarkably small force both on the ground and in the air, quickly took Iraq over and deposed Hussein. No immediate evidence of recent, active weapons development programs was found, however, and in the process the United States inherited the complex reconstruction of a broken state, fractured by guerrilla violence and anti-Western terrorism. After a long struggle against a shifting insurgency that fought the new Iraqi government and the U. S.-led forces that supported it, the last U. S. troops left Iraq in 2011. Since then, continued civil conflict in Iraq has claimed thousands of lives.
A nuclear threat also remained present in North Korea. After the loss of Soviet patronage in 1991, the isolated North Korean state careened from one economic disaster to another, with verified reports of local starvation in some regions of the country and a breakdown of government into military and political fiefdoms. The North Korean government pursued the development of a nuclear arsenal as a bargaining chip against the other major states of northeast Asia and the United States. Those neighbors each understood the grim chance that North Korea might break the last and perhaps most crucial nuclear threshold, providing nuclear
Violence beyond Bounds: War and Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century | 1005
World History
