Paper from Working Group 4 - 56th Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs,11-15 November 2006

Abstract

The religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all today undergoing a transformation known generically as 'fundamentalist'. Although this term is impossible any longer to define precisely, and although there are obvious differences between the movements to which the label is attached, numerous common features, including the original defining feature of fundamentalism-namely the idea of the inerrancy of a sacred text-remain. Together, these considerations justify an interpretation of contemporary religious transformations in a common framework of analysis, especially when account is taken of their global character.

This paper develops such an interpretation by focusing on two aspects of the globalism of fundamentalist movements-their transnational reach and the role played by globalism in their imaginary projections across time and space (David Lehmann 1998).

It also describes how globalization not only influence transnational fundamentalist terrorism as an extreme expression of protest against the modernity and globalization but also itself could simultaneously be considered as an hypothesis of this process(Modernity & Globalization) .

Finally, the core idea of the paper is that the increasing Fundamentalist movements specially in it’s Islamic form, first should be seen as an interpretation for unifying the social values, which appeal to blind violence to be seen under the shadow of the globalization waves.

The connections between globalization and fundamentalist terrorism that appeared in academic literature since the attacks of the September 11, 2001,with the emphasis on the Technological advances, loosening barriers and growing vulnerability of the integrated world ,causes the possibility to see terrorists as “global actors”, which along with other actors of the global economy and politics shape the future developments in the world.

The terrorist form of protest exhibits an extreme form of self described marginality. Terrorism seems to be the only expression of protest when the enemy is considered overwhelmingly powerful ,the struggle, as Hoffmann said, must however, not be lost.

Fundamental terrorists view themselves as being engaged in a cosmic war enforced on them by the enemy. Terrorist assaults are, therefore ,symbolic acts of violence against symbols of enemy’s power to demonstrate temporarily the enemy’s weakness(Jost Halfmann 2003).

This essay seeks not only to identify the most important studies in the field but to show what a critical roll globalization plays in increasingly rise of Fundamental Terrorism as a reaction to the crisis of meaning and integration in the world.

Introduction

At the end of the cold war, commentators were full of optimistic pronouncements for a global order based on liberal capitalism and democracy (e.g, Friedman (1999)). In 1989 Frances Fukuyama famously announced the end of history, “…..not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (Fukuyama (1989), p.2).

What happened? In the view of many, the answer is simple: the world changed on 9/11. But where did 9/11 come from? And what does it represent?

Many observers see the struggle between the United States and al-Qaeda as "World War IV," while other experts caution that the September 11 attacks may be an anomaly.

Policy makers and consultants close to the current US government interpret Fundamental terrorism as one among several responses to the military and economic superiority of the United States and its strong support for economic and political globalization.

As Jost Halfmann said in his essay “ Fundamental Terrorism ,the assault on the symbols of secular power”, Terrorism is considered a militant practice using asymmetric means of violence against American power by choosing strategies “designed to “exhaust American will, circumvent or minimize US strengths, and exploit perceived US weaknesses” (CIA/NIC 2000, quoted in Prados 2002: 24) rather than engaging in direct military confrontation.

This assessment obviously rests on a stark reduction of the complexity of the issues involved in terrorism.

But once again let’s return to the main question that where from comes The Fundamental Terrorism?

The probable answers can be put in the form of four propositions:

Fundamentalism is, in a sense, always with us, and the particular manifestations of it that we see today in the form of Radical Islam was itself a response to the convergence observed at the end of the Cold War, a response that could have been foreseen.
Fundamentalism can sometimes come to power even in democracy.
The end of (most) Soviet –style totalitarian systems did not mean the end of dictatorship, and in fact other forms of dictatorship such as tyranny are more likely to engender terrorism. In a globalized world, terrorist acts are also increasingly likely to be directed against countries in the West to the extent that these countries are seen as supporting tyrannies.
Globalization itself carries with it the seeds of Fundamentalism.

The paper elaborates on these. The fourth is the most complex and its main subject.

Fundamentalism from different views

One of the most influential studies on the political ramifications of Islam and fundamentalist terrorism, Samuel P. Huntington’s book “The clash of civilizations” sets the tone for many social scientific and political analyses, which place terrorism in the context of a cultural conflict. Apparently, this analysis has gained some recognition among members and consultants of the current US government. Huntington in foreseeing conflicts between the Western (Christian) civilization and other civilizations such as the Islamic culture constructs a direct causal relationship between Islam as a religion and Islamic fundamentalism as a political movement: “The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture, and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power” (Huntington 1997: 217).

Huntington believes that conflicts between civilizations are replacing conflicts between nations and ideologies; Huntington describes civilizations as clusters of nations, ordered according to shared religious beliefs and cultural values.

He defines civilization as a "cultural entity ... the highest cultural grouping … defined by both common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people … A civilization may include several nation states or only one" (Huntington 1993: 24)

He anticipates a major fault line between the Islamic civilization and the Western civilization opening up due to Islamic hostility to “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state” (Huntington 1993: 40).

Huntington’s analysis implies a division of the world into different civilizations, which at any given point in time are at different stages in their life cycles. While the Western culture, which has spread its values and rules of conduct all over the world has reached its historical pinnacle, other cultures such as the Islam, but also the Chinese (Confucianism) are on the rise. The aggressive stance of these cultures prompts measures of the West to defend its culture of ”industrialization, urbanization, increasing levels of literacy, education, wealth, and social mobilization, and more complex and diversified occupational structures” (Huntington 1997: 68). Huntington’s concept of civilizations as clusters of states has contributed to the belief that fundamentalist and terrorist threats can be attributed not only to organizations and groups like Al-Quaeda, but also to states, which embrace or further fundamentalist views and terrorist activities. This analysis then, seems to support politics of military measures against so-called “rogue states”.

In contrast to Huntington’s view of point , Jean Baudrillard has pointed in describing terrorism as a virus of modern society at a major weakness of this kind of analysis. Baudrillard stipulates that it would be wrong to see the problem of terrorism as resulting from the confrontation of cultures with differing levels of modernity.

To him, it is rather a conflict within modern global society itself; it is, in Baudrillard’s words, “triumphant globalization battling against itself” (Baudrillard2002: 11).

Globalization or – in Huntington terms - the spread of Western concepts of free markets and democracy, has a self-destructive reverse side. According to Baudrillard’s analysis the fundamental terrorists are not pre- modern, but use all ingredients of modernity (“money and stock-market speculation, computer technology and aeronautics, spectacle, and the media”, Baudrillard 2002: 19) for one singular purpose: to turn their (often suicidal) terrorist attacks into symbolic weapons for which their opponents have no appropriate answer.

Engaging themselves in a “culture of death”(with the expectation to enter paradise after their death) fundamentalist terrorists see the weakness of their enemies in their adherence to a “culture of life”. In this vein, Baudrillard comes to the conclusion that even though religious terrorists apply the notion of (holy) war to their actions to counter terrorism by military means is the “continuation of the absence of politics by other means” (Baudrillard 2002: 34). Based on these introductory remarks, I will propose a preliminary definition of terrorism and particularly of fundamentalist\terrorism.

Terrorism can be defined as acts of violence against symbols of power of a state to demonstrate the enemy’s weakness and to mobilize a potential constituency.

Fundamentalist terrorism will deploy these acts of violence as part of an inevitable reaction in a cosmic war for protecting their existance.

Baudrillard’s essay, which does not pretend to be a fully- fledged sociological analysis of terrorism, points at two issues, which are important for any analysis of fundamentalist terrorism.

First, that terrorism is part and parcel of modern society and not in any way of traditional society; and that modern society has to be viewed as global society. Second, that the aim of terrorism is not to challenge state sovereignty, but its symbols of power.

The first claim is corroborated by Mark Juergensmeyer’s research who found striking similarities in the worldviews of religious terrorists from very different countries and denominations, be they US-American adherents of rightwing religious organizations such as Christian Identity, Israeli followers of Kahane’s Kach party or members of the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo sect. Fundamentalist terrorism is not simply a threat emerging from pre-modern or modernizing societies; it is generated in modern societies themselves

(Juergensmeyer 2001).

A similar argument is made by Olivier Roy who describes in his book “ Globalized Islam, The search for a new Ummah” the emergence of radical Islamic organizations in Western states with no ideological or organizational ties to Islamic countries. He portrayed fundamentalist movements, in particular al Qaeda, as a direct response to globalization pressures exerted by Western cultural and economic values. In his view "Islamic radicalization is a pathological consequence of Westernization," .

“A significant number of fundamentalists are found in countries that are not predominantly Muslim”, Roy said. The movement tends to draw people who feel cut off from what they see as a traditionally Islamic lifestyle, including converts to Islam in European countries, such as Britain, France and Germany. At the same time, fundamentalists find themselves unable to fit in to the respective societies in which they are living. The fundamentalists have "recast religion outside of cultural contexts," (Roy 2003).

As such, fundamentalists tend to hold idealized notions about Islam. Roy added that the lack of a firm grounding in traditional Islamic cultural values left fundamentalists vulnerable to propaganda calling on them to express their faith in violent forms.

Roy drew a sharp distinction between Islamists and fundamentalists. Islamists, he maintained, may once have held radical ideas, but those views have largely been channeled into mainstream political activity.

He cited Iran as an example. The religious fervor that buffeted Tehran at the time of 1979 revolution mellowed over time, as the ruling elite found it had to moderate its policies in order to maintain power.

In Roy words fundamentalists are disinclined to work toward the establishment of an Islamic nation state. Many Western policymakers mistakenly assume that the key to solving the Islamic radicalism issue requires a Mid-East settlement. But Roy’s theories on the nature of the fundamentalist movement challenge some of the notions supporting the Western strategic response to radical Islamic-inspired terrorism. Many experts in the West consider the democratization of the Islamic world as the key to containing terrorism. Roy calls this notion only "half true." Democratization would help "isolate" Islamic fundamentalists, but it would not likely dispel the sense of economic and cultural alienation that drives the movement (Roy 2003).

The second claim is shared by many analyses of terrorism (see i.e. Juergensmeyer 2001: 123; Crenshaw 1995, Hoffman5 In 1998, ) that Osame bin Laden together with other leaders of the “World Islamic Front” proclaimed that the American intervention in the Middle East is a “declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims”; the fatwa, issued in response to this war calls for jihad, a holy war against America (Bin-Ladin et al. 2002:6 1998).6

Bruce Lawrence, in his book ‘Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age’ defines fundamentalism as " the affirmation of religious authority as holistic and absolute, admitting of neither criticism nor reduction; it is expressed through the collective demand that specific creedal and ethical dictates derived from scripture be publicly recognized and legally enforced ." Lawrence argues that fundamentalism is a specific kind of religious ideology. It is antimodern, but not antimodernist. In other words, it rejects the philosophical rationalism and individualism that accompany modernity, but it takes full advantage of certain technological advances that also characterize the modern age. The most consistent denominator is opposition to Enlightenment values. It means as Marshal Berman explicates in his significant study, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The experience of Modernity, that fundamental terrorists are modern but they are not modernist.. It also like Roy discusses the fundamentalist terrorism as non-state economic and political actors .

Lawrence believes that fundamentalism is a world-wide phenomena and that it must be compared in various contexts before it can be understood or explained with any clarity.

Lawrence lists five "family resemblances" common to fundamentalism.

Fundamentalists are advocates of a minority viewpoint. They see themselves as a righteous remnant. Even when they are numerically a majority, they perceive themselves as a minority.
They are oppositional and confrontational towards both secularists and "wayward" religious followers.
They are secondary level male elites led invariably by charismatic males.
Fundamentalists generate their own technical vocabulary.
Fundamentalism has historical antecedents, but no ideological precursor.

Even considering the assumption that terrorism is a modern phenomenon like other features of modern society such as democracy or free markets, the question yet to be solved is, however, on what grounds terrorists strike against symbols of power and what the meaning of such assaults is.

The answer should be seen inside the modernity and globalized order itself again, as Jost Hoffmann declares so ,the modernity of modern society consists precisely in the lack (or loss) of an instance of integration and unification of the diverse social systems in society. ( Hafmann, Globalization and Fundamentalism 2001)

This feature distinguishes modern from earlier forms of society, which were organized around some integrating instance such as religious or political peak institutions and where inclusion in society was provided to individuals by birth and divine order. For the individual actors the differentiation of social systems and the diversity of inclusions in these systems mean first and foremost the experience of risk and contingency. The lose coupling of the social systems in modern society and the mere procedural character of their operations have been noticed with regard to their consequences for the individual actors as “Sinnverlust” (the loss of meaning, Weber), the “Verlust der Mitte” (the loss of the center, Sedlmayr 1948), or as existentialist deprivation of any transcendental reassurance (Sartre, Camus).

The Problematic of the Unifying interpretations of modern society

Compared to pre-modern society, modern society is a society without a center, in an institutional and in an interpretative sense. It is a pervasive feature of modern society that the experience of differentiation and contingency has been dealt with by a variety of unifying interpretations of society, concepts, which try to make overarching sense of the confusing diversity of modern society. This is what will be called a unifying semantic throughout this presentation. Unifying semantics are interpretations of a right and good order of society, typically proposed from a particular social system perspective, which are geared at reducing the implications of the pluralist, heterogeneous and contingent character of modern society. Often, unifying views of society emerge from social movements and their adherents in literary circles, academia and the mass media.

Nationalism is a case in point: it describes society as a territorially circumscribed community of citizens. Nationalism is a unifying semantic, proposed from the point of view of the political system.

In his book on “Nations and Nationalism” (Gellner 1983), Ernest Gellner has made this argument convincingly. Nationalism is to Gellner a semantic device, which accompanies the societal transformation from agricultural to industrial society, from a society based on personal to one built on impersonal relationships. The social meaning of nationalism is to make the strain of alienation during that transformation process palpable. Similarly, pan national movements such as Pan-Slavism (Kohn 1960) or Pan-Arabism define community in ethnic rather than in territorial terms.

In a similar vein, fundamentalism can be interpreted as a unifying worldview, but in difference to nationalism, society is being viewed from a religious perspective and its constituency is not defined territorially, but universally(Hafmann 2002). Its specific target is the separation of politics from religion.

This has been noted by some scholars of fundamentalism. Bassam Tibi states that the secular nation-state is the “prime target of fundamentalism” (Tibi 1998: 6). But it is not the (cultural) fragmentation of modernity as such, as Bassam Tibi claims (Tibi 1998: 6), which is the direct cause of modern fundamentalism. It is the interpretation of fragmentation as a sign of cultural decay, which is at issue.

In Hafmann words, Cultural fragmentation – that is different views of society and particularly, different views of “good society” – is the norm in modern society, given the plurality of perspectives following from functional differentiation of society: one can chose to view society from an economics, a politics or a health perspective, and each time one looks at a different kind of society. Fragmented outlooks, fragmented identities are the norm in modern society.

There are different ways of dealing with fragmentation (or: functional differentiation): one might acknowledge and perhaps praise it, as cultural pluralism or postmodernism does, one can search for interpretations that make sense of society as a whole. These I will call unifying interpretations – and fundamentalism is one variant of this. Unifying semantics view society from one particular perspective, using values and symbols, which are geared at improving the chances for consensus on specific issues across diverging social groups and the system borders of functional differentiation. Unifying worldviews try to counter the contingency of outcomes by offering compensatory rewards and outlooks.

All unifying semantics view society from a vantage point, quasi from the outside in order to look at society as a whole. From the social scientific point of view, all unifying semantics are views constructed inside society, emerging from some particular social system, be it politics, religion or social movements. The attempt to pretend to take an outside look at society introduces a potential for excluding evidence which contradicts this view and which speaks toward plurality and contingency of the world. Cultural theory argues that the content and degree of rigidity of a unifying semantic depends on whether a unifying world view belongs to the center or the periphery of society, that is whether its potential for soliciting consensus is high or low (Douglas 1973, Douglas/Wildavsky 1983, Thompson/Ellis/Wildavsky 1990).

Rationalism is a unifying set of values and symbols, which assumes that roughly the same means/ends-calculi direct the behavior in politics, economics or the family(Hafmann 2002).

Rationalism, but also solidarity and community are sets of unifying values and meanings which are prevalent in segments of society with a high coping level concerning functional differentiation, such as in professional milieus of urban areas in advanced countries.

Such unifying worldviews found in the center of modern society contrast to unifying worldviews at the periphery of modern society (for this distinction see Shils 1961).

The distinction between central and peripheral positions is a cultural one, which denotes the degree of resistance a unifying view – and the intentions of changing society – would encounter in society; it signifies a high vs. a low acceptance of unifying semantics in society across the spectrum of differentiated social systems. Rationalism – the concept of applying cause-effect-types of explaining events in the world - is a unifying concept of central segments of modern society, which finds comparatively easy acceptance in economy, politics, law or sports due to a range of technologies, which embody the principles of rationalism. (Think of Max Weber’s theory of rationalism as leitmotif of modernization in society which cuts across the diverse “value spheres” as he called the diverse social contexts). Central segments of society have also developed a high acceptance of the ambiguity, which is involved in unifying concepts: tolerance for breakdowns of rationalism, which become probable under conditions of the diverse modes of operation and the diverse meanings of rationalism in the respective social systems.

Thus, unifying semantics in the center enjoy far reaching acceptance and exert relatively little exclusionary power to those who disagree; they allow at the same time for paradoxes and contradictions, that is for acknowledging breakdowns of rationalism which become starting points for critiques of this kind of unifying world views.* *(see the cultural critiques of modern “instrumental” views of social relations in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, Habermas).

Peripheral segments in society are characterized by the experience that their unifying semantic meets much resistance. Political Islam in “modernizing” countries like Turkey or Egypt is stiffly resisted by the secular elites.

These modernizing regimes tend to exclude Islamist groups from political representation for reasons of keeping religion and politics apart.

Often these regimes are politically rigid and resistant to democratic government, as the example of Algeria in the nineties shows.

Center and periphery unifying semantics can exist in one country at the same time, as the co-presence of fundamentalist movements and professional elites in the US demonstrates.

In a world, which exhibits a plurality of values principles and in which no institution has evolved, which could establish a hierarchy of values only religion can offer absolute values. Other sources of quasi-absolute values such as Marxism, which have also been used as justification of terrorism (Red Army Faction in Germany or Red Brigades in Italy) are much less well suited as a basis for fundamentalism because of their close association with scientific reasoning and its intimate relationship to doubt and revision.

As Hoffmann argued that the thrust of unifying world-views depends on how the experience of difference (in social systems, social values and life-styles) is negotiated against the drive for unity as a medium of sense-making.

Unifying world-views with a high regard for the diversity of incarnations of unifying semantics (depending on the social context in which they are used) and for the other side of unity (difference) could be called post-modern (example: rationalism). Unifying world-views which experience high resistance and which articulate little tolerance for alternatives (difference) would represent the other end of the spectrum (fundamentalist terrorism). Unifying semantics, which are posited in view of other competing unifying world-views might be called modernizing unifying semantics (example: Kemalism, Nasser’s Pan-Arabism in Egypt). Inward-oriented unifying semantics with little regard for other competing semantics might be labeled traditional(example: Sufi religion).

Therefore, what turns adherents to political Islam as a unifying interpretation into terrorists is neither poverty or deprivation nor alienation (the rejection of Western life-styles, the culture of individualism or sexual liberty – although all these motives may play a role in terrorists’ accounts of making sense of their decisions, see Juergensmeyer 2001), but the belief in the foreclosing of any other option, of the need to defend against a war which has been imposed by an overwhelmingly powerful enemy who is to destroy the Islamic unification interpretation by globalizing the world under it’s own different modern values . It is the moment that the other side of the modernity coin shows it self. Violence is an answer to the experience of powerlessness to the fact that opposition to functional differentiation (in this case: between politics and religion) is treated as opposition against Western values. Violence is the expression of protest where no other forms of expression (such as reform) allow marking a difference to the opponent or enemy.

The ultimate expression of terrorism is the assault on symbols of the enemy’s power: it is the vacuous attack, void of any strategic significance. The assault on the Twin Towers has primarily symbolic character; it shall demonstrate “the vulnerability of governmental power” (Juergensmeyer 2001: 132). Because of the uncompromising character of terrorism the possible death of innocent victims is not an issue. The sharp division between the holy mission and the evil to be fought excludes any recognition of the idea that there can be innocence on the part of the enemy.

Fighting terrorism by military means to counter rogue states which provide terrorists with safe havens or by police means to counter terrorist organizations and their members is certainly the “gut reaction” of states whose prime task is to provide security for the constituency within the territorial realm. One should note, however, that terrorism is as much a feature of the modernity of modern society as are markets and democracy. This means that fighting terrorism by military and police means might successfully weaken terrorists and their organization, but not necessary fundamentalism. As Hassan II, the King of Morocco correctly observed: “… if fundamentalism has to be engaged in battle, it would not be done with tanks. Fundamentalists don’t have armored divisions, they have no Scud missiles, and not an atomic weapon” (Interview in International Herald Tribune, March 14, 1995, quotation taken from Tibi 1998: 4). The very character of modern society as a plurality of social systems each promoting different sets of values and worldviews invites permanently attempts at finding unifying views of society. The separation of politics and religion can become an issue of demanding a unity between both to control the contingency of outcomes in a society operating on the basis of procedures rather than values.

The Manichaean world-view, which goes along with any form of fundamentalist politics knows only sharp differences between friend and foe, us and them, the powerless periphery and the overwhelming center. This view lends itself to uncompromising attitudes. It is, therefore, critical, not to counter the terrorist Manichaeanism by an equivalent view on the side of the state.

Similarly, installing secular “democracies” in defeated rogue states such as Afghanistan or Iraq might replace governments, which have provided safe havens for terrorists, but it might also reinvigorate or create fundamentalism and possibly fundamentalist terrorism because secular statehood is what their protest is primarily about. Military intervention is obviously no longer a viable and prudent option in such a constellation.

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