International Security: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (15 page)

The EU provides a good example of the developing nature of practices designed to secure the border and control migration patterns. Under the Schengen Agreement the EU has established a common border regime harmonizing and strengthening immigration and asylum requirements at its external border as a means to facilitate the removal of internal border controls within the EU, all in the name of promoting the free movement of goods, services, and people within the community. In this respect Schengen preserves the illusion of the EU’s border as a line clearly demarcating the inside from the outside. In reality, however, the situation is different. Instead of a clearly demarcated border what are emerging are processes both internalizing and externalizing systems of border control. Internalization is evident through the creation of databases like the Schengen Information System, which is designed to facilitate information sharing between police forces and immigration authorities throughout the EU and
through the use of identity cards, social security data, and hotel and employment registers to monitor movement across the EU, and which can be used to identify migrants who have slipped through the Schengen net.

Particularly striking, however, has been the externalization of EU border practices. This has taken several forms. First, the EU is increasingly making it a requirement that any state desiring closer relations or future membership must implement EU border practices at its own external borders. This can have various negative effects. Countries seeking membership, for example, can find that while movement and access with the EU is improved, by implementing stricter controls on their non-EU borders relations with their neighbours are in turn undermined. A second consequence, however, is that in the view of critics the externalization of its border practices is also enabling EU member states to shirk their humanitarian responsibilities. Put bluntly, by trying to ensure that economic migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers are intercepted by non-member states the EU is accused of simply washing its hands of the problem. The fact that such migrants might therefore end up being processed by states with poor human rights records exacerbates the concern.

A second mechanism of externalization, however, has involved the extension of quasi-military border enforcement practices beyond the EU’s borders. This has been facilitated through the creation of the Frontex agency in 2004, which among other things has conducted operations outside of EU territory. For example, in 2006 Frontex deployed patrol boats and surveillance planes to patrol the waters and coastline between West Africa and the Canary Islands. The aim was to deter the flow of migrants, which during the course of 2006 saw around 30,000 people reaching the islands, with an estimated 3,000 dying in the attempt. Although such operations have been relatively successful in reducing the number of people making the crossing and make sense when seen through the lens of state security, human rights campaigners
argue that such practices end up exacerbating the insecurities faced by migrants, who are increasingly driven into the hands of unscrupulous traffickers or end up taking ever more dangerous migration routes to avoid capture.

The point here is that, despite extensive efforts to control migration flows, not least by facilitating the movement of those deemed desirable while hindering that of those marked as unwanted, the fact that year on year numbers of migrants (whether ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’) continue to grow indicates that an emphasis on border control is at best only a partial solution. One of the tragedies of many states’ border and migration policies is ultimately that they end up depicting as security threats large groups of humanity whose only sin is to be poor, unhealthy, and uneducated and whose lives are often already characterized by high levels of insecurity. As highlighted elsewhere in this book, the causes of such insecurities are very likely the result of factors well beyond their control and may even lie in the economic, environmental, and political policies adopted by the very states they are trying to reach. A more comprehensive approach to tackling the various security issues raised by migration therefore takes us back to the questions of development discussed in
Chapter 6
.

Our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

(President George Bush, Speech to Congress, 20 September 2001)

For anyone watching television at the time, the events of 11 September 2001 are most likely deeply imprinted. As the images of the World Trade Center being struck by airliners, engulfed in flame, and subsequently collapsing flashed around the globe commentators struggled to understand what was happening. Such confusion was compounded following news of another plane striking the Pentagon and reports of a further plane having crashed in Pennsylvania. In America the sense of being under attack became palpable. In due course a shadowy network of Islamist extremists, Al-Qaeda, was identified as responsible for the attacks, and on 20 September President George Bush, in a speech to Congress, declared the country was now embarked on a ‘war against terrorism’. Politicians and analysts the world over began pronouncing that the world had changed, that a new age of terror was upon us and that new times called for new measures, central to which has been a rebalancing of the relationship between security and liberty/human rights. The war on terror resulted in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of covert operations, and the establishment of the Guantanamo detainment
facility where suspected terrorists have been detained for years, denied due process, and often subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’—a euphemism for torture. In fighting international terrorism trillions of dollars have been spent, thousands of American and Coalition soldiers have been killed, and tens of thousands of civilians have lost their lives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

It is fair to say, therefore, that the events of a single day back in September 2001, when approximately 3,500 people died, have proved momentous and fundamentally impacted on debates about international security. From a purely statistical perspective, however, we might ask why. While it goes without saying that the 9/11 deaths were an abominable crime and deeply tragic, they hardly compare to the estimated 40,000 people who die of hunger every day, the 500,000 killed annually by small arms, the two million dying annually of HIV/AIDS, or the 655,000 dying from malaria. Indeed, in 2000 alone, 28,117 Americans died in weapons related incidents. None of these statistics has been met with anything like the same level of response and mobilization provoked by 9/11. Why, then, does terrorism occupy so much of our attention?

For America one of the reasons was that 9/11 broke an established sense of invulnerability to foreign attack. The last time the USA was attacked was in 1941, when Japan launched its assault on Pearl Harbor in distant Hawaii. This time, however, the attacks were made at the heart of the political, economic, and military establishment in two of America’s principal cities, New York and Washington. If the enemy could strike here, presumably they could strike anywhere. However, 9/11 and subsequent atrocities, such as those committed in Bali, Madrid, and London, indicated the emergence of a global terrorist network utilizing new technologies and social media to organize and further their cause. The identification of training camps in Afghanistan attended by wannabe jihadis from around the world further emphasized the international nature of the phenomenon. Thus, while other groups
using terror campaigns, such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in the UK, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain, and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, all had transnational connections, their campaigns were nationally focused. Al-Qaeda, in contrast, was understood as having global ambitions, and therefore as posing a broader threat to international peace and security. Furthermore, the scale of 9/11 and subsequent attacks was also understood as alarming. As the RAND analyst Brian Jenkins noted, historically terrorists have generally placed limits on their violence, preferring to have a lot of people watching rather than a lot of people dead. The reason was to avoid alienating possible supporters or provoking brutal crackdowns, with this explaining why organizations like PIRA and ETA often warned the authorities of imminent attacks. In contrast, 9/11 seems to have marked a change in tactics where the goal is to maximize body counts and create as much mayhem and public outrage as possible. Finally, another reason for the attention paid to terrorism since 9/11 is that various states and governments have used it as rhetorical cover to pursue various other goals at home and abroad.

So far we have been talking about terrorism and terrorists as if these objects are somehow self-evident, but this is not the case. For example, even defining terrorism can prove difficult and contentious. At its most abstract terrorism is concerned with the illegitimate use of violence and fear to achieve political ends. Thus, while it is the political focus of violence that marks it out as terrorist (as opposed to criminal), the emphasis on its illegitimacy is a way to distinguish terrorism from other, usually state-authorized acts of violence widely deemed to be the legitimate exercise of state sovereignty. As such terrorism is typically associated with non-state actors, a point made evident in the United States’ official definition of terrorism as ‘premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant
targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience’.

This, however, is where we need to start making qualifications since historically speaking it is states that have been the greatest producers of terror. The most notable cases are Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all guilty of the deaths of millions of their citizens. Meanwhile, today Iran is often labelled as sponsoring the terrorist activities of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, while President Bush likewise included Iran, along with North Korea and Iraq, in his ‘axis of evil’ of terrorist states. Second, and as highlighted by Noam Chomsky, it is also important to note that, understood as a term of abuse, terrorism is only ever a label we apply to others to condemn and delegitimize their actions. Our violence we call something else, like counter-terrorism or self-defence. For example, the use of ‘shock and awe tactics’ and the killing of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of fighting terrorism is quite obviously a source of terror for those on the receiving end.

This indicates the politicized nature of claims about terrorism, since while terrorism may refer to the perceived illegitimacy of the use of violence, such violence is used precisely when the legitimacy of the particular order is being challenged. History is therefore full of individuals and groups who are today heralded as national heroes, but who previously were labelled terrorists by those they fought against. Examples include George Washington (who fought the British Crown), Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (designated terrorists by the South African apartheid regime and only officially removed from America’s terrorism watch list in 2008), and Kemal Ataturk (the founder of modern Turkey). Indeed, Nelson Mandela, along with the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, is one of four former ‘terrorists’ to have ended up being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Examples like these not only highlight how one man’s freedom fighter is
another’s terrorist, but also how political context can dramatically affect how and to whom such labels are applied.

Given its politicized nature, and the fact that almost nobody self-defines themselves as a terrorist, some analysts argue we should only use the term to describe the tactic of using violence to intimidate civilians for political ends, and refrain from using it to describe particular groups or individuals. Understood as such we might also ask whether terrorism is necessarily bad. While pacifists would argue the use of violence to kill and generate fear is wrong irrespective of the cause for which it is undertaken, others would suggest that violence undertaken for revolutionary and moral purposes might ultimately be justified. This was the view of the anarchist movement of the late nineteenth century, who saw violence as a form of ‘propaganda by deed’ with emancipatory potential to mobilize the population to one’s cause. As outlined in the 1880s by Johannes Most, not only would the use of outrageous violence grab the public attention, awakening them to political issues; it would also undermine the state and draw it into delegitimizing counter-measures, which might ultimately propel the public to reject the government and what it stands for. It is worth reflecting on such propositions when considering the West’s reactions to terrorist acts of violence in the contemporary period. What is clear, however, is that a wide variety of groups have found such propositions convincing, with terror campaigns undertaken by religious groups (of almost all persuasions), reformists (like the Animal Liberation Front in the UK), groups seeking national liberation or minority rights (like ETA, the Tamil Tigers, and PIRA), and those using violence to advance an ideological agenda (like the Red Army Faction in West Germany during the Cold War).

The political nature of any discussion of terrorism can be clearly demonstrated in terms of how the events of 11 September 2001
were framed by the American political elite and how this came to justify a particular set of responses encapsulated in the war on terror. Indeed, for critics the discursive framing of 9/11 in America represented a mixture of denial and political and strategic opportunism.

The element of denial was evident in the attempts made to try and explain the attacks in the first place. In his speech on 20 September, President Bush asked a rhetorical question: ‘Why do they hate us?’ In answering, he omitted any discussion of the contentious nature of US foreign policy in the Middle East with its support for brutal undemocratic regimes, its oil politics, and its one-sided support of Israel in the Middle East peace process. Instead, he suggested they hate America, not for what it does, but for what it stands for—freedom, democracy, and liberty. The problem, in other words, required no self-reflection, but lay solely with the attack’s perpetrators. As Maja Zehfuss has argued, 9/11 was therefore emptied of political content and context. The principal historical reference invoked was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which likewise evoked memories of a nation unfairly attacked, woken from its isolation, and about to embark on a heroic war in the name of freedom. Such motifs were further enhanced by the portrayal of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda as ‘evil’. Designated as evil, Al-Qaeda’s political goals needed no examination, while its supporters were dehumanized in contrast to an America positioned as good and righteous. In turn, since one cannot negotiate with evil, this also shaped the options available, with an emphasis on a war of eradication preferred to lengthy processes of criminal investigation, arrests, and trial by jury.