Terrorism And Poverty: Is There A Causal Relationship?

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297907844 Terrorism And Poverty: Is There A Causal Relationship? Chapter · January 2007 CITATIONS READS 0 16 1 author: Ivan Manokha Sciences Po Paris 10 PUBLICATIONS 59 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Ivan Manokha on 12 March 2016. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. CHAPTER 3 TERRORISM AND POVERTY: IS T HER E A CAUSAL R EL AT IONSHIP? IVAN MANOKHA INTRODUCTION ‘Without a war on poverty we will never defeat terror’, warned Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan, in her recent critique of Western policies to combat international terrorism.1 The existence of a causal relationship between anti-Western terrorism and poverty has also been suggested by a range of other prominent observers such as US President George W. Bush,2 British Prime Minister Tony Blair3 and James Wolfensohn,4 former President of the World Bank (2002), as well as a number of academics and journalists.5 Such arguments have in common the assumption that individuals suffering from a lack of resources, chronic unemployment, poor education and other violations of basic economic and social rights, may be influenced by radical ideas and recruited as terrorists more easily than those who have a regular income and a good level of education. Although intuitively plausible, this argument appears to be questionable on two counts. First, the anti-Western terrorist attacks have been, first and foremost, 1 2 3 4 5 B. BHUTTO, ‘Without a War on Poverty We Will Never Defeat Terror: Dictatorship and Religious Extremism are Fuelled by Gross Inequality’, The Guardian, 9 August 2004, www.guardian.co.uk/ print/0,4988688–103677,00.html. G. BUSH, ‘President Outlines U.S. Plan to Help World's Poor’, Remarks by the President at United Nations Financing for Development Conference, Cintermex Convention Center, Monterrey, Mexico, 22 March 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020322–1.html. J. MERRICK, ‘Blair’s major U-turn in the war on terror’, Daily Mail, 2 August 2006, at 5. J.WOLFENSOHN, ‘Making the World a Better and Safer Place: The Time for Action is Now’, 22 Politics, (2002), at 118. P. EHRLICH and J. LIU, ‘Some Roots of Terrorism’, 24 Population and Environment, (2002), at 183; L. TYSON, ‘It’s Time to Step Up the Global War on Poverty’, Business Week, 3 December 2001, at 26; R. SOKOLSKY and J. MCMILLAN, ‘Foreign Aid in our Own Defense’, New York Times, 12 February 2002, at A23; C. MILLOY, ‘Terrorism feeds on the global suffering we too often ignore’, Washington Post, 19 September 2001, at B1; W. RASPBERRY, ‘Terrorism’s fertile fields’, Washington Post, 1 October 2001, at A21. Intersentia 43 Ivan Manokha religiously motivated and directly related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the support that Israel receives from the United States and other Western states. Second, the al-Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of September 11 were far from poor or uneducated. Furthermore, recent empirical studies that have investigated the relationship between terrorism and poverty using statistical data on the levels of income and education of terrorists have categorically denied any link between the two.6 This chapter nevertheless seeks to demonstrate that such a causal link does exist and that poverty does play a role in the development of anti-Western terrorist activity. I suggest that in the arguments of both the proponents and the opponents of a causal relationship between poverty and terrorism there are some important shortcomings. First, both sides fail to make a link between anti-Western terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, which, in its turn, is inseparable from economic problems that secularist and nationalist governments started to face in the 1970s in a number of Muslim states. The militant Islam that rose to prominence in this period contained anti-Western rhetoric and explicit calls for a jihad against the West right from the start. Second, poverty is examined in a reductionist and isolationist manner, as a set of statistical data for countries where terrorist organisations are located. That is to say, poverty is not seen in relation to wealth elsewhere, nor is it explained but is taken for granted and treated as a local problem whose solution is simply more urgent today than before the attacks of September 11. This fails to take into account the operation of the global political economy and structural inequalities between the West and the rest of the world, which, as I will argue below, play a role in the development of antiWestern feelings and contribute to widespread support for anti-Western terrorism, whether explicit or tacit. Finally, the conclusions of the empirical studies are also problematic in that they concentrate on an analysis at the level of an individual terrorist, ignoring the fact that in situations perceived as unjust by the participants even those not directly affected by the injustices in question may decide to take action. For example, opponents of racism or gender discrimination may not necessarily be victims of such forms of discrimination. This, of course, is not to equate al-Qaeda terrorists with freedom fighters; it is only to stress the fact that, in addition to an examination of individual variables, structural conditions also need to be taken into account. 6 44 A. KREUGER and J. MALECKOVA, ‘Education, Poverty and Terrorism: Is There a Causal Connection?’, 17 Journal of Economic Perspectives, (2003), at 119; A. KREUGER and D. LAITIN, ‘Faulty Terror Report Card’, Washington Post, 17 May 2004, at 21; see also J.-F. REVEL, Anti-Americanism, (San Francisco, Encounter Books, 2003); D. PIPES, ‘God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?’, The National Interest, (2001–2002), at 14. Intersentia Chapter 3: Terrorism and Poverty: Is There a Causal Relationship? The argument proposed below is made of two parts. The first part carries out an historical analysis of the development of Islamic fundamentalism and demonstrates that it constituted, among other things, a societal reaction to acute socio-economic problems that Muslim states began to face in the 1970s. The process of modernisation and state-led industrialisation undertaken by nationalist and secularist governments in a range of Muslim states in the post-independence period produced some tangible results in the early years but was later frustrated by significant slowdowns in growth, a rapid rise in unemployment and the impoverishment of large sectors of the population. Coupled with the fact that most nationalist governments pursued very authoritarian policies which became increasingly unpopular, there emerged a setting within which Islamic ideology gradually began to be seen as offering a better alternative and acquired more and more supporters. Although initially the project of Islamic militantism was mostly directed against the national governments of Muslim states, right from the beginning it also identified the West one of its enemies and targets. The proclamation of a holy war against Western states and the development of anti-Western terrorism gained real momentum after the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the subsequent support for Islamic fundamentalism in other countries provided by Iran. The second part addresses the contemporary context of anti-Western terrorism. The socio-economic conditions in a range of Islamic states that led to the development of radical Islamic organisations and parties have not only not improved but in many cases have very significantly deteriorated. Such a situation is examined as an issue of structural inequality and in terms of its causal relationship with the development of terrorism today. The argument is built around the concept of the ‘social bandit’ borrowed from British historian Eric Hobsbawm.7 By social bandits Hobsbawm refers to those outlaws in pre-capitalist societies who robbed the rich and gave at least some of their loot to the poor. Their motives diverged a great deal but what was common to all social bandits was a mythology that surrounded their activities and strong popular sympathy and support. In a nutshell, the majority of pre-capitalist populations included poor peasants and when such ‘primitive rebels’ attacked the rich they became popular heroes, despite the fact that they were cruel and violent. In addition, such rebels were primitive in the sense that they lacked any concrete programme for reform or long-term project. They did not question structural relations, nor did they seek to understand the causes of people’s misfortunes. In this chapter I use Hobsbawm’s notion of social bandit to describe the fact that in today’s international setting, particularly in the context of huge international inequality and widespread 7 E. HOBSBAWM, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1959); E. HOBSBAWM, Bandits, (London, Abacus, 2000). Intersentia 45 Ivan Manokha poverty in the non-Western world, violence against Western states, particularly the United States, enjoys significant sympathy elsewhere. This is not only an outcome of inequality but has to do with other factors, particularly certain political and military actions of the US and other Western states. What is important to note here is that the violence perpetrated by terrorists is directed at those who are seen as beneficiaries of the existing order, of international inequalities and injustices and who, for these reasons, attract moral indignation. At the same time, al-Qaeda terrorism has no concrete project of reform, only vague calls for the establishment of an Islamic international order. Like social banditry in peasant societies, it is a primitive form of rebellion and is bound to fail. HIS TORIC AL DEVELOPMENT OF IS LAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM The roots of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism and of its anti-Western dimension go back to the period of colonial domination of Muslim societies by Western powers. The early form of militant Islamism, or ‘pre-fundamentalism’,8 emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was championed by such movements as the Wahhabis in Arabia, the Mahdis in Sudan, the Sanusis in North Africa, the Khilafat Movement in India and the Muslim Brotherhood in the pre-independence years in Egypt.9 The pre-fundamentalist project of Islamic renewal from within and the attempt to unite Muslims into a strong pan-Islamic movement as a means of resisting European colonial ambitions resulted in the development of a new Islamic ideology by such figures as Jamal ad-din al-Afghani in Iran, Mohammed Abduh and Hassan al Banna in Egypt, Muhammad Rashid Rida in Syria, and Sayyid Ahmed Khan in India.10 During this phase of Islamic revivalism poverty did not seem to play any causal role; however, in order to understand better the relationship between socio-economic conditions, Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Western terrorism today, it is important to bear in mind the fact that the early militant Islamic ideologies had an important anti-Western element from the outset. In the immediate post-independence period, the Islamic project suffered a significant setback with the rise of nationalist secular governments whose declared objective was 8 9 10 46 B. MILTON-EDWARDS, Islamic Fundamentalism since 1945, (New York, Routledge, 2004). P. HOLT, The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881–1898, (London, Oxford University Press, 1958); H. ENAYAT, Modern Islamic Political Thought, (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1982). A. HOURANI, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789–1939, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982); K. CRAGG, Counsels in Contemporary Islam, (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1965). Intersentia Chapter 3: Terrorism and Poverty: Is There a Causal Relationship? to modernise Muslim societies. In Egypt under Nasser, Syria and Iraq under the Ba’th, Iran under the Shah, Tunisia under the Neo-Dustur Party, and Algeria under the National Liberation Front, policies of separating the state from religion were implemented. The leaders of such regimes undertook major cultural, educational and political campaigns to convert the Muslim masses to the ideologies of socialism or secular nationalism, suppressing resistance to the virtual elimination of the Islamists in many areas. Policies of modernisation were initially successful, achieving average growth close to 2.5 per cent11 but by the mid-1970s socio-economic conditions in virtually all Muslim states were rapidly deteriorating. We can divide the key states in the Middle East and North Africa into two broad groups: diversified Arab economies (DAE), which include Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia; and oil Arab economies (OAE), which comprise Libya, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.12 Despite their different structures, economic problems in all these states appeared roughly at the same time: the failure of state-led import substitution industrialisation in DAE countries became apparent in the 1970s, coinciding with oil price shocks that affected oil-exporting countries. Thus, the adoption of state-led industrialisation by such states as Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Syria, Tunisia and Morocco was influenced by a development paradigm that prevailed in the 1940s and 1950s, namely the idea that development was synonymous with industrialisation, which was achieved through protectionism and import substitution. Although the doctrine of import substitution emerged and developed predominantly in Latin America, in total 78 developing countries outside the Soviet bloc, including the Arab countries, chose in this period some form of inward-looking development strategy13 and all of them soon started facing similar problems. First, these closed economies borrowed heavily from foreign sources, which resulted in a debt crisis when creditors withdrew support from further lending. Second, they oriented investment toward non-traded goods and thus lacked the foreign exchange earnings to service the debts.14 Third, they had a higher level of state involvement in the economy, including the ownership of state enterprises, and loss-making state enterprises added significantly to the overall fiscal burden of many governments in the 1970s and 1980s, contributing to the onset of high inflation and foreign debt crises.15 After early successes, these economies suffered sharp downturns in economic growth, high inflation and mass unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s. 11 12 13 14 15 I. ELBADAWI, ‘Reviving Growth in the Arab World’, 53 Economic Development and Cultural Change, (2005), at 293. ‘Economic Trends in the MENA Region’, Economic Research Forum, (Cairo, ERF, 1998). J. SACHS et al, ‘Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity No. 1, (1995). WORLD BANK, World Development Report 1978, (Washington, World Bank Publications, 1978). SACHS and WARNER, infra n. 16, at 55. Intersentia 47 Ivan Manokha The oil-exporting countries of the region faced different problems. First, they suffered from an over-reliance on oil revenue, which tended to undermine the competitiveness of the non-resource tradable sectors and hence impeded economic diversification and growth.16 Second, economic expansion, especially during the oil boom of the 1970s, induced structural imbalances and disequilibria: most of the growth was in the service sector of the economy, especially government services, and in consumer-related industries. This worked to the detriment of agricultural and industrial expansion, which lagged behind in most Arab countries.17 Third, oil dependence generated corrosive effects on governance and accountability and hence undermined the institutional foundation of growth.18 Related to this was the problem of redistributing income from oil. The gulf between the few beneficiaries of growth and all those who were left out grew ever wider, making for a greater polarisation of the societies and further economic asymmetries. These problems manifested themselves most acutely following the collapse of oil prices in the early 1980s. As a result, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, countries in the Middle East and North Africa were marked by ‘increased unemployment, mass impoverishment, population explosion, urban hypertrophy, lagging food production, low industrial productivity, inadequately trained labour force, huge defence expenditures, increasing inequality, political instability, and social fragmentation’.19 The expectations that accompanied the onset of modernisation, particularly among the young, were crushed by harsh socio-economic realities. The feelings of disillusionment and dissatisfaction were further increased by the highly authoritarian nature of most governments in the region. In every Arab state, the centralisation of power in the hands of one person or clan has been the dominant feature of politics over the last four decades,20 with political parties, labour unions and voluntary organisations being either outlawed and repressed, or at least dismissed as irrelevant.21 It is against this background that the rise of militant Islam needs to be examined. The Islamists recognised the crisis around them and formulated an approach that 16 17 18 19 20 21 48 J. NEARY and S. VAN WIJNBERGEN, Natural Resources and the Macroeconomy, (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1985); J. SACHS and A. WARNER, ‘Natural Resource Abundance and Economic Growth’, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, No. 5398, (1995). M. FAKSH, ‘The Chimera of Education for Development in Egypt: The Socio-Economic Roles of University Graduates’, 13 Middle Eastern Studies, (1997), at 229. B. EIFFERT, A. GELB and N. TALLROTH, ‘Managing Oil Wealth’, 40 Finance and Development IMF Quarterly, (2003), at 40. C. ISSAWI, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa, (London, Methuen, 1982). A. DAWISHA, ‘Arab Regimes: Legitimacy and Foreign Policy’, in G. LUCIANI (ed), The Arab State, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990). H. BARAKAT, ‘Ideological Determinants of Arab Development’, in I. IBRAHIM (ed), Arab Resources, (London, Croom Helm, 1983). Intersentia Chapter 3: Terrorism and Poverty: Is There a Causal Relationship? facilitated their reinsertion into the public arena. They took up the cause of the poor and called for responsible government, social justice and a more equitable distribution of income.22 As Sheikh Naim al-Qassam, deputy leader of Hezbollah, proclaimed: ‘We want to build society, to provide essential services and meet the prevailing challenges’.23 Earlier on, Khomeini used such slogans as ‘Islam is for equity and social justice’, ‘Islam will eliminate class differences’, and ‘Islam will liberate the hungry and the oppressed from the clutches of the rich and the oppressors’.24 As Zubaida argues, the root of the Islamic phenomenon is economic and demographic problems and the inability of the state to cope with them; ‘this is where the Islamists are moving in’.25 For a generation of young, educated members of the middle and lower-middle classes, as well as the impoverished masses, faced with the denial of opportunities for education, employment and shelter, the militant Islamist ideology of the likes of Ayatollah Khomeini and Ali Shariati of Iran, Al-Turabi of Sudan, Abul Ala Maududi of Pakistan and Sayyid Qutb of Egypt was an attractive alternative and they constituted the chief recruitment pool for the Islamic movements. Islamists themselves acknowledge this: ‘Islam is the religion of bad times’, said an Egyptian sheikh; ‘it is enough to see the poverty-stricken outskirts of Algiers or the refugee camps in Gaza to understand the factors that nurture the strength of the Islamic Resistance Movement’, said a Hamas leader in Gaza.26 Islamic fundamentalism was therefore an indigenous response, especially among the masses of the destitute and underprivileged, to prevalent socio-economic and political problems and the inability of secular governments to guarantee the basic rights of their citizens. Thus, the 1980s witnessed the emergence on the political stage of the Middle East and North Africa of movements and parties advocating the resurgence of Islam. These parties enjoyed their greatest political successes in countries suffering ‘regime exhaustion’,27 that is, a failure of regimes to develop any coherent mass base and to achieve economic prosperity for the masses. Iran was the first country to fall to the Islamists, followed by the Sudan. Islamic militants also made significant inroads in Lebanon, among the Palestinians and in Syria.28 In Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was on the verge of a dramatic electoral victory over the regime party (the FLN) in 1992 when the military took overt control of the government and imposed harsh, 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 M. FAKSH, supra n. 17. Quoted in B. MILTON-EDWARDS, supra n. 8, at 55. See E. ABRAHAMIAN, ‘Khomeini: A Fundamentalist?’, in L. KAPLAN (ed), Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective, (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). S. ZUBAIDA, Islam, the People and the State: Political Ideas and Movements in the Middle East, (London, I.B. Tauris, 1993). Id. 14. A. RICHARDS and J. WATERBURY, A Political Economy of the Middle East: State, Class, and Economic Development, (Boulder, Westview Press, 1990), at 432. T. FRIEDMAN, From Beirut to Jerusalem, (New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989). Intersentia 49 Ivan Manokha repressive measures. In Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood legitimately earned a position from which it could bid for a formal share of power by electing 34 candidates out of a total of 80 in the national parliament in 1989 to become the largest organised group in that body. In Egypt, Islamic militants quietly constructed a network of social support services that reportedly functioned more smoothly than the corrupt and inefficient government bureaucracy. These groups also insinuated themselves into the parliament by means of alliances with officially sanctioned parties.29 Development of anti-Western terrorism was an understandable outcome of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. The reason for this is the central role played in radical Islamic ideologies by the idea of jihad, or holy war. The notion of jihad has many different interpretations in Islam but what is certain is that, at least in part, it involves the restoration and reassertion of Islamic authenticity in response to Western hegemony. Ever since its encounter with, and subsequent domination by, the West, Islam has been on the retreat. This is particularly so in the 20th century, prompting one leading Islamist, Muhammad al-Bahi, to call it ‘the century of eclipse’.30 Coupled with the fact that the origins of Islamic fundamentalism were already in part antiWestern in nature, as we have seen above, it was only a step away from anti-Western terrorism. A move from such radical rhetoric to practice took place with the Iranian revolution of 1979, when Iran became a major supporter of anti-Western Islamic terrorism, of a holy war against the ‘Great Satan’ as Khomeini, following Qutb, branded the US. The era of religiously motivated suicide missions against Western targets was inaugurated during the Lebanese civil war (1975–90), especially in the 1980s. Taking inspiration from Iran’s Islamic revolution and also supported by Syria, Hezbollah militants led a carefully planned suicide attack against the US Embassy in Beirut in December 1981, killing 69 people. In 1983, Hezbollah members embracing martyrdom were particularly effective in staging a devastating blow against the Western military presence within the multinational force in Lebanon, killing 241 US marines and 58 French parachutists. To sum up, the argument made in this section traces the roots of contemporary antiWestern terrorism to the development of Islamic fundamentalism in the context of socio-economic problems that post-independence Muslim states began to face in the 1960s and 1970s. Militant Islamism, as Taheri observed, was ‘bound to end in terrorism’.31 As we have seen above, the anti-Western and militant element has been present in the Islamic revival right from the start and it increased dramatically after 29 30 31 50 F. TACHAU, ‘Introduction’, in F. TACHAU (ed), Political Parties of the Middle East and North Africa, (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1994), at xviii. In M. FAKSH, supra n. 17, at 8. A. TAHERI, Holy Terror: The Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism, (London, Sphere Books, 1985), at 75. Intersentia Chapter 3: Terrorism and Poverty: Is There a Causal Relationship? the Six Day War and the Iranian revolution. Therefore, as Milton-Edwards rightly notes, ‘al-Qaeda represents the apogee of Islamic fundamentalism’.32 In other words, we can construct a causal chain from poverty and the denial of basic socio-economic rights in Muslim states in the 1970s, the development of radical Islamic fundamentalism that proposed a solution to these problems and gained a lot of support from the poor and oppressed masses, to the development of anti-Western terrorism. In the next section we will examine the current global situation and the role of ever deteriorating socio-economic conditions in the development of anti-Western Islamic terrorism, which seems to have reached its peak. NEW ‘S OC IAL BANDITS’ The socio-economic problems of Arab countries discussed above coincided in time and were, to a certain extent, causally linked, with profound transformations in the global economic order. Following the French Regulation School and a neo-Gramscian approach to international relations, we can describe these transformations as a shift from an order based on a Fordist structure accumulation, which characterised in particular developed industrialised economies in the period from the end of the Second World War to the early 1970s, to a new post-Fordist or non-Fordist structure.33 There is no space here to provide a detailed overview of Fordism as a structure of accumulation. What I would like to do is to contrast the Fordist world order with the neo-liberal international system that has succeeded it. This will enable us to see how and why international economic inequalities have grown and how this in turn has impacted on the development of anti-Western terrorism. As a regime of accumulation Fordism involved a cycle of growth based on the synchronisation of mass production and mass consumption. This cycle comprised 32 33 B. MILTON-EDWARDS, supra n. 8, at 113. M. AGLIETTA, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: the US Experience, (London, New Left Books, 1979); M. AGLIETTA, ‘Capitalism at the Turn of the Century: Regulation Theory and the Challenge of Social Change’, New Left Review No. 232, (1998), at 41; R. BOYER, ‘The Political in the Era of Globalization and Finance: Focus on Some Régulation School Research’, 24 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, (2000), at 274; B. JESSOP, ‘The Changing Governance of Welfare: Recent Trends in its Primary Functions, Scale, and Modes of Coordination’, 33 Social Policy and Administration, (1999), at 348; B. JESSOP, ‘Fordism and Post-Fordism: A Critical Reformulation’, in B. JESSOP (ed), Regulation Theory and the Crisis of Capitalism, (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2001); S. GILL, ‘Globalization, Market Civilization, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, 24 Millennium, (1995), at 399; S. GILL, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, (Houndmills, Palgrave, 2003); M. RUPERT, Producing Hegemony: the politics of mass production and American global power, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995); M. RUPERT, Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order, (London, Routledge, 2000). Intersentia 51 Ivan Manokha the following elements: rising productivity based on economies of scale in mass production, rising incomes linked to productivity, increased mass demand due to rising wages, increased profits based on full utilisation of capacity, increased investment in improved mass production equipment and techniques and a further rise in productivity. This regime of accumulation was marked by a specific mode of regulation – a welfare state which managed aggregate demand, controlled finance and generalised mass consumption norms so that most citizens could share the prosperity generated by rising economies of scale.34 The dominant economic paradigm at the time was the Keynesian view that state intervention in the functioning of the market was necessary to offset nominal rigidities, particularly in the labour market, through government spending. State governments in Western Europe, North America and Japan engaged in inflationary policies that were aimed at stimulating demand in order to increase consumption and thereby fuel output and growth. In addition to this, trade unions were well organised and their collective bargaining power was recognised by enterprise management, while the former in turn recognised the latter’s right to control the labour process and corporate strategy. At the core of Fordism was a ‘capital-labour compromise’ as the continuous rise in productivity was matched by the integration of wage-earners into societies for life through mass consumption and the creation of diverse social protection systems.35 International structures of trade and finance were based on the internationalisation of this negotiated compromise between the factions of capital and labour in a range of capitalist states.36 In other words, there emerged a form of a consensus among governments in the US, Western Europe and Japan concerning the development of a capitalist world economy marked by significant state intervention in the functioning of the market. States were allowed to pursue inflationary economic stabilisation and social welfare policies and this consensus was institutionalised in the framework of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Central to the established international order ‘were the ideological notions of the “mixed economy,” which allowed for a range national policies to be practiced in a relatively expansionist, stable structure’.37 The Fordist system, however, began to crumble in the early 1970s. A number of factors were responsible for the decline of Fordism, including slowdowns in productivity that were not matched by a corresponding decline in wages (to a great extent due to the significant bargaining power of workers’ organisations), a decline in the regulatory 34 35 36 37 52 B. JESSOP 2001, supra n. 33, at 35; M. AGLIETTA and R. BRETON, ‘Financial Systems, Corporate Control and Capital Accumulation’, 30 Economy and Society, (2001), at 434. R. BOYER, supra n. 33, at 280. S. GILL, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, supra n. 33, at 87. Id. Intersentia Chapter 3: Terrorism and Poverty: Is There a Causal Relationship? power of inflation (economic actors became used to the existence of inflation and formed their expectations accordingly in terms of wage and price setting), gradual transnationalisation of production processes (due to slowdowns in productivity and an inability to reduce wages in the central countries, enterprises started searching for lower wage zones abroad), as well as exogenous factors such as oil price shocks. Of these processes the key role was played by the transnationalisation of production, which put pressure on labour markets in developed states, particularly on low-skilled workers and led to a rise in unemployment. States responded with policies of labour market deregulation (in different countries to differing extents), which have eaten away the bargaining power of trade unions and put to an end the Fordist capitallabour compromise in industrialised countries. The Keynesian welfare state has gradually given way to a competition state38 which is more concerned with supply-side intervention, such as technology development and job training, than with full employment and demand.39 A new neo-liberal economic paradigm governing state policies replaced Keynesianism with an emphasis on tight fiscal policy, low inflation and a reduction of state regulation of the market: liberalisation of trade and capital movements, privatisation of state-owned enterprises, reduction of public spending and budget deficits and improvement of state competitiveness at the international level, particularly in terms of obtaining foreign investment. At the international level these new policy objectives were adopted by such institutions as the IMF and World Bank, as well as the World Trade Organisation that succeeded GATT, and they are commonly known as the ‘Washington Consensus’. These developments have been described as constituting the development of a hegemonic order at the centre of which is transnational capital.40 The notion of hegemony refers not so much to the behavioural power of capital (although the fact that multinational corporations (MNCs) own more than 25 per cent of the world’s stocks and assets41 is in itself far from negligible) as to its structural power related to 38 39 40 41 P. CERNY, ‘Structuring the Political Arena: Public Goods, States and Governments in a Globalizing World’, in R. PALAN (ed), Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories, (London, Routledge, 2000). B. JESSOP, ‘The Transition to Post-Fordism and the Schumpeterian Workfare State’, in R. BORROWS and B. LOADER (eds), Towards a Post-Fordist Welfare State, (London, Routledge, 1994). R. COX, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History, (New York, Columbia University Press, 1987); R. COX, ‘Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations’, in S. GILL (ed), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993); R. COX, ‘Civil Society at the Turn of the Millennium: prospects for an alternative world order’, 25 Review of International Studies, (1999), at 3; S. GILL and D. LAW, ‘Global Hegemony and the Structural Power of Capital’; and G. ARRIGHI, ‘The Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism’, in S. GILL (ed), Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations, supra. J. HARRIS, ‘Globalisation and the Technological Transformation of Capitalism’, 40 Race and Class, (1998), at 21. Intersentia 53 Ivan Manokha its high mobility. States need to attract and retain investment, which in turn requires the adoption of regulations that favour the interests of capital, such as the removal of state controls on the import and export of capital, reform of labour regulations, favourable taxation schemes and so on. What is important to note here is that both developed and developing states are affected, although the former have much more room for manoeuvre in terms of policy options. As Gill notes, ‘even the autonomy of the United States, Japan, and the European Union is constrained in matters of macroeconomic policy by the globalisation of finance and production. Smaller and less self-sufficient states tend to be correspondingly more sensitive and vulnerable to global financial pressures’.42 In addition, no state can control what happens on the world’s financial markets, although the repercussions of stock exchange crises are felt everywhere in the world, as the East Asian and Russian crises have demonstrated. As Arrighi points out, ‘the main tendency of the last 30 years has been for most states, including the US, to become the servant rather than the master of extraterritorial finance’.43 A similar argument is made by Robinson, who observes that globalisation ‘made it structurally impossible for individual nations to sustain independent, or even autonomous, economies, policies and social structures’, whether they are ‘developed or underdeveloped’.44 However, as mentioned above, in this highly competitive international structure developed political economies have more policy options and economic levers available to them than the governments of developing states. One of the key issues that interests us here is international trade, which is structured in a very asymmetrical and unequal manner and operates to the advantage of the developed Western economies. As has repeatedly been emphasised by development non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and many civil society groups and activists, Western states promote policies of trade liberalisation elsewhere, often as a pre-condition for economic aid but discriminate against imports from poorer countries. Among the key examples of such policies are the Common Agricultural Policy in the European Union and agricultural subsidies in the United States. There also exist restrictions and quotas on imports of textile products, particularly in the United States and more recently the EU, that affect such countries as India, Pakistan and Egypt. According to research undertaken in 2003 by American economists, the world’s poorer countries lose a total of $24 billion a year because of the subsidies paid to farmers by rich nations.45 According to the World Bank, subsidies to agriculture (which run to roughly $1 billion a day) and tariffs in 42 43 44 45 54 S. GILL, ‘Globalization, Market Civilization, and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, supra n. 33, at 399. G. ARRIGHI, supra n. 40, at 69. W. ROBINSON, ‘Globalisation: Nine Theses on Our Epoch’, 38 Race and Class, (1996), at 15. BBC ‘Adding up farming subsidies’, BBC Online, 27 August 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ business/3183139.stm. Intersentia Chapter 3: Terrorism and Poverty: Is There a Causal Relationship? high-income countries on imports from developing countries, which are four times those collected from industrial countries, are ‘important impediments that keep the poor from taking advantage of trading opportunities’.46 Furthermore, ‘the damage caused by discrimination against goods efficiently produced by poor countries such as food, textiles and clothing can be measured against faster integration which through lowering barriers to merchandise would increase growth and provide some $1.5 trillion of additional cumulative income to developing countries over the 2005–2015 period’.47 The competitiveness and development possibilities of the South are further weakened by the problem of external debt, which has significantly increased over the last several decades. Thus, if in 1970, the world’s poorest countries (roughly 60 countries classified as low income by the World Bank) owed $25 billion in debt, by 2002 their debt had reached $523 billion even though over the last three decades they have repaid $550 billion in both principal and interest.48 Extrapolating from United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) data, as many as 5 million children and vulnerable adults may have lost their lives in sub-Saharan Africa as a result of the debt crunch since the late 1980s.49 As Michael Mann notes, the issue of debt ‘is often perceived in the South as constituting countries. The US is the leading imperial actor here, partly because the institutions of the IMF, etc. reflect an earlier era in which the American economy was more dominant than it is today. But other Northern countries are also implicated’.50 In this highly competitive and at the same time very unequal international economic environment, millions of people in the developing world suffer from poverty and poverty-related problems. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), of the 4.6 billion people in developing countries more than 850 million are illiterate, nearly a billion lack access to improved water sources, and 2.4 billion lack access to basic sanitation. Around 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 a day, and 2.8 billion on less than $2 a day.51 In addition to this, there is the issue of generic drugs 46 47 48 49 50 51 WORLD BANK, Global Economic Prospects and the Developing Countries, Making Trade Work for the Poor, (Washington, World Bank Publications, 2002), at xiii. Id. xiii. BBC, ‘Debt relief hopes bring out the critics’, BBC Online, 29 June 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ business/4619189.stm; S. KAPOOR, ‘Paying for 100% Multilateral Debt Cancellation’, EURODAD publications, January, (2005), at 5. R. BUCKLEY, ‘The Rich Borrow and the Poor Repay: The Fatal Flaw in International Finance’, 19 World Policy Journal, (2003), at 59. M. MANN, ‘Globalization as Violence’, online paper, (2001), www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/mann/ globasviol%5B1%5D.pdf. UNDP, Human Development Report 2003: Millennium Development Goals: A compact among nations to end human poverty, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004). Intersentia 55 Ivan Manokha which could save the lives of millions in the developing world but which go against the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS agreement) and which developing countries are not allowed to produce. Thus, 11 million children die each year from preventable diseases; more than one million die from malaria; around two million people die annually from tuberculosis and pneumonia kills two million children every year. Overall, today more than two billion people in developing countries have no regular access to the drugs they need, partly because prices are too high.52 We saw in the first part how deteriorating socio-economic conditions in Arab countries led to the development of militant Islamist parties and movements. What we can say, with respect to the economic situation in the region today, is that it has not improved a great deal and that in some cases it has deteriorated further. An example of such deterioration that is of particular importance for the analysis of terrorism is Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a country that is nowadays categorised as a ‘failed state’, that is, a state that has not been able to maintain a monopoly on the use of the means of violence within its borders and is not able to enforce its laws uniformly. In addition to Afghanistan, a failed state category is also used to refer to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Yemen, East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The causes of such state collapses are socio-economic, primarily the inability of state economies to survive in this highly competitive and unequal international environment, or to finance basic public services and maintain minimal state apparatuses. A number of observers have identified a direct causal link between failed states, particularly Afghanistan, and international terrorism.53 Indeed, Afghanistan was used by al-Qaeda to prepare the attacks of 9/11, and it continues to be one of the key locations of terrorist bases and training camps. In addition, Afghanistan produces up to 96 per cent of the world’s opium, which constitutes one of the sources that is used to finance terrorist activity. In addition to this direct causal link between the current global economic environment, poverty that affects some states as a result of its functioning to the point of their collapse and terrorism, I would like to address the issue of poverty and terrorism in structural terms. That is to say, poverty and large-scale violations of basic positive rights need to be treated not in isolation, as is done by the empirical studies mentioned earlier, but in relation to wealth and abundance elsewhere. For example, in developed 52 53 56 OXFAM, ‘Five Questions Drug Companies Don’t Want You to Ask’, (August, 2005), www.oxfam.org/en/files/doc_questions_drug_companies_poverty/download. J. SACHS, ‘The Strategic Significance of Global Inequality, 24 Washington Quarterly, (2001), at 187; E.-O. CZEMPIEL, Weltpolitik im Umbruch: Die Pax Americana, der Terrorismus und die Zukunft der internationalen Beziehungen, (München, Verlag Beck, 2003). Intersentia Chapter 3: Terrorism and Poverty: Is There a Causal Relationship? countries fewer than one child in 100 does not reach its fifth birthday, while in the poorest countries as many as a fifth of children do not; while in developed countries fewer than 5 per cent of all children under five are malnourished, in poor countries as many as 50 per cent are; and the average income in the richest 20 countries is 37 times the average in the poorest 20, a gap that has doubled in the past 40 years.54 More importantly, empirical studies fail to deal with the fact that a lot of poverty and human misery results from the policies, particularly the trade policies discussed above, adopted by developed countries. This, of course, does not mean that all those who hold developed countries responsible for these inequalities and injustices have the potential to become terrorists. However, in this context it is understandable why more and more people believe that they are dealing with a ‘global satan’, why more and more people can be influenced by radical ideas and cross the line between holding Western populations responsible and committing terrorist acts against innocent people and why those who do receive popular support and are seen as heroes or martyrs. As Courtland Milloy of the Washington Post observed, the root causes of terrorism lie in global suffering, ‘which is systemic and deeply rooted – in colonialism, racism, and greed’.55 To develop this argument further I propose to employ Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of social banditry. In his earlier study ‘Primitive Rebels’ and in a recent book ‘Bandits’ Eric Hobsbawm presents an elaborate analysis of forms of social protest in precapitalist peasant societies. ‘Social banditry’, he argues, ‘is universally found wherever societies are based on agriculture, and consist largely of peasants and landless labourers ruled, oppressed and exploited by someone else – lords, towns, governments, lawyers, or even banks’.56 That is to say, social banditry is a relatively uniform phenomenon which embodies a rather primitive form of organised social protest by peasants against their landlords in particular and oppression, exploitation and inequality in general. Social bandits such as Robin Hood, Pancho Villa, Ned Kelly and Frank and Jesse James are robbers and gangsters of a special kind, for although they are seen as outlaws or criminals by the state, the peasant community regards them as ‘heroes, champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported’,57for they defy the laws and correct what peasants see as injustices or wrongs. Although social banditry is a phenomenon common to agricultural societies in different geographical areas 54 55 56 57 WORLD BANK, World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty, (Washington, World Bank Publications, 2001). C. MILLOY, ‘Terrorism feeds on the global suffering we too often ignore’, Washington Post, 19 September 2001, at B1. E. HOBSBAWM, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, supra n. 7, at 15. E. HOBSBAWM, Bandits, supra n. 7, at 20. Intersentia 57 Ivan Manokha and has a certain historical continuity, Hobsbawm notes that ‘banditry tended to become epidemic in times of pauperisation and economic crisis’,58 and ‘during and after periods of abnormal hardship, such as famines and wars, or at the moments when the jaws of the dynamic modern world seize the static communities in order to destroy and transform them’.59 Thus, an upsurge in social banditry could be observed in Southern Italy and the Rhineland during the revolutionary transformations and wars at the end of the 18th century, and in Southern Italy after unification, fanned by the introduction of capitalist law and economic policy. In Calabria and Sardinia the major epoch of brigandage began in the 1890s when the modern economy, agricultural depression and emigration made their impact; and in the remote Carpathian mountains banditry arose in the aftermath of the First World War.60 What is important to note about the concept of social banditry is that it is structural in nature, that is, it does not approach individual primitive rebels in terms of their personal characteristics, their intentions or objectives, or the mistakes they made which account for their eventual capture or liquidation by state forces. Social bandits are products of their historical and social context, of the way society is organised and interpreted by the participants. As Hobsbawm puts it in reference to a primitive rebel, ‘the peasant society creates him and calls upon him, when it feels the need for a champion and protector – but precisely then he is incapable of helping it. For social banditry, though a protest, is a modest and unrevolutionary protest. It protests not against the fact that peasants are poor and oppressed, but against the fact that they are sometimes excessively poor and oppressed.’61 In other words, on the one hand the structure of a peasant society creates conditions that encourage the development of primitive rebels; on the other hand, it makes such rebellions ‘primitive’ and bound to fail right from the start, as the way social relations of inequality are understood and interpreted is still rudimentary and preconditions for more general transformatory or revolutionary changes do not exist. As a result, social bandits ‘might succeed from time to time… but who really believes that, with all its chief’s genius for irregular warfare [such rebellions] would have faced anything but defeat?’62 I would argue that the late-modern global political economy, with all its injustices and inequalities described above, provides a setting which encourages the development of such new social bandits who today, as Hobsbawm himself notes in passing, 58 59 60 61 62 58 Id. 26. E. HOBSBAWM, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, supra n. 7, at 24. Id. 24. Id. 24, emphasis added. Id. 28. Intersentia Chapter 3: Terrorism and Poverty: Is There a Causal Relationship? are ‘described as terrorists’.63 This is not to equate or in any way compare Osama Bin Laden with Robin Hood; it is to identify the structural context which is conducive to the development of organisations and individuals that can perceive themselves, and be perceived by many others, as heroes and martyrs fighting against the source of evil. It is a structural setting within which individuals, particularly the youth, can be convinced that committing terrorist acts against the West is a just thing to do. As Granville observed, ‘the perpetrators of the September attacks, like so many primary exponents of fanatical and murderous ideologies through history, were neither poor nor uneducated, but the extensive poverty and even more widespread hopelessness give these evil leaders fertile ground not only for recruiting their active foot soldiers, but also for building popular sympathy among the Arab masses’.64 Or, as Talbott puts it ‘while suicide bombers are privileged and educated, their constituencies are the poor who feel victimized’.65 According to Jerrold Post, a psychological profiler at the CIA, the political and economic policies and practices of the US government and US-based global corporations contribute to the conditions that create a ‘roiling hatred within the Arab world directed at the United States’ and terrorists exploit ‘feelings of despair over economic conditions’.66 An example of this is the following statement of Bin Laden: ‘the West intends to deprive us of our manhood; imperialism does not only exploit us, it emasculates us’.67 It is a context within which those who hesitate can always be given examples of different Western policies, both past (colonialist expansion and domination) and present (the trade and credit policies discussed above), which provide instances of exploitation, military coercion, hypocrisy and, more importantly, profound inequalities. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argues, the attacks on the United States took place because ‘it is that superpower which, by its unbearable power, has fomented all this violence which is endemic throughout the world... We have dreamt of this event [9/11]... because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree’.68 Baudrillard expresses here the same idea, except that he does not place anti-US terrorism in the larger framework of the late-modern global political economy (GPE) and the perception of the West in it in the non-Western and particularly Muslim, world. 63 64 65 66 67 68 E. HOBSBAWM, Bandits, supra n. 7, at 19. B. GRANVILLE, ‘The global economy: What has changed?’, in M. BUCKLEY and R. FAWN (eds), Global Responses to Terrorism: 9/11, Afghanistan and beyond, (New York, Routledge, 2003), at 279. S. TALBOTT, ‘The Other Evil’, Foreign Policy, (November/December, 2001), at 75. M. COHN, ‘Understanding, Responding To, and Preventing Terrorism’, 24 Arab Studies Quarterly Vol. 24, (2002), at 25. Quoted in M. MANN, supra n. 50, at 1. J. BAUDRILLARD, The Spirit of Terrorism, (London, Verso, 2002), at 11. Intersentia 59 Ivan Manokha What is important to note here is that, just as the social structure of peasant societies created primitive rebels and then condemned them to failure, the late-modern GPE on the one hand encourages the development of primitive rebels and on the other makes their project an inevitable failure. This is so because any rebellion against particular identifiable actors, such as Western states or multinational corporations, neglects the structural context within which they operate and which conditions their policies. As argued above, the late-modern GPE is characterised by the hegemonic position of transnational capital, which limits the range of policy options at the disposal of state governments. Even if developed states have had many more options, and, as we have seen above, utilised them to the disadvantage of developing nations, particularly in terms of trade relations, these policies cannot be reduced to the intentions and capabilities of these states alone. They need to be placed within the context of the highly competitive environment within which states find themselves today, a Hobbesian war of all against all, which in turn is inseparable from the logic of capitalist accumulation. As Granville observes, ‘restricted trade access for poor countries’ primary resources and manufactures reflects the political and social pressures of rich country unemployment, and other internal structural weaknesses’,69 which are, in turn, inseparable from the global context. There is no space to address these issues here in detail, but what I wish to highlight with respect to the late-modern GPE is that although actions directed against those who are seen as beneficiaries of the existing order may generate sympathy and approval on the part of those who lose out, just like the actions of social bandits in peasant societies, they are bound to be unsuccessful. Not only do anti-Western terrorists and those who support their actions reduce all social problems to the foreign policies of a handful of Western states but they also lack any tangible alternative whatsoever. Their statements concerning the corrupting influences of Western culture, their calls to stop Western imperialism, by which they mean a whole range of things from Western movies reaching Muslim societies to the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia and their project of establishing a global Islamic caliphate certainly do not constitute any tangible, let alone attractive, alternative. As a result, they will inevitably fail. The key question that arises out of this discussion is what would happen to antiWestern terrorism were poverty to be dramatically reduced or eradicated. Based on the arguments developed above, it is my contention that the eradication of poverty would remove one very important structural condition responsible for the creation of social bandits or terrorists. Of course, religious terrorism would not be eradicated, as religious fanaticism has existed throughout history, whether in the context of poverty or not, and in the case of Islamic terrorism today there would still remain 69 60 B. GRANVILLE, supra n. 64, at 279. Intersentia Chapter 3: Terrorism and Poverty: Is There a Causal Relationship? such issues as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the presence of US troops stationed in Arab countries. Nevertheless, poverty reduction would alter the structures that produces social bandits and would inevitably reduce their number. What this means is that to fight anti-Western terrorism it is necessary to challenge international economic inequalities and global poverty. This necessitates a counter-hegemonic project directed not so much against individual or collective Western actors (such as Western states, regional and international organisations such as the EU and the World Bank, or multinational corporations) but against the global capitalist order itself, particularly its neo-liberal version which has developed in the last two or three decades. An analysis of such a counter-hegemonic project is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, it is the contention here that in the absence of such a project the governments of developed states and other actors, particularly international financial institutions, should strive to take seriously the obligations contained in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and other internationally recognised standards, as well as their commitments to the Millennium Development Goals. This is a necessary measure, for by reducing poverty and providing for at least the most basic rights of individuals in developing countries they would deal a significant blow to anti-Western radicals and their legitimacy in the eyes of others. CONC LUSION This chapter has argued that there exists a causal link between poverty and widespread violations of economic and social rights on the one hand and anti-Western terrorism on the other. Contrary to similar arguments made by different prominent observers, this chapter did not focus on poverty as a factor pushing the poor and the unemployed into terrorism. Instead, it has provided an historical analysis of the rise and development of Islamic fundamentalism and its relationship to the socio-economic problems that Muslim states began to face in the 1970s and the way the rise of militant Islam appeared to many to be a solution in that context. It has also demonstrated that Islamic fundamentalism, right from the start, had a distinctive anti-Western dimension and that the development of anti-Western terrorism was an inevitable outcome of its militantism and its radical interpretation of the notion of jihad. With respect to the current context, this chapter has used Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of social bandit to describe how the injustices, inequalities and asymmetries that characterise the late-modern GPE today create a context within which anti-Western terrorism takes on a form of social banditry. It encourages the rise and development of individuals who may see themselves and be seen by others as heroes and martyrs fighting for a just cause. The chapter concludes that although the eradication of Intersentia 61 Ivan Manokha all poverty in the world would not result in the complete cessation of terrorism, it would remove a crucial structural condition that encourages anti-Western terrorism and the support that it generates. 62 View publication stats Intersentia