The day after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the great symbol of global capitalism, graffiti appeared in Genoa. Next to a red star – the symbol of the most hard-core anti- globalisation groups – protesters had sprayed the words “Fly Osama Airlines”.
The movement against globalisation is so heterogeneous that it is impossible to describe how “they”, as a block, have reacted. But the peace vigil that began outside Downing Street and in Parliament Square a week after the bombing was a good place to gauge the mood of anti- globalisation protesters.
There were certainly many familiar faces from the Genoa protests. Their overwhelming emotion was dismay – yet there was also a sense that America had had it coming. One woman in her early twenties, who said she was with “Globalise Resistance”, was withering about the United States. “I’ll cry for the Wall Street brokers killed in Manhattan when America cries for the half a million they killed in Iraq, the 30,000 civilians they killed in Nicaragua, the thousands still ‘missing’ from Pinochet’s CIA-backed regime . . .”
The terrorist attacks have forced the campaigners to ask themselves how far they would be prepared to go. In the aftermath, chatroom users excitedly discussed whether “we” might have been responsible. Some were horrified at the prospect, but others were more positive. One writer, on the anti-globalisation site urban75.org, said: “There has been much talk of terrorist organisations pulling together . . . Could this shift from military to economic targets herald a new era of co-operation between radical groups of completely different ideologies? By this I mean religious fundamentalist and anti-capitalist factions.”
Indeed, the similarities between the two movements – both structurally and, in many ways, intellectually – is disconcerting. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Empire (which is very popular within anti-globalisation circles) write, for example, that, like their own movement, Islamic fundamentalism is postmodern. This is so in as much as it “rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro- American hegemony”. Both movements are supported predominantly by young activists disillusioned or repulsed by US-style materialism and profiteering. The New York and Washington suicide bombers were middle-class, educated men from comparatively wealthy backgrounds: both the anti-globalisation activists and jihadists are movements of the wealthy that claim to speak on behalf of the poor. Both hold the destruction – or at least the crippling – of US power (and that of its supposed subsidiaries, the World Trade Organisation and World Bank) as a fundamental goal.
The most interesting similarity between the two movements lies in their nebulous “network” structures and diffuse political goals. Most of the “terrorist” threats of the 20th century were from groups who wanted either to seize control of a state (for example, the ANC) or establish a breakaway or united one (the IRA, PLO or ETA). After the anarchist movement of the early 20th century died away, almost all recognised terrorist movements were tied to territorial states.
The new “terrorist” groupings are markedly different. They are global in their reach and aspirations. Brought together through a global medium (the internet), the unit they are trying to influence is no less than the whole of humanity. The members of these new movements are shedding the old imagined communities of the nation state. Neither anti-globalisation activists nor jihadists feel that their identity is bound by the territorial nation. The anti-globalisation protesters affiliate themselves to non-corporate humanity; the jihadists stress the unity of the umma (the Muslim people), whatever national boundaries it may cross.
The “old school” terrorists had command structures modelled on national armies. The IRA, for example, has an army executive and soldiers whose sole task is to do its bidding. This has given way to diffuse networks with no clear centre. Power has become much more spread out, shared among states, corporations and supranational organisations such as the International Monetary Fund. So the opponents to that power have become similarly diffuse. Who, for example, is at the heart of the anti-globalisation movement? Who is its leader? Many may retort that the jihadist movement has a clear leader in Osama Bin Laden, yet radical Muslims speak of him more as an inspiration than as a Yasser Arafat-style leader from the front. Bin Laden’s influence on his movement is similar to Naomi Klein’s on hers: a trend-setter, elucidator and guide, but very far from a centralised dictator.
Bush’s inner circle – the likes of Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice – are very much products of the cold war, and they seem to expect their new opponents to act like the old Soviet Union. Schooled on the old model, they cannot comprehend their new enemies. The Bush administration is therefore unable to understand a battle against a grass-roots network spread across the world (including its adherents here in London). They immediately fall back on the language of war, but that is only meaningful between two states.
The US mindset needs to shift its state-centric focus if it really is to “win” this “war”. At first, this will be hard. It will be like trying to look at a magic-eye picture. US leaders will have to let their vision go out of focus and, sooner or later, they will see the pattern of the new world forming in front of their eyes. This will be an extremely hard adjustment for the US government to make, requiring it to acknowledge that many of the traditional tools of foreign policy have been blunted.
You cannot launch missile strikes against a network that communicates in cyberspace and has no physical base. You cannot launch a war against an enemy you cannot find.
The anti-globalisation movement has many benign aspirations to enhance participatory democracy and curb corporate power. But it also has some violent and frightening adherents who are capable of the kind of terrorism being visited upon us by Muslim fundamentalists.
The opposition to the west in the 21st century will come from untraceable networks with no leaders and no hierarchies, just a shared interest in attacking American capitalism in the hope that something better will emerge from the ashes.
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