The Brutal Legitimacy Of Terror Or: Wouldn't It Be Nice If There Were Only States And No People In Them?

What Muenkler would seem to be suffering from is something to be found with regrettable frequency across the region and beyond: a fond nostalgia for a past when warriors were still civilized, states held a monopoly over physical violence and the logic of "politics" was solely responsible for maiming and killing people (mostly the aforementioned civilized warriors). His broad sweep over (Western, European) history provides him with ample evidence for substantiating his claims: once the territorial state ousted any competing models (and, one might add, imposed these notions of state sovereignty on the rest of the world in the unprecedentedly violent colonial empires of the early modern and modern periods, which restricted the legitimate exercise of violence to a small Western elite):

Muenkler talks about (European) territorial states in much the same way Hegel talked about the Prussian state: his discussion of the state, or at his level of abstraction, statehood, conflates the (unspecified) idealist and descriptive perspective, and one quickly loses sight of what is prescriptive and what is factual. The state as an organizing principle is the profoundly, and profoundly disturbing, Hegelian presupposition that pervades Muenkler's line of argumentation. Any state, in Hegelian thought, bears essential moments of the state's existence in itself, and as such, Hegel tells us, it produces a new organization of rational life; a theory of the state is consequently, according to Hegel, a theory of reason. It is this theory that Muenkler tries to connect to terrorism, and it is this connection that ultimately makes his line of thought so fraught with problems.

In a move from Hegel to Weber, Muenkler goes on to describe history (which in his limited Eurocentrist point of view is exclusively Western history) as the Werden of the state, an evolutionary process in which an "institutionalized territorial state" superseded other forms of government and thus somehow managed to apparently gain a monopoly not only on physical violence in its consolidated territories but also a monopoly of rationality. (Why this change should have been more consequential than, say, the invention of printing remains unexplored.) Here Muenkler follows the very widespread, and very flawed, historical assumption that a centralized, absolutist state apparatus was ultimately successful (in Europe) against competing models because it was simply the most rational model of governing - an assumption which ignores and denies the violent, mythical and religious foundations on which the pre-modern territorial state in its many variations was based. Muenkler also chooses to ignore the outrageous atrocities committed by "civilized warriors" in the past (and, for that matter, present) or includes them under the neutralizing banner of "instrumental rationality"; yet it is very much to be doubted that women raped by "professional soldiers" in modern wars or the victims of, say, Hiroshima would find consolation in the instrumental rationality that wreaked havoc on, or took, their lives and poisoned their countries under the auspices of a state monopoly on warfare.

Such gaps and selective evidence are very indicative of Muenkler's trajectory: his broad sweeps through history, sprinkled with a dose of political philosophy (in a very unholy alliance), can very conveniently bypass factual evidence to the contrary so that his presuppositions support his conclusions that statehood can prevent statehood. The few historical examples he cites are clearly intended to substantiate his assumption (which, one might note, is also a self-representation of states) that their politics in general and their warfare in particular is based on rationality, which is somehow (how exactly?) related to the art of "drawing boundaries." Capitalism (and imperialism, which he considers the unfortunate violent aberration of capitalism in its initial stages) is just the next, supposedly rational step in this evolutionary narrative of history in which the state by itself [für sich] realizes itself as a manifestation of rationality, a guarantor for peace and stability in its more advanced manifestations. It is here that his Eurocentrist, Western point of view and the vagueness of his historical references become undisguisedly apologetic. "Nearly all forecasts of peace in the social sciences as in philosophy are at least implicitly based on the mutual interaction of capitalist prosperity and state stability," claims Muenkler - a very selective vision of the social sciences and philosophy indeed, and it is probably not a coincidence that we are not privy to the sources upon which Muenkler bases this remarkable claim. It seems almost gratuitous in this context to pose the obvious question: in a world where processes of social and political hegemony have created an immense gap between the rich and the poor both within and between nation-states as an outcome of precisely the kind of capitalism that Muenkler glorifies as a guarantor of peace and prosperity, surely one must ask: peace and prosperity for whom?

The historical developments that Muenkler describes not only led to an established concert of European nation-states which, according to Muenkler, allowed for prolonged periods of peace, commerce and prosperity, they also entailed, as Muenkler at least mentions in passing, colonialist expansion and exploitation. Many people in parts of the world outside Muenkler's tunnel vision would indeed strongly disagree with his claim that imperialist expansion and the concomitant violence committed by the colonizers against the colonized was only the engine of capitalist expansion in its initial stages. But Muenkler insidiously denies those parts of the world the rationality he reserves for Western states, and demonstrates convincingly why Frantz Fanon's complex ideas on the emancipatory nature of political "violence," formulated in the context of the Algerian uprisings, still deserve attention as powerful challenges to Eurocentrist idealism. In other words: if we extend our field of vision beyond Western Europe and the United States, beyond the privileged citizens of these countries; if we take history seriously in a global sense, then it becomes obvious that a world of nation-states under the supreme rule of capitalism is not such a peaceful and rational place after all. (Not that capitalism is a completely rational system either, but we won't pursue this line of argument here.)

But these are the questions that Muenkler's Hegelian idealism and abstractions do not allow him to ask, and it is the very structure of his argument on the rationality of states which reveals his ideological position most blatantly. Muenkler's historical narrative, which paints such a rosy picture of territorial, Western warfare as limited, calculable and ultimately conducive to those prosperous, non-violent peacetimes in which the benevolent economic regime of Capitalism ensures prosperity for everybody (even in the currently bankrupt Berlin, where he teaches political science), is just the stage setting for his real target, the description of civil war (and, in a more than awkward extension, terrorism) as irrational, illegitimate and threatening. Ultimately, Muenkler's arbitrary abstractions are intended to set up binary structures of opposition that delegitimate non-state violence (with the unfortunate side effect of legitimating state violence). This is clearly expressed in his "most menacing conflict scenario of the twenty-first century" when war has become privatized and conducted for reasons of profit. Muenkler assumes, economic wartime booms and armament industry interests notwithstanding, that states (again, for clarity's sake: which states? But even though it is never spelled out concretely, he quite clearly implies the European states and the U.S.) always aim at ending wars as fast as possible, while "Colombian bosses or Peruvian guerrilla groups, African warlords, Balkan paramilitaries, and possibly also the organizers of terrorist attacks" always want to prolong warfare indefinitely. This very confidently presented statement simply ignores the fact that it is precisely states that very often have a huge stake (and economic interest) in prolonging, leading and supporting (local) wars, not only out of an interest to oust undesired regimes (as in the case of the U.S.'s support for the Nicaraguan contras or in the - now somewhat discredited - Afghan Mujaheddin's fight against the Soviets) but precisely in order to legitimize and demonstrate their monopoly on rationality and physical violence, i.e. to represent an ideological claim that would have no meaning in a completely pacified world. (Insurgent groups, on the other hand, often fight for quite limited aims, and it never seems to have occurred to Prof. Muenkler that Peruvian guerrilla groups might have legitimate - dare we say rational? - grievances against their government.) There is no single and simple distinction between state wars governed by instrumental reason and "civil wars" which are irrational and privatized - this distinction can only be made by first reserving rationality for the state; and manifestations of the Weltgeist aside, there are some very good, and very ideological, reasons for promoting this flawed equation.
Now these narratives on which Muenkler draws in his extended ruminations on the state of the world are by no means unique or original: dichotomizing, criminalizing, de-legitimizing is, of course, the preferred tactic of ideological state apparatuses to produce the kind of hegemonic consensus that evades the need to address underlying issues and reasons for grievances and facilitates the conflation of issues that should rather be kept apart.

It is not very helpful to subsume terrorism under all the other forms of warfare and violence not exerted by a state; it is a move that legitimizes very dangerous forms of state policies (now clearly visible and exploited in many places) which simply de-legitimate any form of violent (or even non-violent) opposition as "terrorist." Surely Muenkler cannot imply that anti-globalization protesters, who break down fences, should fall under the same category as the perpetrators of the attacks on Washington and New York, who killed thousands of people? But the argument is also very problematic in the other direction: "The preferred soil of terrorist networks is where the state order has been for the most part destroyed: thus, in civil war zones such as Lebanon, Somalia, or also Afghanistan," according to Muenkler. What about the other usual suspects generally rounded up by terrorism "experts," like Libya and Iraq, where intact state apparatuses survived even U.S. bombs? Or has the very fact of this resistance against state erosion from the outside already legitimated their status so that they are no longer included in Muenkler's list?

"The restoration of a minimal measure of statehood everywhere on earth could in the long run be a more effective strike against terrorism than air attacks on their territory" is Muenkler's ultimate diagnosis. So who defines terrorists? Who defines statehood? Can the U.S. (or NATO or the U.N.) become the ultimate state and thus the sole legitimate exerciser of physical violence (as the only capitalist/rational society)? How much more violence would this do to nations, groups and social movements already feeling so alienated that they have to resort to physical violence? Should it not be the ultimate aim to delegitimize violence as a means of conflict resolution in general, or at least to restrict its uses even more, bind it to a problematics of Sittlichkeit that goes beyond the assertion of statehood and rationality and that addresses the reasons and causes for the need to resort to a logic of violence? Muenkler's article is ample testimony to the ease with which these questions can be evaded, exploited and turned around.

We do not have any easy answers for the complex problems of terrorism, warfare, state security, resistance and global inequality highlighted by the atrocious attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon and their aftermath, and we are very suspicious of anyone who claims such answers exist. But we do feel that these events are far too important to be buried beneath sweeping generalizations and grandiose tours through history with little attention to detail and specificity. We urge more careful, more contextualized approaches be taken that take each incident, each movement, each historical example seriously in all its political, social and sittlich complexity and relates it to its global (and we mean global, not Western) situatedness.

Whether Muenkler is aware of it or not, his generalizations and his reification of Western statehood as a moral value per se prepare the ground for going down quite a different road, the road to a more totalitarian form of statehood. Muenkler's piece, which reifies rationality (and, concomitantly, a capitalism founded on states as its enabling condition) so that it can no longer critique its basic assumptions, demonstrates what Adorno has warned us against, the dialectic of the Western Enlightenment that erodes resistance to totalitarianism in the name of instrumental reason.