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Cooperation and Conflict

DOI: 10.1177/00108367020370036762002; 37; 323Cooperation and Conflict

MIKKEL VEDBY RASMUSSEN`A Parallel Globalization of Terror': 9-11, Security and Globalization

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A Parallel Globalization of Terror:911, Security and Globalization

MIKKEL VEDBY RASMUSSEN

ABSTRACTLittle research exists on how the conception of world order in terms ofglobalization defines security policy. The way the terrorist attacks onNew York and Washington, DC, on 11 September 2001 were under-stood highlights how globalization defines threats, and the policiesadopted to deal with them, in the post-Cold War international order.This article utilizes three elements of the globalization discourse (glob-ality, globalization and globalism) identified by Ulrich Beck inanalysing the Western reaction to the events of 11 September 2001. It isargued that the attacks reflected a new strategic globality in which thenew civilian infrastructure of globalization enabled Third World groupsto intervene in the West. In terms of globalization, the events of 11September were seen as the realization of scenarios for post-Cold Warinsecurity that dominated the late 1990s. The terrorist attacks actual-ized the ontological insecurity which followed from the notion thatglobalization enabled threats to proliferate with the same force astrade. Focusing on globalism, the article analyses the strategies for cre-ating safety in a globalized world that presented themselves immedi-ately after the events. The author presents three globalisms:particularism, imperialism and cosmopolitanism.

Keywords: 911; constructivism; globalization; security; United States

In this article, I analyse how globalization was used to explain the signifi-cance of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11September 2001.The United States, in particular, and the Western world, ingeneral, understood what had happened and what they needed to do inresponse in terms of their own conception of the post-Cold War world. This

post-Cold War world-view was defined by globalization.But what defines globalization? I begin with Ulrich Becks distinction

between a global social structure (globality), the process that transcendsprevious national structures in favour of new global structures (glob-alization), and political action based on the premise of globalization(globalism).With this distinction it is possible to see that a substantial num-ber of the different conceptions of what became known as 911 are basedon common conceptions of globalization and globality.

Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies AssociationVol. 37(3): 323349. Copyright 2002 NISASage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)0010-8367[200209]37:3;323349;027676

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Focusing on the immediate Western reactions to the events of 11September 2001,1 I utilize these events to analyse how Western security pol-icy is conceived in terms of globalization. The subject of the article is nothow other societies or groups construct globalization or the events of 11September 2001, nor is it a discussion of how globalization, the events of 11September 2001 or the aftermath oughtto be regarded.

Becks three concepts of globalization structure the article in three sec-tions. The first deals with what I term strategic globality. In the second, theWestern conception of globalization as the process defining the post-ColdWar world is analysed. Finally, I identify particularism, imperialism andcosmopolitanism as three policies of globalization (globalisms) that pre-sented themselves in the wake of 911. I begin, however, by making thecase for focusing on the construction of 911 and at the same time presentBecks concepts of globalization.

Constructing 911 in Terms of Globalization

In the autumn of 2001 there was little hard evidence as to why al-Qaidachose the World Trade Center as its target for the 11 September attacks.One could speculate that the twin towers were attractive targets simplybecause they were landmarks. Perhaps the sheer size of the buildings madethem a target easier to hit by inexperienced pilots than, for example, a NewYork landmark such as the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps it was the number ofcasualties which the destruction of the buildings would generate thatattracted al-Qaida. The point is that in the autumn of 2001 no one in theWest seemed to know the answer for sure.Al-Qaida only offered the brutefacts of the attack.2 In the absence of a clear statement of purpose, the ter-rorists left an understanding of the reasons behind the attack for the UnitedStates and the rest of the Western world to ponder. The Western discourseon the reasons why included the tactical considerations mentioned above,but tactics could only be the immediate cause of the attack. The debatequickly focused on what were believed to be the permissive causes of theattack. The most powerful explanation that first came to light was that al-Qaida had chosen to attack the World Trade Center because of its value asa symbol of globalization.

To the West, the World Trade Center became a scale model of a global-ized world, and the fact that the twin towers fell represented the vulnera-bility of the world order defined by globalization, which had developedfollowing the end of the Cold War.3 The West therefore made its own fearal-Qaidas reason. It was the West, not al-Qaida, that defined itself and itsfuture in terms of globalization. It was the West, not al-Qaida, that pro-duced volume upon volume analysing the causes and consequences ofglobalization. Globalization was the Wests conceptual means for under-standing itself and the world.4 Al-Qaida targeted the West, however, andthe West constructed the attack in the context of globalization, becauseonly in this context did the attack make sense to the West. Globalizationexplained why even American cities were vulnerable to mass terrorism; and

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globalization explained what was at stake and how the West could, andshould, respond.

We therefore need to take a closer look at the way the strategic environ-ment is conceived in terms of globalization if we are to explain theAmerican understanding, and Western understanding in general, of whatsecurity challenge the attacks on 11 September 2001 represented. In doingso, it is important to note that globalization is used in a number of differentways, ways that describe different results of the transformation process andthat globalization is used to construct.

Ulrich Beck distinguishes between three meanings of globalization:globality, globalism and globalization proper. According to Beck, glob-ality refers to a global social structure which presents agents with a worldhorizon (2000: 12). Globalization refers to the process that not only pro-duces a world horizon but also breaks down the categories of the nationalstate that used to define the political, economic and social world (pp. 1, 11).Globalism is globalization turned into action. Globalism is politics justifiedin terms of globalization. Beck regards globalism as the death of politics asworld markets eliminate or supplant political action (p. 9).5

I analyse the Western construction of the events of 11 September 2001 interms of globalization. In the first section, I focus on globality and in thenext on the conception of globalization as a process that made the impact ofthe attacks much greater than it would otherwise have been.In the final ana-lytical section I map the three globalisms, the three recipes for policy, whichpresented themselves to Western policy-makers in the autumn of 2001.

Strategic Globality

The attacks of 11 September 2001 arguably showed the globality of securityin the late-modern world. Where Americans traditionally could safelyassume that wars took place beyond the horizon, Deputy Secretary ofDefense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress in October that:6

The recent attacks on Washington and New York demonstrate [that] we arewitnessing a dramatic expansion of the deadly zone of conflict to our popula-tion centers. War used to be something that took place on foreign soil. Nolonger. (Wolfowitz, 2001: 33)

Less fortunate peoples than the Americans had been experiencing waron their soil for some considerable time. What had changed, the DeputySecretary of Defense argued, was the ability of others to project power vis--vis the United States. Using the global civilian infrastructure, even non-state actors were now able to inflict considerable harm on the UnitedStates. As President George Bush told Congress, however, the UnitedStates ability to project power had also markedly improved, giving theUnited States a truly global military reach. Referring to the operations inAfghanistan, the president had this message to terrorists plotting to usetheir projective power against the United States: Even 7,000 miles away,

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across oceans and continents, on mountain tops and in caves you will notescape the justice of this nation (Bush, 2002: 6).

One could argue that the improved power projection capabilities of ter-rorist networks and of great powers like the United States are a quantita-tive change only. Strategic globality is far from new. On the contrary,globality has been a strategic quality for hundreds of years. Ever since theseventeenth century, European conflicts have had a global dimension, asEuropean colonies added an overseas theatre to European wars. The SevenYears War (175663), one of the first such conflicts, was fought not just incontinental Europe but also in North America and India. From a theoreti-cal point of view, one could even argue that strategic globality has been thevery condition for the international system. Raymond Aron defined theinternational system as the ensemble constituted by political units thatmaintain regular relations with each other and that are all capable of beingimplicated in a generalized war (1966: 94). The background for this defini-tion is that for much of human history only the resources mobilized for warwere sufficiently great to overcome geography and make the actions of onepower of immediate relevance to every other. In Anthony Giddenss terms,it was only war that was able to create one international space, one system,of states that did not share a geographical place (1990: 1821). Arguably,globalization is changing this situation by creating a civilian infrastructurethat is creating a transnational space.

For much of the modern period, European conflicts like the Seven YearsWar were the product of the European ability to project power to the restof the world. What is new about the mass terrorism displayed in the 11September attacks is that it no longer takes the infrastructural power(Mann, 1994) of a great power to reach strategic globality.The developmentof a civilian global infrastructure allows civilians to project power on aglobal scale. Al-Qaidas use of commercial flights as a cruel type of cruisemissile is a dramatic example. Numerous think-tank reports and govern-ment studies suggest that many other elements of the global civilian infras-tructure can be used for violent purposes (more on this later).

Because such power projection is no longer dependent on the infrastruc-tural power of a great power, it is no longer just First World conflicts thatare exported to the Third World. Now, the Third World is able to bring itsconflicts to the First World as well. As was the case with the European colo-nial empires, some of these conflicts are internalized. A global infrastruc-ture allows for the extension of social spaces beyond their traditionalgeographic confines. The perpetrators of the attacks on 11 September 2001were thus apparently recruited from radical Muslim groups in Europe, fromwhere they travelled to the United States for the attack itself (Friedman,2002). The attack did not originate from the Third World in a geographicalsense, but rather from a Third World space which globalization importedinto the First World.

Strategic globality has taken on a new quality, but strategic globality itselfis not a new phenomenon. The questions the United States and the Westwere left with after the attack were the result of globality rather than itsexplanation. Globality explained how the attack was possible and outlined




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the possibilities for retaliation. But globality offered no conceptual meansfor analysing why the attack had occurred and what kind of threat theattack constituted. Furthermore, globality offered no political program forhow to deal with strategic globality. In the next section I deal with how themass terrorism of 11 September 2001 was constructed as part of the processof globalization. In the following section I map the three globalisms, thethree recipes for policy, which the construction of the world in terms ofglobalization presented to Western policy-makers in the autumn of 2001.

A Window Into Our Future

Presenting the Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR, 2001) to the Houseand the Senate armed services committees, Deputy Secretary of DefensePaul Wolfowitz described the attacks on 11 September 2001 as a windowinto our future (2001: 3). The events of 11 September were horrible inthemselves. However, many events are horrible without having the politicalconsequences of the events of 11 September 2001. The events of 11September were of such significance because they were constructed as ascenario for security threats in the twenty-first century.

This way of constructing 911 shows the reflexive nature of security pol-icy in the late-modern age.7 The new reflexivity manifested itself in the con-clusion that even the United States had become a vulnerable risk society.Below, I use Ulrich Becks theory of reflexivity and risk society to concep-tualize this. Terrorism is regarded as an inherent risk in modern sociabilitybecause it is constructed as the negative consequences of the globalizationprocess. The very process by which the West is believed to be transcendingthe modes of conflict and production of the twentieth century thus entailsthe creation of new threats and new modes of conflict. This leads to a crisisin what Anthony Giddens refers to as ontological security, which was inthe making before 11 September 2001. For that reason the events of thatterrible day were quickly interpreted as proof of the growing power of thedark side of globalization. Because terrorism was constructed as the otherside of globalization, the power associated with the social, political, eco-nomic and cultural aspects of globalization was conceptually transferred toterrorism.

Reflexive Security

Arguing that the attacks were a wake-up call one that we ignore at ourperil (Wolfowitz, 2001: 5), Secretary Wolfowitz engaged in constructivistpolitics when he appeared before the Congress committees to present theQuadrennial Defense Review. On behalf of the administration he askedCongress to take action based on a perception of how certain contemporaryprocesses produced a dangerous future and what kinds of threat this futurepresented. The way the events of 11 September were constructed asimportant by means of a scenario highlights the reflexive nature of securitypolicy in the twenty-first century. In reflections on the meaning of 11




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September, globalization played a vital part, because it was globalizationthat defined the process creating the future to which 11 September was awindow.

Critics of the American strategy following 911 have pointed out thatequal numbers of people have died around the world without the UnitedStates, or any other Western power, having taken comparable action oreven given the events much attention.8 The moral relativism of that argu-ment aside, it points to what one might term the reflexive security dilemmaof the late-modern world.

The security dilemma is traditionally defined as the risk of reducing onessecurity by acts intended to increase it, because another party feels threat-ened by the action in question.9 It probably describes important securitypolicy mechanisms in a highly conflictual world of sovereign states. Thereflexive security dilemma is a more appropriate tool with which to anal-yse the post-Cold War period a time when the Western world is not facedwith a serious military threat from any power. The question is no longerwhether one provokes conflict by seeking security, but rather what conflicts,or security issues in general, are important to ones security.

In the absence of a clear and present danger, most issues are the cause ofendless discussion and not of vital and pressing importance. The dilemmathen becomes when and how to act. The Clinton administration was caughtin this dilemma time and time again during the 1990s, as it struggled todefine whether, for example, the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia were ofany consequence to European and transatlantic security or whether inter-vention in Somalia was a national interest great enough to merit casualties.Security policy was constantly a subject of reflection.10 The Clinton admin-istration therefore reversed its position several times on the importance ofwhat was at stake in the various crises it encountered.11

How does one analyse the reflexive security dilemma and the choices ofsecurity it presents? Ulrich Beck offers one point of departure, as his the-ory of reflexive modernity springs from the question of how one navigatesthe multiple risks, that late-modern society presents social agents with.Ulrich Beck argues that the very activities that make late-modern societiesfunction present a risk to that society and its inhabitants. Pollution is aprime example. Without industry, present society would cease to exist, butindustry cannot function without pollution presenting a challenge to thewell-being of the inhabitants of industrial societies (Beck, 1992). Thisboomerang effect makes late-modern society a reflexive society, Beckargues: society becomes a theme and a problem for itself (p. 8).

Late-modern society is not the iron cage of a single, meansend ration-ality that Max Weber described, but rather a hall of mirrors offering thepossibility of endless reflection on what one is doing and what one might doon seeing the issue from another point of view. In other words, late-modernsociety is defined by process rather than by structure. Society is not shapedby the static structures of class, rationality and production by which Marxand Weber described modern society, but by the process that transcendsthose structures.

If the basis for political discourse is a process of transcendence, then sce-




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narios become the currency of politics. In Becks words,events that have notyet occurred become the object of current action (1999: 52). The object ofpolitics is not the present,because the present structures are not going to last.In times of chance, one must act on the basis of a vision for the future,a sce-nario of where present processes will lead us and our environment of action.Scenarios offer, in Becks apt phrase, a real virtuality (p. 136). By showingwhy a certain course of action is necessary in the present, scenarios make thefuture real by constructing it as the cause, rather than the effect, of presentactions. However,a scenario is but one construction,and other visions of theprocesses of change offer different scenarios and correspondingly differentpolicies.Beck therefore argues that we are living in an age of constructivism(1999: 133) and understands social constructivism as not exclusively aboutthe philosophy of science, but also as a matter of praxeology.

A Parallel Globalization of Terror

To the West, the attacks of 11 September 2001 constituted a real virtuality.The carnage of the World Trade Center collapse presented a brute fact ofwhat the enemies of the West were capable of in an age of strategic global-ity. The attack was made all the more significant, however, because of thevirtual context it was placed in a context which the reality of the tombof rubble (Bush, 2001a: 3) made vivid in the minds of the members of theHouse and Senate armed services committees, as Paul Wolfowitz presenteda scenario for the security threats of the twenty-first century:

A future where new enemies visit violence on us in startling ways; a future inwhich our cities are among the battlefields and our people are among the tar-gets; a future in which more and more adversaries will possess the capabilityto bring war to the American homeland; a future where the old methods ofdeterrence are no longer sufficient and new strategies and capabilities areneeded to ensure peace and security. (2001: 4)

The Deputy Secretary of Defense refers to all three elements of global-ization: globality, globalization and globalism. I will return to the questionof globalism in the next section, focusing here on globality and globaliza-tion.

In Wolfowitzs analysis, 11 September 2001 made real how strategic glob-ality had now made American cities battlefields and our people amongthe targets. War was no longer a state of emergency but a risk in everydaylife.Terror had become one of the risks of late-modern society, with the dis-tinction between civilians and combatants broken down.We are all soldiersnow, David von Drehle wrote in the Washington Post (2001). Defenceagainst terrorism and vigilance against individual terrorists had become theresponsibility of American citizens. In his State of the Union Address,President Bush acknowledged two flight attendants who detained a pas-senger trying to set off a bomb on a transatlantic flight (2002: 32).

Individual heroism was so highly valued because much more terrorismwas expected. The question was how that future was shaped and how it




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could be influenced to achieve greater security.According to Wolfowitz, theprocess by which the attacks of 11 September 2001 became possible andwould shape future security threats was globalization:

Along with the globalization that is creating interdependence among theworlds free economies, there is a parallel globalization of terror, in whichrogue states and terrorist organizations share information, intelligence, tech-nology, weapons materials and know-how. (2001: 37)

There is a dimension of time and a dimension of space in this statement. Inspatial terms, the Deputy Secretary argued that globalization was a processof terror as well as a benign process. This was a dramatic argument, becauseglobalization was constructed as a process determining the shape of theworlds free economies and by implication for the worlds free soci-eties. It is in realizing the dark side of globalization that the temporalelement comes into play. As globalization was believed to define the future,the dark side of globalization harbours dark prospects for the future.Wolfowitz argued that the realities of 11 September supplanted a rosy sce-nario of interdependence and peace, which had guided policy in the 1990s,with a more complex and threatening scenario: a parallel globalization ofterror.

Globalization defined the 1990s.I believe that if you want to understandthe post-Cold War world, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times wrotein 2000, you have to start by understanding that a new international systemhas succeeded it globalization (2000: xxi). Friedman no doubt reflectedon the dominating conception of the 1990s as an era in which liberal inter-nationalism was secure for the future. During the twentieth century, theWest had believed that peace depended on a stable, liberal world order, aworld order that would allow democratic ideals and institutions to spread,thereby creating governments inclined to peace rather than conflict. Onecould argue that the West fought the two world wars and the Cold War todefend or realize that liberal order.As the Cold War came to an end, demo-cratic peace theory codified this belief in an empirical law (quoted inLynn-Jones, 1996: ix). In Becks terms, the democratic peace had ceased tobe a virtual ambition for future world order and had become if not thereality then the generally accepted blueprint for the future.12

Globalization became a guiding concept for the analysis of the structure,process and politics of the post-Cold War world. As Becks categories sug-gest, it is the process element that is the most important in reflexive moder-nity. Globalization is about the future it promises rather than about thepresent realities it analyses. In Jens Bartelsons words, globalization is ahorizon of political imagination structured around expectations of tran-scendence (2000: 192). This description captures Friedmans definition ofthe post-Cold War international system or order in terms of globalization.Contrary to the bipolar Cold War international order, globalization doesnot define order by means of a clearly defined, static structure.Globalization is a process that defines times in terms of transcendence.Globalization describes a process of transcendence that is underway and




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specifies the parameters of this change (the horizon of political imagina-tion, in Bartelsons terms).

Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz understood the process of globalization inthe way it had been understood during the 1990s: in terms of transcendence.In the 1990s, Wolfowitz argued, there was a temptation to believe that thisfavorable circumstance was a permanent condition (2001: 1112). Hewas highly critical of what he presented as the complacent focus on the ben-efits of globalization. The September 11 attacks, Wolfowitz argued, haveawakened us to a fundamental reality: the 21st century security environ-ment will be different from the one we faced in the 20th century but justas dangerous (2001: 13).

Ontological Insecurity

Paul Wolfowitz would probably not claim, and it certainly would not be fairto claim, that the parallel globalization of terror had been completelyignored in the 1990s. By the end of the 1990s, fear of the dark side of glob-alization had reached the highest levels of government. In 1999, BritishPrime Minister Tony Blair asserted, albeit in a different context, that glob-alization [was] not just economic, it [was] also a political and security phe-nomenon (1999).Actually, the impact of what happened on 11 September2001 was strong because it was a realization of the fears presented in a num-ber of scenarios during the 1990s.13 In 1999 the bipartisan HartRudmanreport concluded:

States, terrorists, and other disaffected groups will acquire weapons of massdestruction and disruption, and some will use them. Americans will likely dieon American soil, possibly in large numbers. (US Commission, 1999: 138)

The use of weapons of mass destruction was a central concern in the1990s. By the end of his second term, President Clinton reportedly believedthat within the next ten years, there was a 100 percent chance of a chemi-cal or biological attack on the United States.14 The fact that the attacks on11 September 2001 were carried out in hijacked civilian planes used asweapons in no way allayed fears of terrorists using nuclear, biological orchemical weapons. On the contrary, it fuelled fears of what devastationgenuine weapons might cause. Furthermore, the fact that 911 realizedthe fears behind the scenarios rather than the scenarios themselves onlymade things worse. It suggested that the United States and the rest of theWestern world were neither prepared nor knew what to prepare for.

The lack of what Anthony Giddens terms ontological security, the firmknowledge of what one might expect (1991: 3569), is a characteristic of thereflexive risk society (pp. 1835). During the Cold War the mutually assureddestruction of the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the SovietUnion arguably placed the American people at much greater risk. Thenuclear threat, however, was material and the logic of the balance of terrorensured that it was extremely calculable. The superpowers played thenuclear game in strict adherence to the meansend rational rules of




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deterrence. For that reason, people in East and West had ontological secu-rity during the Cold War albeit in a somewhat ironic form.15 They knewwhat threats to prepare for and had reason to hope that if their govern-ments played the strategic game skilfully and responsibly a nuclear warcould be avoided.

The events of 11 September 2001 seemed to confirm the growing fears ofthe late 1990s that the strategic game had changed and that Western gov-ernments did not quite know what the new rules were. From the very begin-ning, 911 was presented as a lesson in new strategic realities andcorresponding strategic commitments equal to the lesson learned from theJapanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

As such, the events of 11 September were constructed in the terms bywhich Ulrich Beck defines risk society. Terrorism was defined by the samesocial ontology as Western society: globalization. Wolfowitzs critique ofthe 1990s and of the politicians of the decade was that, in his view, theybelieved the end of the Cold War had provided the ultimate and un-ironicontological security because no single power challenged the West any more.Ontological security could not exist in a time of globalization because ofthe transcendental nature of the process. Instead, globalization turned outa risk in itself. The same process that made the Western ontology of liberaldemocracy and market economies universal also made the West insecure.

The Power of Globalization

Belief in the power of globalization reinforced ontological insecurity. If oneaccepted globalization as a powerful economic and social force that neces-sitated new rules of politics, then the same power had to be associated withthe parallel globalization of terror. For that reason, the logic by which theprocess of globalization was believed to work was used to describe thedevelopment of new threats. In the security discourse, that logic is oftendescribed as proliferation.As David Mutimer points out, proliferation hasbeen increasingly used to describe security problems in general (1998:99129). The Quadrennial Defense Review thus refers to the pervasivenessof proliferation in an era of globalization (QDR, 2001: 6). Security prob-

lems of the West are no longer constructed in terms of a concrete and spe-cific threat, as they were during the Cold War. Security problems areconstructed in terms of scenarios. They are reflections of the possibilitiesthe infrastructure of globalization gives for proliferating the technology,know-how and personnel of the Wests enemies. Added to proliferation isthe possibility of networking the capabilities multiplied by proliferationinto a powerful strike force (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 2001).

President George Bush expressed this fear for proliferation and net-working in his State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002 when hedescribed the enemy, and its capabilities, in the war on terror:

Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder, oftensupported by outlaw regimes, are now spread throughout the world like tick-ing time bombs, set to go off without warning. (2002: 10)




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According to President Bush, terrorists proliferate, spread throughout theworld. They are trained and guided by a network that includes outlawregimes. Presenting the terrorists as time bombs operating by the unstop-pable and autonomous logic of a clock, the President emphasized ontologi-cal insecurity. Global space made terrorism so integrated in Westernsocieties that it was unstoppable. The same mechanical and deterministiclogic has been used about economic and social globalization (Rosenberg,2000).

Proliferation and networks are the same processes by which economicand social globalization are believed to work. Markets and social practicesproliferate through the infrastructure of globalization. Proof of globaliza-tion has thus often been taken to be the spread of Western (American) cus-toms and products to far reaches of the globe. And the power ofglobalization has equally often been illustrated in reference to the globalreach of firms, civil society organizations or other agents capable of net-working across state borders. Even successful state integration projects likethe World Trade Organization, North American Free Trade Agreement, theNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the European Union canbe constructed in terms of networking or multilevel governance acrossstate borders (Marks et al., 1993; Nye and Donahue, 2000; Prakash andHart, 1999; Friedman, 2000).

Proliferation and networks are supposedly the reason states are losingcontrol (Sassen, 1996). Transferred to issues of security, this lack of controlbecomes a lack of ontological security. During the Cold War, the threat wasthe concrete capabilities of the Soviet Empire. Today the threat is chaos,argued Tony Blair (2001a: 38). This is ontological insecurity: fear of theinability to maintain order. Ontological insecurity is the hallmark of risksociety because it causes reflection on the very nature, the ontology, of thesituation we are in. If ontologically secure, we trust our environment andthe people and organizations in it. Ontological insecurity, however, compelsus to distrust and question our environment and take action against peopleor organizations believed to be agents of insecurity. By identifying terror-ism with the process (globalization) which the West believed shaped inter-national order, as well as national, social orders, following the Cold War,terrorism was constructed as an existential threat.

The perception of the threat of terrorism fed on the Wests constructionof its own future in terms of a powerful process of globalization.As the darkside of globalization, terrorism had a power equal to the bright side of glob-alization.The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were therefore seen, inthe words of German Chancellor Gerhard Schrder, as a declaration ofwar against all of civilization (2001: 20). It was cosmos defending itselfagainst chaos. President Bush thus identified the struggle against terrorismas a resolve to keep the most basic commitment of civilization: we willdefend ourselves and our future against terror and lawless violence (2001a:1). It was a fight for ontology as well as security.

Exactly what ontology was to be secured? The events of 11 Septemberwere believed to be a result of, as well as an attack on, the post-Cold Warinternational order. International order could not merely be defended,




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because the process that created it was believed to be feeding the attack.International order became, in Becks phrase, a theme and a problem foritself. Thus 911 caused much reflection on the ontology of the interna-tional system and what strategies that ontology provided for creating secu-rity. In the next section I sketch three different ontological concepts and thestrategies they dictated.

Making the World Safe for Globalization

The events of 11 September realized the fears of what the globality andglobalization of security might cause.What hopes were there for using glob-ality and globalization to create security? According to Ulrich Beck, thepolitics of globalization, globalism, substitutes the debate of political alter-natives with a monolithic market logic (2000: 9).Whatever the merits of thisargument, when it comes to national economic and welfare policies,16 it isnot necessarily true of security policy. On the contrary, the construction of911 in terms of globalization sparked intense debate in the Westernworld because 911 came to mark what Tony Blair referred to as a kalei-doscopic moment in which the pieces that made up world order had beenshaken (2001a: 155). In the words of John Lewis Gaddis, everyoneacknowledged that everything had changed (2001: 3).

A defining characteristic of globality was the fact that most, if not all, soci-eties had to deal with globality.However,only the West defineditselfby glob-ality, and thus constructed its political discourse in terms of what Beck refersto as globalization and globalism. In fact, one might argue that in reflexivemodernity Western identity was defined by a conception of social life interms of globalization and globalism. Societies or persons that defined them-selves and their opportunities in terms of globalization would be recognizedas Western.When globalization was identified as a source of insecurity, con-siderations of security became reflexive: the defining feature of Western soci-ety was defined not only as the driving force of the future, but also as thesingle most important source of insecurity.Constructing new threats in termsof globality and globalization, the West in general and the United States inparticular asked how security was to be created and who was to create it. Ifal-Qaida could harness the power of the dark side of the forces of global-ization, how could the bright side of globalization be used to counter ter-rorism, and who was to organize the fight against terrorism?

This question became the centre piece of a debate that went to the veryheart of what the West was all about. If Western identity was defined byglobalization and Western identity functioned as a basis for collectiveaction among a number of states, then agreement on how globalization gen-erated security threats, and what action (and by whom) was merited to cre-ate security, was essential for the continuation of the West itself. Thus theontological insecurity created by the attack related to reflections not onlyon the threats, but also on the policies needed to counter them.

The reflexive nature of security showed in the way policy became anobject of reflection, and the differences in reflection became security issues




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in themselves, because they put the premise of Western identity (i.e. global-ization) and the West as a community of collective action up for debate. Asmost states identifying themselves as Western found the existence of theWest a condition for their security, the debate itself was a source of onto-logical insecurity. The debate was defined by three different strategies forhow to create security in the post-911 world: a particularist, an imperialand a cosmopolitan strategy.

In this case, strategy refers to the praxeology that followed from a certainontological conception of the possibilities for creating security inherent inthe present international system. The three strategies defined the Westerndiscourse on how to achieve security following 11 September 2001.The par-ticularist strategy was rejected by Western governments. It remained a mat-ter of considerable controversy whether an imperial or a cosmopolitanstrategy should be chosen as the basis for policy. As the United States gov-ernment was inclined to follow the imperial strategy, which the Europeangovernments rejected in favour of various versions of cosmopolitan strate-gies, this was a source of considerable controversy.

Particularism:The Age of Muslim Wars

To particularists, the end of globalization could be dated quite precisely: 11September 2001, at 8:48 a.m. EST, when the first plane hit the World TradeCenter. The terrorist attack showed, particularists would argue in the fol-lowing days, that globalization could not deliver on its promise of transcen-dence. On the contrary, the events of that September morning showed howdangerous it was to imagine the possibility of transcending the fault linesbetween civilizations, as Samuel Huntington termed the most comprehen-sive we within which we feel culturally at home as distinguished from allthe other thems out there (1998: 43). Huntingtons argument is a claimon the durability of structures (i.e. civilizations) in the face of processes oftranscendence (i.e. globalization). Cultural identities could not be tran-scended by any global process, according to Particularism, but least of all byglobalization, which in fact just reflected the cultural values of the West.Particularism may be used to describe the belief (widespread, but mostforcefully presented by Huntington) that the West could only find peaceand security in isolation and on its own cultural terms.

In 1989, Samuel Huntington had warned, with reference to FrancisFukuyamas notion of the end of history (Fukuyama, 1992), that to hopefor the benign end of history is human.To expect it to happen is unrealistic.To plan on it happening is disastrous (Huntington, 1989). Globalizationwas based on the same conception of a new departure that could transcendthe violent history of the twentieth century by realizing a global, liberalorder. In fact, that conception came to dominate the 1990s, whileHuntingtons dystopian vision was marginalized. The attack on the WorldTrade Center might be taken as evidence, however, that the belief in tran-scendence was not only unrealistic, but had proven disastrous.

The particularists argument was reflexive: the Western concept of tran-scendence was to blame for an unrealistic policy that had left the United




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States and the West unprepared for a 911. From that point of view, thegreatest risk facing the West was the Wests misconception of itself,and thusof the world. This was not the age of globalization and democratic peace,Huntington argued:

Contemporary global politics is the age of Muslim wars. Muslims fight eachother and fight non-Muslims far more often than do peoples of other civiliza-tions. Muslim wars have replaced the cold war as the principal form of inter-national conflict. (2001: 8)

The terrorist attacks did not herald a new kind of war (Bush, 2001b:17), according to Huntington.They were proof that the oldest kind of war(wars between different identity groups) had returned. Huntington had lit-tle doubt that Osama bin Laden sought a clash of civilizations (2001: 12).According to Huntington, identity could only be found in a Hegelian strug-

gle of identity with the Other (1998: 129). When Muslim societies failed torespond to globalization, thus producing great social problems and politicaland ideological unrest, the resulting crisis of identity led to a challenge tothe dominating Western identity (Huntington, 2001: 9). And inHuntingtons analysis the West had in fact responded to the challenge fromthe Other, strictly along civilizational lines (2001: 13).

To Huntington, the unified Western response was good news. Arguablythe main foreign policy purpose of Huntingtons thesis was to stress theimportance of continued transatlantic security cooperation after the demiseof the Soviet Other.17 Huntington argued that NATO had a common civi-

lization to defend, and emphasized that the Alliance would soon be neededto contain the challenge from rival civilizations with the same perseverancewith which it had contained the Soviet Union (1998: 161). NATOs decisionto invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and offer the United Statesany military aid deemed necessary (NATO, 2001) was proof to a particu-larist that NATO had accepted its post-Cold War role as the security orga-nization of Western civilization (Huntington, 1998: 307).

As The Economistobserved, the construction of 911 and the ensuingwar on terrorism in terms of a clash of civilizations was more prevalentin Muslim societies than in the West (The Economist2001: 14). In Westernpolitical discourse, Huntingtons particularist world-view gained even moreprominence than before. It was discussed by presidents, chancellors andprime ministers. However, it was used as a position to reject. Huntingtonsargument seemed to have gained most ground in continental Europe,where the events of 11 September fuelled unpleasant debates about the sta-tus of Muslim immigrants. Perhaps for that reason, German ChancellorSchrder was one of the most explicit in his rejection of Huntingtons the-sis: Is this the clash of civilizations that has so often been spoken of? Myanswer is clear. It is no (2001: 23). Other Western leaders wereequally clear.18 As military operations in Afghanistan began, Tony Blairnoted that this is not a war with Islam (2001b: 15), and George Bushemphasized that the USA is a friend of the Afghan people, and we arefriends of almost a billion worldwide who practice the Islamic faith (Bush,




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2001c: 6).Western leaders did use the concept of civilization, but they usedit in the universalist sense which Huntington had rejected in favour of aparticularist interpretation.19 As mentioned above, civilization was an onto-logical concept that embraced all peoples of the world. Civilizationdescribed the civilizing process whereby the world became an increasinglybetter place and the values that ensured progress (Elias, 1978). From thatpoint of view, globalization was a late-modern, sociological term for thecivilizing process.

In the words of George Bush, the civilized world faces unprecedenteddangers. They were unprecedented because the parallel globalization ofterror empowered what in more blunt times would have been referred toas barbarians (2002: 1). Because civilization and globalization were con-structed as the same thing and terrorism was believed to be the dark side ofglobalization, terrorism was perceived as a powerful threat to the progressof human society as such. From that point of view, it was not rhetorical over-kill to regard the war on terrorism as an existential struggle:

There is no compromise possible with such people, no meeting of minds, nopoint of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: defeat it or be defeatedby it. And defeat it we must. (Blair, 2001a: 267)

But in Western eyes it was an existential struggle of a Hobbesian ratherthan the Hegelian kind which Huntington spoke of. Terrorism was seen asa challenge to international order and the civilizing process of globalizationgenerated by that order. To Western leaders, terrorism wasnotthe culturalchallenge Huntington identified. If one accepts that the West had aHobbesian rather than Hegelian conception of what was at stake, one mightask whether international society did need a Leviathan, or a more activeone, to maintain order. One might term this the imperialist point of view,and that is the one we turn to next.

Imperialism: A Hobbesian Moment

For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Robert Harris wrote in theDaily Telegraph on 13 September 2001, one has the uneasy feeling that thefuture is not as settled and monolithic as it once appeared, that the Americanempire may one day go the way of the Roman.According to Michael Hardtand Antonio Negri, that uneasy feeling might be the beginning of imperialpower rather than its end. Hardt and Negri observe that imperial rule func-tions by breaking down (2000: 202).The uneasy feeling that mere anarchyis loosed upon the world (Yeats, 1983: 189) may be the foundation of aHobbesian moment,a moment of reflection in which people realize that thesocietal foundations of their lives are not as secure as they believed them tobe. In this state of unease, or ontological insecurity, they realize that aLeviathan is needed not only to make them secure but also to strengthentheir belief in their world, in their ontology (Hobbes, 1996).

The United States government followed the Hobbesian script quiteclosely: it took decisive action to counterattack terrorism at the same time




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as it emphasized that the ontology of modern society still ought to bedefined by liberal ideas (freedom).The focus on decisive action placed theAmerican government, and its unrivalled ability to project power, at thecentre of attention. The focus on liberal ideas invoked the traditional

American discourse of the United States as the champion of liberty. Takentogether, the focus on decisive action and Liberalism put the United Statesapart from the rest of the world as the strongest and the freest society inthe world. In turn, that led to the conclusion that world order depended onthe United States strength and freedom. The course we follow is a matterof profound consequence to many nations, President Bush argued; ifAmerica wavers, the world will lose heart. If America leads, the world willshow its courage. America will never waver.America will lead the world topeace (2001d: 50).

Discussing al-Qaidas reasons for going to war against the United States,

President Bush concluded:

They hate our freedoms our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech,our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other These ter-rorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. Withevery atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from theworld and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand intheir way. (2001e: 27)

To the President, the United States was the only substantial force stand-ing in terrorisms way and guarding civilization. Therefore, a dichotomy

between the interests of the United States and the interests of the worldwas a false one.When the United States was insecure because of terrorism,so was the whole world, and in making the United States secure the gov-ernment made the world secure. As George Bush had argued when a pres-idential candidate: our gains are not measured in the losses of others. Theyare counted in the conflicts we avert, the prosperity we share and the peacewe extend (1999: 13). This line of argument was not new. For all GeorgeBushs critique of him, Bill Clinton had argued the same way (Clinton,1999). Indeed, Frank Ninkovich argues that so has every AmericanPresident since Woodrow Wilson when faced with what they believed to bea crisis of modernity (1999). However, it may be novel that the UnitedStates is believed to be the sole guardian of world order. From that point ofview, the world order is an empire.

The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involve-ment and ambition, Max Boot argued inThe Weekly Standard; the solutionis to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implemen-tation (2001). Boot speaks for a number of conservative intellectualsclosely connected with the Bush administration who argued that the previ-ous post-Cold War administrations made the mistake of conducting foreignpolicy as if the United States position was still that of the Cold War (Eakin,2002).The end of the Cold War, they argued, had left the United States withunrivalled power, and therefore given the United States a responsibility ofmaintaining world order no one else had. The British historians, Niall




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Ferguson and Paul Kennedy, argued that by the beginning of the twenty-first century American power far exceeded that of the British Empire in thenineteenth century (Kennedy, 2001, 2002; Ferguson, 2001). Just as Boot did,they found that the United States had yet to produce the functional equiv-alent of Pax Britannica. Ferguson wondered whether the leaders of the onestate with the economic resources to make the world a better place have theguts to do it? (2001: 141). The school of Republican intellectuals, includingBoot and Wolfowitz, clearly believed they had the guts (Eakin, 2002). Andthey believed that the events of 11 September 2001 showed the need for theUnited States to assume the duties of an international Leviathan. Theyprovocatively called for the United States government to take on an impe-rial role. Hence the title of Boots piece: The Case for American Empire.

The concept of empire served as a challenge to preconceived notions ofAmerican power. Empire serves this provocative rhetorical function forthose, like Boot, desiring a more expansive and assertive American securitypolicy, as well as for those critical of American power (Hardt and Negri,2000). President Bush did not have the same rhetorical need to provoke, sohe did not use the term empire. However, especially following 11September, the President and his administration became more and moreconvinced that decisive American action was imperative if security was tobe achieved in a globalized world.

The Bush administrations construction of American power in imperialterms challenged the conception of the West as a community defined by col-lective actions maintaining world order (see note 1).The imperial argumentunderlined an imperative for acting, no matter what the United Statesallies might think. In his State of the Union Address of 2002, George Bushrecognized that not all governments shared his administrations view onhow, or indeed how decisively, one should pursue terrorism: some govern-ments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: Ifthey do not act, America will (2002: 16). The President constructed inac-tion as weak governments betrayal of the true interests of every civilizedsociety.20 But where less important powers could falter, the Presidentargued that United States could not.The United States not only had a spe-cial responsibility because of its capabilities, but it was also specially vul-nerable because it was the centre of civilization and because it had thepower to hold the centre.

Hugo Young of the Guardian referred to this as the unilateralist impulseof a new age (2002). However, the Bush administrations imperial policywas not unilateralist in the strict sense of the term. This is what the notionof empire itself suggests. In a balance of power system, a great power isfunctionally equivalent to other states, albeit more powerful (Waltz, 1979).An empire is different from other international agents, as it integrates themwithin the order defined by its power (Doyle, 1986; Watson, 1992). A greatpower is part of an international order; an empire is international order.Thus an empire is not a structure in the Waltzian sense (Waltz, 1979).Empire is better understood as a process in which the imperial power con-tinuously asserts order.The concept of empire might thus be said to be yetanother example of the shift from structure to process that characterizes




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reflexive modernity. As order is constantly asserted by the imperial powerconstituting it, the way empire shapes international relations appears lessnatural than, for example, a balance of power order. The nature and meritsof imperial power are therefore always open to reflection. An imperialpower may be powerful enough to formulate its own policy, but it is not iso-lated from the rest of the world. On the contrary, people like Boot use thenotion of empire to advocate the imperative for engagement.

The Bush administrations analysis of 911 shows that it does not believethat unilateral solutions are possible in a globalized world. We recognize,Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department, argues,that many of the defining features of this increasingly globalized era areintrinsically transnational (2001: 6). Therefore the Bush administrationshould perhaps be described as exceptionalist rather than as unilateralist. Itdoes not believe that the United States is acting alone or in a void,but clearlyit does believe that American values and power set it aside from the rest ofthe world.That is the point of the notion of empire. It implies the freedomto act for what is right and what is necessary.21 Multilateral institutions andcoalitions are thus means, rather than ends, in themselves. Richard Haassargues that the United States has unique global responsibilities. And if weare to meet them effectively,we may not always be able to go along with mea-sures that many or even most others support (2001: 29).

This approach caused deep resentment among the Allies as well as in thewider world.At the same time, the chorus of those who welcome Americanaction, as well as those who believe that the ills of the world are caused byAmerican inaction (Chomsky, 2001; Said, 2001; Zizek, 2001), has grownstronger after 11 September 2001. Even those who blame the Bush admin-istration, however indirectly, for having brought the attack on the UnitedStates by not focusing enough attention on the IsraelPalestine issue are infact taking the imperial line. In effect, they too argue that whatever happensin the world depends on American power. They resent the empire, but theyneed it all the same.22 This is the nature of the Hobbesian moment.

Cosmopolitanism: A Kantian Moment

So I believe this is a fight for freedom, British Prime Minister Tony Blairtold the Labour Party Conference in October 2001, and I want to make ita fight for justice too. Justice not only to punish the guilty, but justice tobring those same values of democracy and freedom to people round theworld (2001a: 150). To Tony Blair, this was not merely a Hobbesianmoment, but rather a Kantian moment that provided the opportunity forcreating a just, not merely a stable, world order. By stating he believed thewar against terrorism to be more than a fight for freedom, Blair signalledthat he found George Bushs ultimate war aims too narrow. As we haveseen, freedom was the Bush administrations cue,but it was not enough forBlair. Freedom referred to what the West had, and what it needed todefend. Blair agreed this was an existential struggle: This is a battle withonly one outcome: our victory or theirs (2001a: 9). Where the Americangovernment believed that our victory should serve to secure American




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power on which world order and globalization depended, Blair believedthat victory should be used to transform world order. Where the conserva-tive George Bush sought security and stability, the liberal Tony Blair soughtsecurity and reform. One illusion has been shattered on 11 September,

Blair argued, that we can have the good life of the West irrespective of thestate of the world (2001c: 8). Where Bush had an exceptionalist, imperialvision, Blair had a cosmopolitan vision.

Blair believed that the ontological insecurity caused by the dark side ofglobalization could only be overcome if international governance wastransformed to fit the facts of globalization.

The issue is not how to stop globalization.The issue is how we use the powerof community to combine it with justice. If globalization works only for thebenefit of the few, then it will fail and will deserve to fail. But if we follow theprinciples that have served us so well at home that power, wealth andopportunity must be in the hands of the many, not the few if we make thatour guiding light for the global economy, then it will be a force for good andan international movement that we should take pride in leading. (2001a:5960)

Blair argued that this would be the true new world order. In the 1990s,he argued, the West had failed to forge a new international order by meansof the power victory had given them. Blair agreed with the republicanimperialists in Washington that too little had been done in the 1990s. Butwhere they referred to the defence of the new world order, Blair blamedhis generation for not having the courage and conviction to create morepeace by more integration in the manner of what he referred to as our pre-decessors following the Second World War (2001c:34).Again, being pow-erful was not enough to secure Western values, according to Blair, the worldorder guaranteed by the West needed to become something more than ameans to stability. A liberal international order was an end in itself becauseit realized what Immanuel Kant had referred to as a cosmopolitan systemof general political security (Kant, 1970b:49). Globalization meant that thevalues and interdependence, which had characterized the Western commu-

nity, had proliferated to the rest of the world. The institutional networkneeded to follow suit, Blair argued:

After the Cold War, despite the talk of a new world order, we failed to renewthese institutions or create new ones. Perhaps the euphoria that accompaniedthe crumbling of the Soviet bloc reduced the incentive to take a hard and rad-ical look at the conduct of international affairs. Now it is time to do so. (2001c:35)

The insistence on the present as a time of transcendence and on the needto take action to take control of the transformation characterized not onlyBlairs argument but also the three globalisms. This was the way of politicsin a time defined by transcendence. But the three globalisms differed onwhere transcendence was taking them. Bush believed that it was possible to




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transcend the present insecurity by a determined effort that could secureworld order. Blair believed that the world order should transcend itself inorder to create the foundations for future security. The difference betweenthe Hobbesian and the Kantian conception of the moment was in itselfinstructive of how globalization undermined the distinction betweendomestic and foreign policy. The way the American liberal press receivedBlairs speech shows that the formation of foreign policy was no longer adomestic issue and that politics no longer stopped at the waters edge.23

The differences between conservatives and liberals were carried on toglobal political space. Where ideological differences proved transnational,the different choice of strategies by the United States government andWestern European governments strained the notion of the West as a com-munity of collective action. Choosing how to achieve security thus becamea threat in itself, as it strained the Western communality widely believed tobe the object of the 11 September attacks themselves and the foundationfor international order, as well as the security of the individual Westernstates. This, especially, placed the European governments in a reflexivesecurity dilemma: if they needed the United States for their security, howcould they reject the American strategy? On the other hand, most of thembelieved that the American strategy actually would not solve the securityproblems, and perhaps even create new ones.

Conclusions

The events of 11 September 2001 became 911 by means of globalization.The facts of the attacks on New York and Washington, and the resultingdevastation of the World Trade Center, did not speak for themselves. Theywere made to speak by means of the concept of globalization. Globalizationprovided a way for us to understand the reasons why the United States hadbeen attacked, and provided the means by which to conceptualize whatshould be done in response to the attacks. In this way, globalization turnedthe attack into a symbol for something even more momentous than thebrute facts of that terrible morning. 11 September ceased to be a date andbecame a symbol.

Following the end of the Cold War, the West has come to define itself andthe world in terms of globalization. Globalization showed the transcen-dence of the Cold War world in favour of a new world order governed bythe values of democracy, market economy and civil society by which theWest defined itself and human progress. Hence, globalization has become alate-modern, sociological name for the civilizing process, which accordingto the Western mind gradually improves the human condition, civilization,by transcending its own achievements in favour of something increasinglybetter. In other words, Western victory in the Cold War had allowed it todefine the world on its own terms and given it reason to believe that theworld in due course would become like the West.

The Western preoccupation with globalization should thus be regarded interms of what Anthony Giddens terms double hermeneutics (1984: 284,




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34854): globalization is a way of conceptualizing a time of transcendence,but it is also a political means to get a desired kind of transcendence.Therefore it is important to distinguish between the different meanings ofglobalization analytically even if they are intertwined in discourse. Thisarticle has used Ulrich Becks distinction between a global social structure(globality), the process that transcends previous national structures infavour of new global ones (globalization) and the political action of global-ization (globalism).

While strategic globality is not new, the ability of non-state agents withrelatively few capabilities to project power globally is new. The events of 11September 2001 thus showed that globalization had eroded the (Western)great powers monopoly of intervention.The new global civilian infrastruc-ture made intervention a collective good.

The concept of Imperialism shows that the Bush administrations policieswere not unilateral, not even isolationistic, as they were often portrayed(perhaps especially in Europe).The use of Becks typology of globalizationallows one to see that the Bush administration did understand the world interms of globalization. The politics they derived from this understandingwas different from that of the previous administration and the Europeanallies, however. The belief in globalization was the base-line of all main-stream concepts of the world, and therefore the belief in globalization didnot necessarily translate to the same (liberal) policy. In fact, it was a discur-sive trick to claim so. On the contrary, the notion that the world was tran-scending itself presented different scenarios for the future and differentnotions of what one wanted of the future. For that reason, the time of glob-alization is intensely political. But the times are political in ways quite dif-ferent from the clash of ideologies of the twentieth century. The politics ofglobalization is not about radical projects for transforming society, butabout reflections on the social processes of the society at hand. The great-est schism in thepolicy relevantdebates of the autumn of 2001 and springof 2002 was thus between the conservative imperialists, who saw the prob-lems of the future in terms of the Wests ability to defend its freedom, andthe liberal cosmopolites, who wanted to translate their domestic reformagenda to the world stage.

Imperialism and cosmopolitanism not only constituted a transnationaldistinction between conservatives and liberals, it also constituted a distinc-tion between the United States and Europe. Imperialism was an exception-alist ideology in the sense that only the United States had the possibility ofempire. Though quite a few Europeans argued in favour of assertiveAmerican power, the choice of how to use its power was Americas tomake. In many ways 911 was constructed as a Hobbesian moment thatcalled upon the United States to act decisively and reinforce Western val-ues. And it was exactly on this point that the imperial policy of the Bushadministration alienated large European constituencies.The different polit-ical interpretations of globalization thus put the very values, which werebelieved to be globalized, and the Western alliance at the centre of global-ization, in question.This was yet another example of the reflexive nature ofthe times. Thus 911 had become a symbol for a new security agenda in




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which the West could only find security by challenging the ways it had pre-viously achieved security, and only secure progress and civilization bychallenging the values by which the West defined itself.

Notes

A previous version of this paper was presented at the annual convention of theInternational Studies Association in New Orleans in March 2002. I thank the dis-cussant Jan Art Scholte and my fellow panellists for their insightful comments. I alsothank Birthe Hansen, Lykke Friis, Jens Bartelson and the anonymous reviewers forscrutinizing my argument.I gratefully acknowledge the funding of the Danish SocialScience Research Council and the Security and Defence Studies project at theDanish Institute of International Affairs.

1. Focusing on the West of course leaves open the question of how to define theWest: Is the West an alliance identifiable with NATO? Is the West a community ofvalues? Is the West a convenient cover for the United States? Or is it somethingelse? A concept such as the West is a means by which to signify identity and, usingthis identity, to constitute an imperative for action (Coker, 1998; Gress, 1998;Rasmussen, 2001b). Thus one might argue that a society identifying itself asWestern, and recognized as such by others together with which it acts on the inter-national stage, is Western. Because the West relates meaning this way, the conceptitself became important in the aftermath of 911, as a number of governmentsdefined themselves and their policies as Western and the attacks as an attack on thevalues associated with this identity. I refer to the West in the context of this broad

community, and identify individual state agents (e.g. the United States) to the extentthey act on their own or refer specifically to national subjects.2. John Searle distinguishes between brute and institutional facts.According to

Searle,brute facts exist regardless of how they are known to us.Institutional factsexist only by virtue of their social construction (Searle, 1995: 158).

3. Whether the buildings, in spite of their name, had been a symbol of globaliza-tion before 11 September is of little consequence: they became a symbol of global-ization when disaster struck.

4. This does not mean that al-Qaida, or other non-Western social agents, did notrelate to globalization. However, they did not define themselves by it. In Becksterms, they had a concept of globality, but not of globalization and globalism. I

return to this below.5. The purpose of this article is not to account for Becks analysis of globalizationor 911.The article utilizes Becks concepts as heuristic instruments.

6. One should pay careful attention to statements from Paul Wolfowitz. Thestatements of any Deputy Secretary of Defense give insights into the way an admin-istration constructs the strategic environment. In the case of Paul Wolfowitz, it alsogives insight into the thoughts of what Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor ofNewsweek, terms the one strategic thinker of the administration (PBS, 2001).

7. I have elaborated on the reflexive nature of post-Cold War security policy inRasmussen (2001a).

8. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound, Slavoj Zizek wrote, we should also

now more than ever, bear in mind that the actual effect of these bombings [theattack on the World Trade Center] is much more symbolic than real: in Africa,EVERY SINGLE DAY more people die of AIDS than all the victims of the WTCcollapse, and their death could have been easily cut back with relatively small finan-




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cial means. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the world on a dailybasis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Rwanda and Congo to Sierra Leone (Zizek,2001; capitals in original; see also Chomsky, 2001).

9. An arms race typically offers this kind of negative trade-off, as the procure-ment of arms intended to make state A more secure makes state B fear it even

more, leading B to acquire new weaponry, and thereby forcing A to increase pro-curement yet again. On the security dilemma, see Jervis (1976) and Butterfield(1951), as well as Herz (1951).

10. Perhaps one is able to induce an interesting hypothesis from the Clintonadministrations track record: it was only when an issue became a matter ofAmerican credibility (that is, the United States ability to function as a securityagent) that an issue became a top priority which the President was willing to com-mit military force to solve. If this is so, it is the ultimate act of security reflexivity: toact to maintain ones ability to act. The reason for this reflexive way of conductingsecurity policy was not (exclusively) the nature of that particular presidency, but the

very nature of the decision-making process in a time of no clear, essential securitychallenges. The dilemma was inherent in the situation. It would have been an act ofextraordinary statesmanship of President Clinton notto be caught in the dilemma.

11. Richard Holbrookes (1999) account of his involvement in the United StatesBalkan policy is one illustration of this. General Wesley Clarks (2001) memoirs ofthe Kosovo war is another.

12. I have elaborated on this argument in Rasmussen (2001b).13. President Clintons first national security advisor, Anthony Lake, presents a

number of the most feared scenarios in a popular form (Lake, 2000).14. Statement by Richard Clark, National Coordinator for Security, Counter-

Terrorism and Infrastructure Protection on 60 Minutes, CBS, 22 October 2000,

quoted in Cilluffo et al. (2001: ix).15. On the meansend rational logic of deterrence theory, see Freedman (1989).

On the irony of ontological security during deterrence, see Coker (1994: 197225).16. Friedman argues that globalization makes state control virtually impossible,

and empowers the individual (2000), whereas Mark Rupert (2000) describes howdissenting voices find it hard to be heard in a discourse where the global logic of themarket and liberal democracy are seen as truths rather than policies.

17. The second purpose of Huntingtons book arguably relates to Americandomestic policy. It is a rejection of multiculturalism,as this passage illustrates: Theclash between multiculturalists and the defenders of Western civilization and theAmerican Creed is, in James Kurths phrase, the realclash within the American

segment of Western civilization . . . The futures of the United States and of the Westdepend upon Americans reaffirming their commitment to Western civilization.Domestically this means rejecting the divisive siren calls of multiculturalism.Internationally it means rejecting the elusive and illusory calls to identify the UnitedStates with Asia (Huntington, 1998: 307).

18. Some European leaders were not on message. The Italian prime minister,Silvio Berlusconi, was quoted making a Huntingtonian argument. The speed withwhich he retracted his comments shows how the Western discourse was dominatedby an anti-Huntington line. Arguing otherwise was simply not a viable course fora Western leader.

19. The distinction between Kultur and civilization stems from theEnlightenment revival of German nationalism. The Germans wanted to distinguishthe traditions of the German bourgeoisie from the French-speaking aristocracy(Elias, 1978: 724). Kant was one of the first to make this distinction (1970a). For an




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encyclopaedic introduction to the distinction between civilization and culture inGerman political discourse, see Fisch (1992).

20. Charles Krauthammer presented one version of this argument (2002).21. The insistence on the exceptional moral character of American international

involvement reminds one of President Woodrow Wilsons insistence on being an

associate rather than an ally of France and Britain during the First World War.Wilson wanted to avoid any of the prior understandings associated with alliances inorder to be free to make a world safe for democracy after the war. In the same way,the Bush administration prefers coalitions because it does not want to be subjectedto the judgement of other governments.This seems to suggest that the Bush admin-istrations approach is neither a radical break with American foreign policy tradi-tion nor merely a realpolitik strategy. See also Ninkovich (1999).

22. Hardt and Negris Empire (2000), which is arguably one of the most compre-hensive and intellectually challenging critiques of globalization, as well as of the roleof American power in globalization, shows this ambivalence clearly. The book isintended to be an expos of American power, but the more the functionality of

imperial power is exposed, the more necessary the power of empire seems to be.The authors end up by presenting only the most feeble and ritual alternatives toempire.

23. See for example Lewis (2001).

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Haass, Richard N. (2001

thematic debates of security

Documents