The elimination of the state will occur when enough anti-state causes triumph that the state can no longer maintain its aura of legitimacy. The convergence of a myriad of single-issue movements into a broader coalition organized around the common demand for the decentralization of power, with anarchist militants serving as its intellectual and activist vanguard, would seem to be the proper means of tying together the various threads of independently emerging anti-state sentiments into a unified quilt capable of smothering and extinguishing the monster of Leviathan altogether. In the years and decades leading up to the final assault on the state, four essential concerns might become the primary focus of the leadership corps of the revolutionary forces. The first of these would be the creation of alternative infrastructure that would be in place and ready to take over those social functions abandoned by the state, including the issuance of units of exchange backed by a precious metal standard, provision for dispute resolution through an arbitration or common law system, an independent educational system, associations formed for the care of the elderly, the disabled, and the otherwise infirm, entrepreneurial endeavors serving as a model of an alternative to state-created and subsidized corporate systems, popular organizations for the handling of consumer interests, cooperative health clinics, and other similar institutions. Second, an alternative media would be necessary for the dissemination of propaganda favorable to the anti-state movement in order to counter the pro-state propaganda generated by the establishment media. Shortwave and pirate radio broadcasts, public access television programs, websites, and independent publishing services are no doubt the embryo of such a phenomenon. Ultimately, anti-statists should aspire to obtain a network of independent television and radio stations of their own, perhaps emulating the numerous forms of religious media currently in existence.
The last two concerns are also the most controversial. One involves the relationship of the anti-state movement(s) to local political institutions. Most contemporary anarchists favor a position of total non-involvement with state institutions, even local ones, and consequently shun voting, lobbying, and other forms of “working within the system.”[186] While the enthusiasm for this position is understandable, I am not sure that it is practical. Certainly, the efforts of groups like the Libertarian Party to field candidates for President are absurd. Yet grassroots local governments are far more accessible to the average person and far more responsive to public pressure. The seizure of local political institutions by secessionist oriented forces, constantly under pressure by a grassroots anti-state movements, might serve to create antagonisms between localities and the central state resulting in a loss of perceived legitimacy and the emergence of a situation where an alliance of seceding communities and regions could “pull the rug out from under” the federal empire. Note that I am not claiming that local secessionist politicians could be trusted as custodians of the liberty of the people. Such a scenario would only be feasible if such politicians were under enormous pressure from intermediary institutions and popular organizations existing independently of government at any level.
Finally, there is the question of what to do when the state attempts to maintain power by means of direct armed force. This is a question many anarchists shy away from but it is an immensely important one. Bloodless political change is always preferable but not always possible. On this question, the patriot militia movement of the 1990s had it right. During the time leading up to the final confrontation with the state, the formation of locally-based citizen militias, guerrilla forces, paramilitary outfits, contracted mercenary organizations, established on a decentralized model and combined with underground cells and lone wolf fighters, will no doubt be indispensable.[187] On this matter, I am a hawk. It will also be necessary to obtain the sympathy of a substantial number of international forces capable of providing economic, diplomatic, and, if necessary, military support to the anti-government forces à la French and Spanish support for the first generation of American revolutionaries.[188]
Fidelity to Patrick Henry’s famous proclamation, “Give me liberty or give me death!” is likely to be not only a moving sentiment but a practical necessity in the battle against the state.
Fourth Generation Warfare, and the Decline of the State:
An Examination of the History of the Decline of the State’s Monopoly on Violence and War
Introduction
World events of recent years have brought to the forefront of public attention and intellectual debate the matter of what is commonly called “terrorism.” Efforts at merely defining this provocative term have proven difficult, and no consensus exists among scholars as to what “terrorism” actually is. The standardized cliché that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” appears to have some actual basis in fact given the ideologically charged nature of many efforts at summarizing the core characteristics of terrorism. Can all individuals or organizations who engage in extra-legal violence for political purposes objectively be classified as “terrorist”? Or do such actors need to engage in a narrower set of behaviors, such as inflicting injury or death upon persons not directly involved in whatever “cause” or “struggle” the alleged “terrorists” may be motivated by, in order to validly earn the “terrorist” label? Is the term “terrorism” itself appropriate when describing non-state actors who engage in political violence? Does this label signify any characteristics at all that are unique to those to whom it is being applied, or is the “terrorist” label merely a subjective ideological construct?[189]
Of course, the use of physical threats and raw violence towards the achievement of political ends by rulers and the ruled alike has been commonplace since time immemorial. Political history is to a large degree the story of palace coups, massacres, purges, insurrections, and other incidents of violence occurring outside the context of any formalized legal infrastructure. However, “terrorism” as it is commonly perceived of by contemporary Westerners certainly carries with it the imagery of particular kinds of actions such as bombings, assassinations, hijackings, and deliberate destruction of physical infrastructure carried out by persons devoted to the achievement of some political program through the use of such tactics and doing so in a manner that is frequently indistinguishable from that of common criminals so far as established legal norms are concerned. An examination of the history and evolution of modern Western “terrorism” would indicate that this lay perspective is indeed rooted in fact. However, it is inappropriate to associate extra-legal political violence with ordinary criminality. To understand why this is so, it is necessary to first understand the relationship between “terrorism” and the modern institution of the state as it has evolved in the Western nations and subsequently been exported to other parts of the world.
As will be shown below, political governance underwent a major transformation in the Western world in the eras between the early Renaissance period and the rise of modern nationalism in the nineteenth century. The foremost characteristic of this transformation was the emergence of government as a corporative as opposed to personalized conception. Parallel to the development of this impersonalized, bureaucratized manifestation of government was the decline of the older polycentric order of Europe whereby powers that were previously shared by a variety of institutions (including war powers) were now concentrated into the hands of the corporative state. The state then claimed for itself an exclusive monopoly on the use of political violence. Over time, the state evolved from its role as a means to an end (the maintenance of order) to an end unto itself. This latter process transpired from the time of the French Revolution to the explosions of the “total wars” of the twentieth century.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the state’s monopoly on political violence and war began to meet challenges from contending ideological currents and organizational forces. One of the earliest manifestations of this trend was the advent of so-called “propaganda by the deed,” a term given to the tactics of the classical Anarchists, an ideological
tendency that ironically denied not only the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly on violence but the legitimacy of the state in its entirety. Though the classical Anarchists of the “propaganda by the deed” period effectively died out as a political or ideological force following their defeat in the Spanish Civil War and the eclipsing of radical labor movements by the Second World War, their tactics were appropriated and utilized by a wide variety of dissident political currents in Europe and the Americas during the postwar period. Such currents originated from all over the geographical and intellectual spectrum. Some were “far Left,” others “far Right.” Some were religious in nature, others avowedly secular. Some consisted of indigenous Europeans or Americans, others originated from the Third World. Some killed or bombed indiscriminately, others were more selective. Indeed, the only common denominator to be found among postwar Western “terrorist” groups is their resolute opposition to one or another of the manifestations of modern liberalism and its foundations: bourgeois commercialism, neocolonialism and liberal imperialism, relative cosmopolitanism, rapid technological expansion, and parliamentary forms of government.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Western liberal model has achieved unprecedented hegemony and taken root in an expanded number of nations. The elimination of the Soviet Union as a constraint on liberal imperialism has been accompanied by a predictable rise in militarism on the part of Western liberalism.[190]
Furthermore, the universalist presumptions and economic determinism of liberalism, combined with the ongoing process of the globalization of capital, have propelled the liberal powers, particularly the United States, towards the pursuit of unprecedented and unchallenged global hegemony. That this state of affairs should meet with resistance from many of the world’s peoples is no surprise, particularly those peoples whose cultural foundations are the most antithetical to liberalism, i.e., those of the Islamic world. Interestingly, pockets of resistance to liberal global hegemony have arisen within the First World as well, including the United States.
Much of conventional opinion regards the practice of modern “terrorism” as originating from ordinary criminal motivations, ideological extremism, mental illness, or moral deficiency on the part of its perpetrators. Accusations of this type are frequently selective, uninformed, and ideologically biased. In this article a dissenting point of view will be presented. “Terrorists” will be described as non-state political and military actors engaged in the rational application of ordinary principles of realpolitik. This application includes the process of mounting a challenge to the state’s claimed monopoly on political violence. The methods utilized are not fundamentally different ideologically, morally, or psychologically from those of state actors. Instead, the kinds of “terrorist” groupings to be examined will be shown to be representatives of a new stage in the evolution of modern war (so-called “fourth generation war”). Additionally, an examination of modern military history, contemporary military theory, and the dramatic expansion of both the scale and success of so-called “terrorist” entities will demonstrate both the rise of such entities as major political contenders and the decline of the state as a monopolist of political violence.
1. The Rise of the Modern State and Its Monopoly on Violence (1300–1800)
The Dutch-Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, in his seminal work The Rise and Decline of the State (1999), describes the origins and development of the modern conception of the state as it emerged during the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries in Western Europe. Van Creveld emphasizes the importance of distinguishing the state from government per se. What are the characteristics that are unique to the state are not necessarily to be found in government generally? The most important of these is the notion of the state as a legal person unto itself. The state has a legal and institutional life of its own that exists above and beyond its individual members or subjects and is self-perpetuating even as its personnel change. The state is a corporate body, but unlike other corporate entities (business corporations or religious and educational institutions) the state regulates and externally establishes the conditions of operation for other kinds of corporate bodies, maintains for itself an exclusive territorial monopoly and a monopoly on particular attributes of public authority (“sovereignty”), and is recognized by and interacts with other state entities in a way that non-state entities do not.[191]
Van Creveld points out that political government was carried out with varying degrees of formality by tribes, chiefdoms, city-states, and empires before the rise of the state. Typically, ownership and rule went hand-in-hand. Those who acquired ownership of land and resources, by whatever means, also ruled over those who lived upon the land.[192] An important contribution of the Greek cities and the later Roman Republic to the eventual rise of the state was to separate ownership from rule. The operation of the machinery of government existed independently of the private property of owners and individual rulers. One could lose one’s political position without losing one’s personal wealth in the process. However, the political arrangements of antiquity did not conceive of government as an institution independent of its individual members. Van Creveld cites Thucydides’ claim that “the city is its men” and Cicero’s description of the res publica as “an assembly of men living according to law.”[193]
With the collapse of the Roman Empire in Western Europe and the emergence of the subsequent feudal era, a historically unique set of arrangements came about that created the conditions necessary for the rise of the state. Van Creveld observes that unlike previous disruptions of centralized authority and the dispersion of power into the hands of localized rulers, the medieval feudal rulers who comprised the Holy Roman Empire found themselves in the position of having to share power with the Church. The Church was a massive institution unto itself. The Pope maintained his own seat of authority in Rome, while the domain of the Emperor moved from place to place.The Pope also possessed his own armed forces and the Church maintained many privileges of its own that preserved its independence from secular authority. Out of the cracks in the overlapping authority of Church and Emperor came the monarchies which formed the basis of future states. The monarchs’ persistent struggle against the powers of the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, the independent cities, and the feudal nobility proved successful over the long term, and the time of absolute monarchs began.[194]
Van Creveld describes the process by which these centralized monarchies began laying the foundations of the state by building a bureaucratic infrastructure for administrative purposes.[195] The bureaucracy eventually became a power unto itself and began to challenge the power of the monarchy, the Church, and the centers of authority to be found in the broader society. The bureaucracies’ powers of collecting both information and taxes from the citizenry at large transformed its relationship to the citizenry. The emergence of a bureaucratic infrastructure with the power of taxation subsequently made it possible for the bureaucracy to gain a monopoly over the raising of armed forces and making war, an activity that had previously been largely privatized. The growth of regular armies, along with internal police organizations and penal institutions, cemented the concentration of authority into the hands of the bureaucracy. By the end of the eighteenth century, the bureaucracy had grown to the point where it crystallized into the person of the state.[196]
During the centuries of its evolution, the state was accompanied by the parallel development of a radically altered intellectual culture, one which gradually came to deny the previous theological foundations for political legitimacy in favor of a more pragmatic secular concern for the obtainment and preservation of order. As the state grew, the power and influence of intermediary institutions such as the Church, the aristocracy, the individual monarch, the patriarchal head of the household, and the slave master diminished. Particularistic attachments along with traditional systems of rank and privilege began to decline. Rulers and authority figures came to be seen as ordinary persons who
se powers and privileges were derived from their official positions rather than any intrinsic virtue, wisdom, or superiority of their own. As traditional hierarchies began to vanish, subjects began to be seen less in terms of their ascribed status and more as individuals in terms of their relationship to the universal authority of the state. Egalitarian doctrines arose whose effect was to extend political rights to ever-growing groupings of citizens (classes, religions, ethnicities) within the state. This leveling of traditional hierarchies, combined with the disruptions and dislocations generated by the industrial revolution, caused the state to grow ever-more powerful.[197]
Van Creveld examines the transformation of the state from a means to an end (the preservation of order and the protection of life and property) to an end unto itself. The intellectual framework in which this occurred involved the marriage of the state with nationalism.[198] The glorification of the nation-state and the transfer of traditional particular, provincial, or parochial loyalties to the state first found full expression in the French Revolution. Traditional religious sentiments were replaced with the quasi-deification of the state and the nation. State ceremonies, rituals, and pageants began to take on quasi-religious symbolism and expressions of reverence. This trend was manifested in particularly spectacular ways by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, but was also observable in less extravagant ways in the liberal states such as France, England, and America. Conscripted, popular armies became the norm and to give one’s life in the fight for one’s country was elevated to the level of the highest ideal. The state strengthened its control over civil society not only by means of its police and penal institutions but also through assuming control over education, welfare services, banking, and other sectors of social and economic life as well. This unprecedented dominance on the part of the state afforded individual states the means with which to wage war against one another with previously unheard of levels of death and destruction.[199] Ironically, the state, whose original purpose had been the maintenance of peace, became an agent of unparalleled disorder. Martin van Creveld thus describes the legacy of the modern state:
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