01 Oct 2006: Globalisation and International Terrorism, Mwesiga Baregu COMMENTARY Globalisation and International Terrorism Mwesiga Baregu Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Published in African Security Review Vol 15 No 3 As I settle down to write this piece a number of unsettling developments are being reported in the international press. One such report is that the latest round of negotiations in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has all but collapsed after the failure to agree on the Doha development issues that are supposed to bring some relief to Third World countries by lowering tariffs and removing agricultural subsidies in the rich countries. That is likely to aggravate the frustrations of the Third World countries by spawning disillusionment among the political leadership and lowering the threshold for violent action particularly among the youth. Another reported development is that the Hamas government in Palestine, which has hardly had time to settle down, is heading for direct confrontation with Israel in Gaza over kidnapped Israeli soldiers. This increases the tension in the region with increased suicide bombings and possible open warfare. Parallel with that development is the resurgent Taliban resistance in Afghanistan and the intensifying insurgency in Iraq, both of which increase uncertainty and unpredictability in the conflicts. A possible US (nuclear?) strike on Iran is in the offing if the latter continues to defy pressures to desist from developing a nuclear weapon. Along with these developments is the reported test of a faulty long-range missile by North Korea on the same day as the re-launching of a faulty space shuttle Discovery in the US programme to militarise space. London is observing the first anniversary of the terror attack on the underground transport network that resulted in the death of 56 people and many injuries at the time that British forces are getting steadily mired in Afghanistan. In Latin America, Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba are joining hands in the struggle against globalisation. At the same time the world’s attention is riveted on the highly terrorism guarded FIFA World Cup finals being played out in Germany and delivered live (at a cost of nearly US $100 million) to a world audience estimated at five billion viewers. While many celebrate the tournament, others fear soccer racism and ‘Islamic terrorism’. All these events have at least four aspects in common. One is that they are all reported instantly, though unevenly, to the whole world, owing to rapid advances in communication technology. This makes it possible for new awareness to emerge, alliances to form and unprecedented frontiers of wars of ideas to be opened up. The second is that this information reaches highly asymmetrical groups of people who are impacted differently by the events and the reporting about them. Some people live in areas with high concentration of resources and wealth while others (the majority) live in areas where poverty, unemployment and pestilence are the order of the day. Yet others inhabit the areas where these events are occurring. The third aspect is that, with the possible exception of the World Cup, the rest of the events involve conflicts with varying degrees of violence, either actual or potential, and serious implications for world peace and security. Finally, all these events form part of the contradictions arising from the process of globalisation as it defines and structures the beginning of the 21st century. At the beginning of the last century, V I Lenin perceived imperialism as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’ and World War I as ‘the opening shot in the re-division of the world between the emerging monopoly trusts’. At the beginning of this century we argue that ‘globalisation is the highest stage of imperialism’ and international terrorism is the violent expression of the struggle against globalisation, particularly by the people of the Third World and their sympathisers. I agree with the sentiments expressed by the Canadian Minister of Finance in the wake of 9/11: For the terrorists, however, the aim of their criminal act was not only the destruction of life – they were seeking to destroy our way of life. The terrorists did not choose their targets randomly. New York’s World Trade Center stood at the heart of the international financial district. It was a symbol of accomplishment and confidence. It was targeted for that reason. The terrorists sought to cripple economic activity, to paralyze financial relations, to create new barriers between economies, countries and people.1 In other words, to fight globalisation in a new popular war to reclaim or liberate the world for the impoverished, marginalised, excluded and humiliated. Organisationally this is expressed by the broad coalition in the anti-globalisation and new social movements, symbolised by the World Social Forums (WSF) that have emerged in opposition to the political power of large corporations and the international financial institutions symbolised by the Davos World Economic Summits (WES). Bill Clinton described the other side of this war aptly in a speech at Yale University in the wake of 9/11, on the eve of the US bombing of Afghanistan: “I believe we are engaged in the first great struggle for the soul of the 21st century … whether positive or negative [these issues] show an astonishing increase in global interdependence.” According to him terrorism is “simply the dark side”.2 It is in this sense that while globalisation facilitates global terrorism, terrorism itself is putting a break on globalisation. “Global terrorism depends on the success of globalization. In fact one may very [well] conceive of global terrorism as a facet of the global culture resulting from globalization.”3 A dialectical unity of opposing forces! For this reason Cronin contends that analysing terrorism as something separate from globalisation is misleading and potentially dangerous. Indeed, he maintains that globalisation and terrorism are intricately intertwined forces characterising international security in the 21st century.4 In trying to describe the essence of imperialism Lenin identified five principal defining features. We shall review and update them accordingly. In brief Lenin contended that: “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established, in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance, in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”5 It is instructive that the above features identified by Lenin are even more developed under globalisation as played out not only by the United States and Europe but also by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation, and the growing debt of the Third World. Nothing could be more true, particularly for Africa today, than when Lenin contends that the world has become divided into a handful of usurer states and a vast majority of debtor states with the military forces of the creditor states playing the role of bailiff when necessary. He attributes this to ‘imperialist parasitism’ whose modern-day manifestation is what has been described by Samir Amin as ‘tributary militarism’ referring to the conduct of war to forcefully capture other countries’ resources as is the case in Iraq. In the case of Africa it is important to note that apart from the very recent development in Somalia, Africa has not had incidents of what is called Islamic terrorism except, perhaps, the terror bombings in Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Mombasa. Where incidents of terrorism have occurred, such as in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, they have arisen from the resentment against the exploitation of natural resources by foreign companies. They are the kind better known as resource terrorism or counter-terrorism. Terrorism in the sense that the indigenous people under the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) (one of approximately 120 such groups) are organised to fight the foreign oil companies and the collaborationist Nigerian government in the inequitable exploitation of their oil wealth. They may also be identified as counter-terrorist if they are conceived as fighting a terrorist onslaught unleashed by the oil companies upon the Ijaw people. At any rate their actions have managed to take nearly 25 per cent of sweet crude out of the market since February this year.6 In his well-known book entitled Jihad vs McWorld, Benjamin Barber argues that globalisation and international terrorism (fundamentalism) are locked in a struggle for domination of the world. In this struggle, he avers, “both Jihad and McWorld undermine the sovereignty of a nation state, dismantling the democratic institutions that have been their finest achievement without discovering ways to extend democracy either downward to the sub-national religious or ethnic entities that now lay claim to peoples loyalty or upward to the international sector in which McWorld’s pop culture and commercial markets operate without sovereign constraints”.7 The undermining of sovereignty inevitably leads to the weakening of the state and ultimately, in the worst cases, states collapse, societies disintegrate, ethnic communities become fragmented and eventually polarised. It is this polarisation that leads to internal conflicts if it turns on the community in the form of politicised ethnicity, for example. On the other hand, if polarisation focuses on the outside world as the source the problems, this may result in international terrorism. Globalisation also has the tendency to integrate the industrialised countries while marginalising other countries and regions, such as Africa. It also leads to the centralisation and deepening of the exploitation of the resources of marginalised areas while excluding, alienating or even discarding their people. The effects of such exclusion are well reflected in the struggles in the Niger Delta where resource terrorism has become the major weapon of the deprived people. It is thus through the marginalisation, exclusion, fragmentation and polarisation characteristics of globalisation that the link to terrorism may be found. As Joan Johnson-Feese says, globalisation does not cause terrorism – terrorism existed prior to the latest wave of globalisation. There are, however, aspects of globalisation which frustrate, anger, and/or offend individuals and groups. This anger and dissatisfaction can serve as a petri dish for the breeding of terrorism and terrorists.8 Notes Globalization, terrorism and the world economy, speech by the Honourable Paul Martin, Minister of Finance for Canada, at a luncheon organised by the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee and the Conference Board of Canada, Ottawa, November 16, 2001, 21 April 2006. G Arana, Clinton speech addresses globalization, terrorism, Yale Daily News, 8 October 2001, 7 September 2006. M Khan, GlocalEye, 7 September 2006. A K Cronin, Behind the curve: Globalization and international terrorism, International Security, Winter 2002/2003, 21 April 2006. V I Lenin, Imperialism: The highest stage of capitalism, 1916. M Maavak, Peak oil and the political economy of terrorism, (21 April 2006). 21 April 2006. J Johnson-Freese, Globalization and terrorism, course description, 21 April 2006.
