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September 23, 2002, 9:00 a.m. The West and the Rest On terrorism and globalization. Part I By Roger Scruton EDITOR'S NOTE: This begins a series of excerpts from Roger Scruton's new book The West and the Rest, published by the ISI Books.

t is thanks to Western prosperity, Western legal systems, Western forms of banking, and Western communications that human initiatives now reach so easily across frontiers to affect the lives and aspirations of people all over the globe. However, Western civilization depends on an idea of citizenship that is not global at all, but rooted in territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty. By contrast, Islam, which has been until recently remote from the Western world and without the ability to project its message, is founded on an ideal of godliness which is entirely global in its significance, and which regards territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty as compromises with no intrinsic legitimacy of their own. Although there have been attempts to manufacture nationalisms both appropriate to the Islamic temperament and conducive to a legitimate political order, they have fragmented under the impact of sectarian or tribal allegiances, usually giving way to military dictatorship or one-man, one-family, or one-party tyranny. Islam itself remains, in the hearts of those who live under these tyrannies, a permanent call to a higher life, and a reminder that power and corruption will rule in this world until the reign established by the Prophet is restored.

Terrorism has a long history in the Islamic countries, being the usual recourse of those who reject the legitimacy of the prevailing sovereign power. Until recently, however, it modeled itself on the Assassins, and took powerful or symbolic individuals as its targets. In 19th-century Russia, terrorism took a new and more destructive form, involving indiscriminate bombings and acts of destruction which, according to one estimate, claimed 17,000 victims between 1894 and 1917. The Russian methods finally led to a successful revolution, and have been adopted by the postwar nationalist movements in Western Europe, notably by the IRA and ETA, as well as by the urban revolutionaries of the 1960s in Italy, France, and Germany, by the PLO, and by the left-wing insurgents in Latin America. Those groups have formed mutually supportive networks for the exchange of training and expertise, and it is due to the globalizing process that these networks are available also to the Islamist extremists.

Nevertheless, Islamist terrorism is a distinct development in two ways. Islamism is not a nationalist movement, still less a bid to establish a new kind of secular state. It rejects the modern state and its secular law in the name of a "brotherhood" that reaches secretly to all Muslim hearts, uniting them against the infidel. And because its purpose is religious rather than political, the goal is incapable of realization. The Muslim Brotherhood failed even to change the political order of Egypt, let alone to establish itself as a model of Koranic government throughout the Muslim world. Where Islamists succeed in gaining power — as in Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan — the result is not the reign of peace and piety promised by the Prophet, but murder and persecution on a scale matched in our time only by the Nazis and the Communists. The Islamist, like the Russian nihilist, is an exile in this world; and when he succeeds in obtaining power over his fellow human beings, it is in order to punish them for being human.

Globalization does not mean merely the expansion of communications, contacts, and trade around the globe. It means the transfer of social, economic, political, and juridical power to global organizations, by which I mean organizations that are located in no particular sovereign jurisdiction, and governed by no particular territorial law. The growth of such organizations is, in my view, a regrettable by-product of our addiction to freedom. Whether in the form of multinational corporations, international courts, or transnational legislatures, these organizations pose a new kind of threat to the only form of sovereignty that has brought lasting (albeit local) peace to our planet. And when terrorism too becomes globalized, the threat is amplified a hundred-fold.

With al Qaeda, therefore, we encounter the real impact of globalization on the Islamic revival. To belong to this "base" is to accept no territory as home, and no human law as authoritative. It is to commit oneself to a state of permanent exile, while at the same time resolving to carry out God's work of punishment. But the techniques and infrastructure on which al Qaeda depends are the gifts of the new global institutions. It is Wall Street and Zurich that produced the network of international finance that enables Osama bin Laden to conceal his wealth and to deploy it anywhere in the world. It is Western enterprise with its multinational outreach that produced the technology that bin Laden has exploited so effectively against us. And it is Western science that developed the weapons of mass destruction he would dearly like to obtain. His wealth, too, would be inconceivable without the vast oil revenues brought to Saudi Arabia from the West, there to precipitate the building boom from which his father profited. And this very building boom, fueled by a population explosion that is itself the result of global trade, is a symbol of the West and its outreach. The appearance of Arabia has been permanently altered by it — and altered, in the feelings of many Muslims, for the worse. Concrete high-rises dwarf the minarets, domestic alleyways give way to pretentious boulevards or jerry-built slums, and the hideous, unfriendly style of international modernism overlays and extinguishes the delicate fabric of the Muslim city.

It may seem quixotic to emphasize the role of architecture in the present conflict. But we should remember Mohammed Atta's nostalgia for the old town of Aleppo and reflect on what has happened to the face of the Middle East under the impact of Western architectural norms, which have a symbolic significance at least equal to that of Western dress and Western manners. Architectural modernism was introduced with fanfares of globalist propaganda by the Bauhaus and by Le Corbusier, who envisaged their new style of architecture as both the symbol and the instrument of a radical break with the past. This architecture was conceived in the spirit of detachment from place and history and home. It was "the international style," a gesture against the nation-state and the homeland, an attempt to remake the surface of the earth as a single uniform habitat from which differences and boundaries would finally disappear.

In the West, where democratic procedures and legal norms give power to the citizen, the impact of international modernism has here and there been controlled and limited. Although the damage has been great, many cities retain their local character, and villages hold out against the tide. The great exception — Germany — remains committed to architectural modernism as a symbol and instrument of its cultural self-repudiation. And the modern German city can be seen as part of the long sad coda of Germany's defeat — the final transformation of a nation that does not dare to show its face without the benefit of plastic surgery. Elsewhere in Europe — notably in Italy, France, and Spain — the international style has been resisted; churches dominate the skyline and streets are still bordered by humane facades. A conscious effort has been made to retain the character of both town and country, in the knowledge that they define an experience of the homeland, and that the homeland is the thing to which the citizen's loyalty is owed.

Americans have been careless of their cities, with the result that no one wants to live in them. But their suburbs radiate homeliness and comfort, and the country itself lies somewhere out there along the interstate, a still wild, open frontier that belongs to all of us, and we to it. Against the odds America has retained the aspect and the atmosphere of home.

In the Middle East, however, where land is disposed of by the governing power, and planning regulations are either non-existent or ignored, the landscape and cityscape have been mutilated beyond recognition. It was Le Corbusier who showed the way. Having failed to persuade the French authorities to adopt his plan to bulldoze Paris north of the Seine and replace it with militarized towers of glass, Le Corbusier worked on successive French governments, including the Vichy regime, to implement his insolent plan to raze the old city of Algiers, capital of Algeria, which was then a French colony. He succeeded at last, and after the war the bulldozers moved in, with catastrophic results. Thanks to the enormous profits that accrue to the modernist ways of building, Le Corbusier became a hero of the architectural establishment, and his repulsive plan for this once beautiful city is now illustrated in all the standard Western textbooks of architecture.

Le Corbusier showed the European intelligentsia how the inferior people of North Africa should be treated: such, surely, was Atta's perception. Since Le Corbusier's time, the rush of speculative building — most of it illegal and on land that is officially "publicly owned," and fueled by the demographic explosion — has entirely transformed the visual aspect and daily rhythm of the Middle Eastern cities. Whatever hope there might have been that people would come to define their loyalties in terms of territory rather than faith has been obliterated by the impact of Western technology, which seems to believe in neither. And if we wish to understand in full the resentment of Palestinians towards Israeli settlements on the West Bank, we should not neglect the visual damage that these settlements have caused, introducing modernist styles and materials, sweeping roadways, and ubiquitous light pollution into a landscape that had worn its biblical aspect for centuries, with star-spangled nights above stone-built villages and historic cities like Jenin.

As the examples of bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the September 11 terrorists demonstrate, Islamism is not a cry of distress from the "wretched of the earth." It is an implacable summons to war, issued by globetrotting middle-class Muslims, many of them extremely wealthy, and most of them sufficiently well versed in Western civilization and its benefits to be able to exploit the modern world to the full. These Muslims are products of the globalizing process, and Western civilization has so amplified their message that it travels with them around the world.

It may be hard to sympathize with these spoiled and self-indulgent advocates of violence. But it is not hard to sympathize with the feelings upon which they depend for their following. Globalization, in the eyes of its advocates, means free trade, increased prosperity, and the steady erosion of despotic regimes by the growing demand for freedom. In the eyes of its critics, however, it means the loss of sovereignty, together with large-scale social, economic, and aesthetic disruption. It also means an invasion of images that evoke outrage and disgust as much as envy in the hearts of those who are exposed to them. In the United States, where pornography is protected as free speech, people are able to accept that this assault on human dignity is the price we must pay for freedoms too precious to relinquish. But if you have not known those freedoms, and believe in any case that happiness resides not in freedom but in submission to God's law, the impact of pornography is devastating. No less devastating, for pious Muslims, are what they see as the indecent clothes and behavior of young women in the West — clothes and behavior that are in no way modified when those women travel on business or as tourists to Muslim countries, there to presume on a toleration which they are willing to reciprocate but do little or nothing to earn.

People in the West live in a public space in which each person is surrounded and protected by his rights, and where all behavior that poses no obvious physical threat is permitted. But people in Muslim countries live in a space that is shared but private, where nobody is shielded by his rights from communal judgment, and where communal judgment is experienced as the judgment of God. Western habits, Western morals, Western art, music, and television are seen not as freedoms but as temptations. And the normal response to temptation is either to give in to it, or to punish those who offer it. Many Muslim muhajiroun do both. Like Atta, they drink, gamble, and fornicate in the flesh-pots of America, while secretly plotting revenge against the thing that made these indulgences possible.

Globalization, therefore, offers militant Islam the opportunity that it has lacked since the Ottoman retreat from central Europe. It both concentrates the resolve of the believer and offers him a sword with which to prosecute God's will. Muslim states do not have the loyalty of their people, who are not citizens but subjects, contemptuous (for the most part) of their rulers. Hence, Muslim states have not recently posed a threat to the West. If they seem to do so, it is only because they form the shield around some crazy tyrant, whose power reaches no further than his weapons. Globalization, however, has brought into being a true Islamic umma, which identifies itself across borders in terms of a global form of legitimacy, and which attaches itself like a parasite to global institutions and techniques that are the by-products of Western democracy. This new form of globalized Islam is undeniably threatening, since it satisfies a hunger for membership that globalization itself has created. It calls on the old nostalgia of the muhajir, and directs it not at some local usurper but at God's enemies, wherever they are.

September 24, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
The Personal State
On globalization and the terrorist threat.
Part II

By Roger Scruton

nterestingly, the principal target of al Qaeda, as of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, is neither Western civilization, nor Christianity, nor global capitalism, nor anything else that an be given an abstract profile — it is the United States, conceived as a sovereign nation-state. In an uncanny way, the Islamists have identified the core component of the system that they wish to destroy. It is not the American people who are the enemy. It is the American state, conceived as an autonomous agent acting freely on the stage of international politics, and so calling on itself the wrath of God. When Khomeini described America as "the Great Satan" he meant it literally. And his doing so showed that he had grasped the fundamental difference between the West and the rest: Namely, that in the West, but not in the rest, there is a political process generating corporate agency, collective responsibility, and moral personality in the state.

The point here may easily be overlooked by those who see politics in terms of movements, processes, forces, and power struggles, and who neglect the difference that has been made to all these things by the legacy of over two millennia of Roman law. Like a firm or a church, a nation-state is not merely a collection of individuals. It is a moral and legal person, which acts on its own behalf and is liable for what it does. The nation-state can therefore be praised and blamed, hated and loved, and the form of membership that it offers is also a bond of trust between individual citizens and the corporation in whose decision-making they share.

The very same political process that turns subjects into citizens turns the state into a collective expression of its citizens' way of life. When we speak of the United States as negotiating a treaty, as building up its army, as declaring war on terrorism, we are not speaking metaphorically. These things are the genuine actions of a corporate person, in which all U.S. citizens are to some extent implicated, but which are the actions of no individual. When we speak in the same terms of Iraq or North Korea, however, we are speaking obliquely. There is no such entity as Iraq, only a legal fiction erected by the United Nations for the purpose of dealing with whichever individual, clique, or faction is for the moment holding the people of that country hostage. The form of corporate agency established by Western political systems has not been established elsewhere in the world. The states of the non-Western world are impersonal states, machines in their rulers' hands. They make no decisions, take no responsibility, and can be neither praised nor blamed, but exist merely as shields and weapons in the hands of those whose advantages they secure. This was made explicit under the Leninist system of communist government, which was founded on the theory of "parallel structures." Every office of the Soviet state was shadowed by an office of the "vanguard Party," which exercised all the power but was wholly unaccountable for doing so.

This too casts some light on September 11. The attacks were designed to wound the United States in its decision-making part. The Pentagon, the White House, and the World Trade Center represent the three principal spheres of political agency — military, governmental, and economic — and the three ways in which the United States makes itself felt around the globe. And they bear witness to the reality of the country as an autonomous agent that can make decisions on its own behalf and can call upon the loyalty of its citizens to adopt those decisions as their own. The attacks were assaults on the person of the United States, and therefore on each and every citizen of that country.

The difference between "the West and the rest" is captured in this idea of the corporate person — an idea that has its origins in Roman law and no real equivalent in the fiqh. The personal state is characterized by a constitution, by a rule of law, and by a rotation of office-holders. Its decisions are collectively arrived at by a process that may not be wholly democratic, but which nevertheless includes every citizen and provides the means whereby each citizen can adopt the outcome as his own. Personal states have an inherent preference for negotiation over compulsion, and for peace over war. They can live peacefully side-by-side despite disputed borders, as do the United States and Canada, while awaiting the outcome of a legal case that will settle the dispute. And they foster the growth of a national loyalty and a territorial jurisdiction in which the absolute demands of religion are tempered by the overarching need for toleration and common obedience to a secular power. The legitimacy of this power resides partly in custom, tradition, and the long-standing habits of the homeland; but it also depends upon the negotiated consent of the citizens who, through their participation in the political process, make the decisions of the state into decisions of their own.

Of course, that is a somewhat idealized picture of the modern nation-state. But it conveys the ideal to which Western states have aspired, and which has shaped their distinctive form of politics. Although democracy has been an immensely important component in the emerging nation-states of the modern world, it is more a consequence than a cause of their personality. In the absence of corporate personality, experiments in democratic government lead to social disruption, factionalism, and either the tyranny of the majority or the seizure of power by a clique. This we have witnessed time and again in Africa, and those who believe that the remedy for the "failed states" of the region is to introduce democratic elections fail to see that without the framework of institutions and the underlying territorial loyalty, democratization is merely a staging post on the way to tyranny.

The personal state is answerable to its citizens, and its decisions can be imputed to them not least because they, as citizens, participate in the political process. When it fights on their behalf it does not drag them into conflicts that are none of their business but involves them in conflicts of their own. In this it should be contrasted with the principal forms of government that prevail outside the "West": the one-party state, the religious state, individual tyranny, and the so-called "failed state," in which the apparatus of government has simply fallen into disuse, leaving the people unprotected against criminals, marauders, and terrorists, as they are now unprotected in many parts of South America. Although all these varieties of state are represented at the United Nations, and all are accorded there the status of persons in international law, none of them has full corporate personality as I have described it. For one thing, they all lack effective internal opposition. Often during the Cold War commentators wrote of a contest between "hawks" and "doves" in the Kremlin, or of opposition to communist policies in this or that professional or military grouping within the party. And similar things are said today about the Islamic Republic of Iran. The fact remains, however, that there is no defined role for opposition in those states, no way in which an opposing party can peacefully compete for power with the one that currently possesses it, and therefore no way in which opposition can be used to create a government based on dialogue. Decisions are made by an unanswerable minority and imposed willy-nilly on the country. The role of opposition, which is to make government accountable to the people, remains unfulfilled.

Any conflict with a non-personal state is therefore a conflict with some faction or individual within it. There cannot be victory in such a conflict unless the faction or individual is destroyed. This we have already experienced in the Gulf War. The Iraqi soldiers who had occupied Kuwait were quickly driven from their positions — after all, it was not their war, and not one of them had the slightest desire to lay down his life for Saddam Hussein. They were helpless conscripts in the schemes of a dictator. But because the allies did nothing to depose Saddam Hussein, the seeming victory was not a victory at all, but merely a restoration of the status quo ante and a renewal of Saddam's implacable enmity. The formal defeat of Iraq was the defeat of a legal fiction. The real victory was that of Saddam, who retained control over his subjects in the face of an alliance of nation-states that proved powerless to unseat him.

The asymmetry between personal states and the impersonal forces that now confront them can be witnessed in the case of Israel. The British protectorate of Palestine, carved out of the defunct Ottoman Empire, was opened to large-scale Jewish immigration by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Later, in the wake of the Holocaust, the desire of Jews for a state of their own became irresistible, and the retreat of the British from their protectorate was hastened by the terrorist methods of the Stern Gang. Israel quickly transformed itself thereafter into a nation-state by allying a historical national identity with an existing territorial jurisdiction. The Jews' pre-existing attachment to the Promised Land endowed the rule of law that the British had begun to establish in Palestine with the much-needed territorial loyalty. The result is that the state of Israel exhibits personal sovereignty on the Western model, and a genuinely democratic system of government. Few people doubt the injustice done to the Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, in this process. But the fact remains that, for better or worse, Israel now exists in the heart of the Middle East, a personal nation-state surrounded, since the virtual annexation of Lebanon by Syria, by tyrannies, factional groupings, and terrorist movements that have only a fictitious personality either in fact or in law.

There is as yet no Palestinian state, nor was there ever, strictly speaking, a Palestinian nation, over and above the collection of historic creed communities that coexisted in the Holy Land under a succession of imperial rules — most recently Ottoman and British. The nominal leader of the Palestinians — Yassir Arafat — has never been elected by them, but was projected into eminence by the PLO, itself a terrorist organization on the model of the IRA, with a global network devoted to a local cause.6 By astute diplomacy on the world stage 'Arafat has won recognition for that cause; but he has neither the authority to pursue accommodation with Israel, nor the power to lead the Palestinians in an all-out war. Nor can he control the terrorist organizations that reside under his aegis and draw on the support of Islamic militants throughout the world.

Organizations like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad take their inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Hezbollah. They do not work through diplomacy or negotiation,
but through violence, and suicide bombings are now their principal device. In these circumstances it is almost impossible for Israel to form a coherent policy towards the Palestinians. To destroy Arafat is pointless, if it leads to no change in the suicide attacks. To negotiate with him is also pointless, since he does not represent the people on whose behalf he claims to speak. In the absence of a corporate person with which the Palestinians as a whole can identify, and whose decisions they can make their own, all negotiation is futile, and all force unfocused.

In the face of this, the argument for a Palestinian state is surely overwhelming. However it is doubtful that a Palestinian state, if founded, would easily develop the kind of corporate personality that I have attributed to the United States. For this would require, if my argument is right, the emergence of territorial loyalties that transcend the bonds of religion and asabiya and express themselves through some participatory form of citizenship. It would require, in other words, the same kind of radical break with local history that we see in Israel.

Israel, meanwhile, suffers all the agonies of a personal state at war. It takes collective responsibility for its aggressive gestures, and its politicians rise and fall in response to the constant internal dialogue over principles and policies. Its leaders are subjected to criticism both at home and abroad, and, in its efforts to maintain the freedoms and rights that are the hallmark of personal government, Israel exposes itself to a constant stream of atrocities. The world supposes that Israel is at war with the Palestinians: but the Palestinians do not exist as a genuine agent in this war, and besides it is only in Israel that any Palestinian Arab can cast his vote in an election and expect to have some influence on what is done. To say this is not to approve of Israel's current policy towards the West Bank. Nor is it a reason to deny the plight of the Palestinians. It is simply to indicate the structural difficulty of the problem, and the near impossibility of making peace when there is no accountable agent with whom to negotiate.

If we see the Palestinian conflict in this way, we shall be led to reject the currently fashionable view that the terrorist threat to America comes from America's support for Israel. On the contrary. It is Israel's relation to America that makes Israel the target of militant Islam. The Palestinians have a legitimate grievance. But the Muslim states of the Middle East have done little or nothing to support them in this grievance. Instead they have exploited it for their own imperial ends, like the Syrians and the Iranians in Lebanon, or Saddam Hussein in Kuwait. When Israel became the target for the Islamic militants of Hezbollah it was not in order to achieve some settlement favorable to the Palestinian people. It was in order to punish Israel as an outreach of the West in the dar al-islam. The Islamic militants can therefore be satisfied with nothing short of the total destruction of Israel. For Israel is a nation-state established where no nation-state should be — a place where the only law should be the sharia, and the only loyalty that of Islam. Meanwhile, the occupation of the West Bank, proceeding as it does not through administration but through modernist architecture, is a vivid symbol of the globalizing process: it exhibits a will to permanent and irreversible change, by which local identities are razed and the earth re-shaped as an ubiquitous nowhere.

The problem posed by conflict when one of the parties has no real corporate personality is not confined to the Middle East. Globalization is spreading it to the West, and the terrorist attacks are our first large-scale encounter with it. Furthermore, they bring home to us the fact that the remedies devised for dealing with global problems are ineffective against the new kinds of agency that globalization has created. International law can do nothing to control al Qaeda, nor is the United Nations effective against organizations that neither are, nor aspire to be, nation-states. While it is possible to bring pressure to bear on individual states that harbor terrorists, this pressure is ineffective against a failed state, or against a state like Iran, which is happy to ignore requests from Satan.

September 25, 2002, 9:35 a.m.
Transnational Government
On the globalization of terrorism; Part III.

By Roger Scruton

t has been a ruling principle of Western politics that every extension of human powers should be accompanied by an extension of the law, as a means of controlling those powers and ensuring that they are not abused. Inevitably, therefore, as the global impact of human decisions increases, so does the demand for new legislative bodies with which to control that impact and direct it to the common good. Until recently this kind of legal control was exerted through international law, backed by treaties, of which the charter forming the United Nations was the most important. It was assumed that sovereignty remained with the individual states, and that the benefits from international law were such that they would willingly uphold its judgments, lest they be excluded from the club. As originally conceived, therefore, the United Nations was exactly that — a union of nations, each of which could one day be constituted as a nation-state, and each of which meanwhile enjoyed the legal personality bestowed upon it by international law.

Many commentators still believe that the U.N. is the benign institution that its founders intended it to be, and cause powerful countries like the United States prefer to settle their disputes directly, on terms more favorable to themselves than could be obtained from the court of international opinion. It seems to me, however, that this optimistic view is no longer sustainable. For it ignores the fact that, with the exception of delegates from personal states, those who turn up to U.N. meetings literally have no business being there. They are not the representatives of the people from whose territory they come, and if they speak for anyone it is for the party, faction, or tyrant who sent them. Moreover, as Rosemary Righter has shown, the U.N. and its subordinate institutions are wholly prey to corruption, consuming vast resources by the relentless extension of unaccountable bureaucratic power. These institutions are less means of resolving disputes than means of creating them, by dressing up the crimes of unaccountable tyrants as though they were the corporate decisions of nation-states.

Matters have significantly worsened in recent decades, as new forms of transnational legislation threaten the sovereignty and the aspirations of the smaller countries of the world. It would be a coherent response to globalization to encourage the emergence of nation-states in all places where there is an embryonic territorial jurisdiction. In this way each nation could make its own choices for the future, and avoid being swept away by the global tide. And with the emergence of territorial jurisdictions and genuinely accountable governments, the terrorist threat would almost certainly dwindle, as people learn to attach their loyalties to real fragments of earth rather than imaginary vistas of heaven and thereby to see human life for what it is — namely, a process of accommodation with one's neighbors. But this is not what is happening. The embryonic states of Africa and Asia, for example, are subject to WTO regulations that will unavoidably ruin their local food economies by forcing them to compete on equal terms with massively subsidized industrial food producers in the West. Genetically modified crops, whose seeds are patented by Western multinationals, will very probably drive the old crops from the market, compelling third-world farmers, through the system of Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights, to buy their seeds in the West. In other words, the agrarian economies of Africa will be expropriated by transnational legislation that their people are powerless to annul.

I mention the WTO because it is so widely perceived as an instrument of "Western imperialism," and not only by those Westerners who fly around the world to demonstrate against its meetings. In fact, almost every international institution, however good its intentions, is attempting to pass laws, conventions, and treaties — if only to justify its existence and to have something for its overpaid bureaucrats to do. Repeated protests against the decisions of global summits go unheeded, and a constant stream of unaccountable regulations issues from the meetings of the Western powers as though the rest had no choice but to accept them.

The global financial institutions have acquired comparable sovereign powers. The World Bank and the IMF, though founded with the purpose of securing global financial stability, are now widely perceived as instruments of Western domination. After all, they deal in dollars, and the money that they give or lend can be spent only in an economy dominated by Western technology and Western exports. By accepting this money a state is dragged unavoidably into the global maelstrom.9 Moreover, being compelled in the nature of things to negotiate with governments, the World Bank and the IMF subsidize the tyrants and gangsters who have expropriated the political life of the countries where they have come to power. Nor is there any real pressure on such transnational institutions to account for their actions. A large number of the enormous IMF loans made in recent years to the states of the former Soviet Union have disappeared into the same Swiss bank accounts that have been used to milk the Soviet people for fifty years. This has led to a few vaguely reproachful noises, but to no penalties corresponding to the enormity of the crime.

To some extent the United States has remained unaffected by this growth in transnational legislation. Its presidents have been reluctant to sign any treaty not clearly in the nation's interest, and they react adversely to any proposals that would diminish United States sovereignty or the ability of the country to defend its territory. But, the critics say, this is because the United States is able to dominate the crucial bodies, and to ensure that regulations — such as those issued by the WTO — operate always in its national interest.

A telling example is the proposed treaty to establish an International Criminal Court — a pie-eyed dream of Western liberals, designed to replace wars by judicial processes, and to charge belligerents with war crimes. It seems clear that the Senate will not ratify this treaty even though President Clinton reluctantly added his signature to it. For the treaty will curtail the freedoms to make sound military judgments and to make pre-emptive strikes against a potential enemy. Hence, it will violate national sovereignty in an area where sovereignty is the pre-condition of survival. The court will be appointed by no accountable government, and its judges will include many from impersonal states, who will act simply as tools in the hands of unscrupulous factions or dictators. It is surely a welcome development that the United States is rebelling against this particular piece of transnational legislation. But it has yet to wake up to the principle that almost all transnational legislation is a threat to someone's sovereignty.

Pertinent in the present context is the U.N. Convention on Refugees and Asylum, ratified in 1951, at a time when migration was not common and asylum rarely offered or sought. This piece of legislation obliges our governments to offer asylum to all who need it, and to give hospitality meanwhile to those who claim it. As a result of global mobility, some two million people arrive every year in Europe, ostensibly seeking asylum but in fact wishing to profit from the black economy, and in any case enjoying the obligatory hospitality required by the U.N. Convention. As a result, European states have lost control of their borders, have unknown numbers of illegal residents, and have black economies that grow larger by the week. Moreover, anyone who suggests that the U.N. Convention is anachronistic, politically dangerous, and socially destructive is subjected to intimidating criticism and risks being denounced as a "racist" or worse.

The political and economic advantages that lead people to seek asylum in the West are the result of territorial jurisdiction. Yet territorial jurisdictions can survive only if borders are controlled. Transnational legislation, acting together with the culture of repudiation, is therefore rapidly undermining the conditions that make Western freedoms durable. The effect of this on the politics of France and Holland is now evident to everyone. And when we find among the "asylum seekers" the vast majority of those Islamist cells that have grown up in London, Paris, and Hamburg, we begin to recognize just how much the political culture of the West is bent on a path of self-destruction.

September 26, 2002, 11:55 a.m.
The New Imperium
On the globalization of terrorism; Part IV.

By Roger Scruton

s the nation-state a durable arrangement? Consider England — the most successful example of a localized territorial jurisdiction in the modern world. Just when and for how long did it exist as a nation-state? The skeptic would say: for about the length of time required to absorb its northern neighbor; in other words, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Act of Union with Scotland of 1707. Thereafter it expanded relentlessly into an empire, acquired, in Sir John Seeley's famous words, "in a fit of absence of mind"10 — i.e., not by policy, still less by any corporate decision on the nation's behalf, but by "an invisible hand," in other words, as the unintended by-product of a myriad actions, very few of which were actions of the state. And those who accuse the United States of being, or becoming, a new imperial power are pointing to a similar process, whereby the legislative powers of smaller states are being steadily expropriated by transnational institutions that only the United States can really control or escape from.

Perhaps the most telling example of the invisible hand of imperialism, however, is not the United States, but the European Union (EU). Europe is the home of the nation-state, and the crucible in which the idea of secular and territorial jurisdiction first took shape. At the same time recent history has implanted in many of the European elites a skepticism towards the national idea and a desire for a transnational federation in place of it. The British and Scandinavian people are reluctant to accept this; the Mediterranean people accept it only because they do not take it wholly seriously. But many of the French and the Germans remain wedded to the idea as the best way of maintaining the peace and prosperity of Europe. At the same time, the majority of the decisions that are forcing the Europeans to abandon their national sovereignties are made by people who have no intention to produce an imperial power.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that virtually nobody explicitly wants it, a process is under way that will effectively extinguish the national democracies of Europe and erect in their place a European superstate, nominally a democracy but with largely unaccountable legislative powers, hidden in bureaucratic institutions with their own long-term agendas. Already most laws passed by the United Kingdom Parliament are imposed by diktaat from the Brussells bureaucracy, and the few areas of legislative competence that remain are being steadily eroded by revisions to the Treaty of Rome. Scotland and Wales are still present on the official maps of Europe. But the nation-state that did most to create the modern world — namely England — has already been replaced by "regions" that have no historical meaning and defy all the local loyalties to which English patriotism responds.

There are those who regret this, and those who welcome it, as an opportunity to revive the idea of Western civilization on the continent where that civilization was born. The question that we need to ask, however, is whether this new form of imperial government can really answer to the problems that now confront us. If my argument is correct, the European superstate will not be held in place by its political institutions. Only in the context of a pre-political loyalty will those institutions have legitimacy in the eyes of the citizens, and it is precisely the absence of a pan-European loyalty that gave rise to the federal project in the first place.

Suppose a village has existed for centuries as an autonomous community, its residents making decisions collectively through their elected council and enjoying all the benefits and burdens of self-government. And suppose that a neighboring, similarly self-governing but somewhat larger, town proposes to amalgamate with the village, arguing that the increased prospects for trade and commerce fully justify the move, and that the new community will be just as democratic and self-governing as the old ones. Suppose, finally, that the villagers are persuaded, and do indeed enjoy the promised commercial benefits. They will find themselves as a result in a minority whenever a decision affecting their interests is to be made, and will be overridden by the town whenever the interests of town and village conflict. The new waste-disposal site will be placed on the borders of the village, not the town; the highway will be built through the village, not the town; and so on. In short, the villagers will experience their new democratic regime as a loss of sovereignty and a diminution in their democratic powers.

That is what is beginning to happen in Europe; indeed it has already happened with such measures as the expropriation of British fisheries by France and Spain and the imposition on Britain of metric weights and measures. Americans do not need reminding, in this context, of the controversy over "states' rights." The evident conclusion is that, just as the village in my example will begin to resent the town and regard its decisions as illegitimate, so will the nation-states of Europe seek to break away from the Union, as the conflicts of interest re-animate the desire for national autonomy.

It is significant that, in all major crises that affect the root sentiments of the people, the national governments of Europe entirely set aside the transnational project to which they profess to be committed. After September 11 the British Prime Minister immediately joined with the United States, not only in condemning terrorism, but in committing his country and its armed forces to the fight against it. Other European countries made vague noises in the same direction, but did nothing. And subsequent pronouncements from France, Italy, and Germany have displayed a veiled but growing anti-Americanism, and a wish not to be involved. The French in particular prefer to see September 11 as an alien event affecting an alien people. A book arguing that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on September 11 and that those which hit the twin towers were guided there by the CIA has even become a bestseller in France.

Similarly the French have refused to police the entrance to the channel tunnel, knowing that the best way to rid themselves of illegal immigrants is by passing them on to Britain, where the welfare deal is more attractive. In this matter that affects the national interest and national identity of the two countries, pre-political loyalty shows itself at once, and it is the very same loyalty that shaped Europe as a system of nation-states.

Nor is it likely that a new kind of pre-political loyalty could arise from the European Union. All the factors that formed the loyalties of the European peoples — shared language, shared religion, shared customs, shared legal systems, and shared ways of life — are absent. Hence, the European Union is rapidly destroying the territorial jurisdictions and national loyalties that have, since the Enlightenment, formed the basis of European legitimacy, while putting no new form of membership in their place. It is significant that separatist and nationalist movements, far from being eroded by the project of union, have grown under its aegis, taking heart from the EU's antipathy to existing nationalisms to promote rival nationalisms of their own. Hence the renewed activities of the IRA and the Basque separatist organization ETA.

On the other hand, the very fervor with which the project of union is promoted by the European elites is some indication that the national loyalties of Europe are in decline. The EU is a political expression of the culture of repudiation that I described in chapter 2, and goes hand-in-hand with legislative initiatives from the European Commission and the European courts that could be used to bind the entire continent in a regime of enforced political correctness. The commission proposes a Europe-wide police force, with power to extradite from any jurisdiction to any other within the Union, and with a list of extraditable offenses that include "racism and xenophobia." This offense is unrecognized in English law and as yet undefined by the courts. But anybody who has followed the reasoning of the European elites knows how it could be used: namely, to suppress any kind of nationalist opposition to the centralized bureaucracy.

Entering this new and bewildering political labyrinth the Muslim immigrant will certainly find a freedom and a prosperity that are unfamiliar in his country of origin. He will also enjoy welfare benefits, free education — or at any rate "education" — for his children, and free medical services. He will find plenty of work on the illegal market, since the states of the European Union have raised the cost of employing people to the point where small enterprises can no longer afford to offer work in the official economy. What the Muslim immigrant will not find, however, is any process of nation-building that might serve to recruit him to membership in the surrounding social order. He will live in strict isolation, and regard the world in which he earns his living as of no independent concern to him. Such membership as he enjoys will come to him from his family and the immigrant community to which his family belongs. And it will depend upon their shared obedience to the rituals of prayer and fasting and to the revealed will of God.

The new European superstate therefore offers a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists. Just as the official culture of Europe involves a repudiation of the nation and its pride, so does the Muslim terrorist target the nation-state as the true work of Satan. The attacks on America were a response to the world's most successful attempt at nation-building, which projects its power, its freedom, and its detritus so effectively around the globe. All the principal actors in the atrocities of September 11 had resided in Europe, and received there both training and indoctrination through the local cells of al Qaeda. The plot to attack America was not hatched in any Muslim country, but on the continent where the West began.

— Roger Scruton is among the most prominent contemporary English writers. A philosopher who was a formerly a professor at Birkbeck College in London and at Boston University, he is now a freelance writer living in Wiltshire.