Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror

Concerning the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11, the initial question one should ask is exactly why there was outrage on such a gigantic scale? After all, however unusual and shocking this event may have been, people are killed in large numbers all the time, by terror, politics, and economic oppression. Within a matter of days after the attack on the World Trade Center, the United States already may have killed more people in response to the attacks than died in them, through increased and tightened sanctions in the Near East which bring pressure on governments through the deliberate terrorization of civilian populations. So why this unprecedented outrage? There may be two answers here.

The first answer is the threat to sovereign power that is involved. It is, after all, sovereign power that is supposed to have the right over life and death, whether in Islam or in the West. The sovereign state can execute people. It can pass laws that increase the lives of some and decrease the lives of others. It can fight wars. It can impose sanctions that kill. Individuals who take upon themselves this right of life and death are considered to be criminals. But to kill on this scale throws everything into confusion. Is this a crime? No, it seems, because killing on this scale is something only the state is supposed to be capable of. Is it then an act of war? Well, if so, then is it a different kind of war, because only sovereign states can wage war. It actually seems to be worse than normal war waged by a state, because it is a threat to the very idea of the state itself, and so to sovereignty itself.

One must here ignore the pieties about the dreadfulness of terrorism. The West and Israel itself engage in or covertly support many acts of terror all over the globe, and indeed terrorism has only arisen as a tactic of minority resistance in imitation of the new late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century deployment of unabashed physical and psychological terror against civilians as a primary instrument of war in contradiction to all traditional Christian teaching and even practice, up to a certain point. (These horrific new tactics were arguably first taken up during the American Civil War.) The terrorism that is seen here as being uniquely evil is the terrorism that assumes a power that is supposed to belong to states alone. I am not at all saying that the people who blew up the World Trade Center buildings were anarchists. No, they were perhaps indeed Islamic totalitarians who wished to establish something like an Islamic International (this applies to Al-Qaeda; whereas the Egyptian Hamas organization aspires to Islamic nation-statehood). But their mode of action threatens the very idea of the state. So that is my first answer.

But answer two is that there was a hidden glee in the official outrage on the part at least of some, though certainly not of others. The attack seemed to give an opportunity to do things that some factions in the West have wanted for a long time. What are these things? An assault on so-called rogue states; a continuous war against "terrorists" everywhere; a policing of world markets to ensure that free-market exchange processes are not exploited by the enemies of capitalism. But, above all, the attack provided an opportunity to reinscribe state sovereignty.

The modern secular state rests on no substantive values. It lacks full legitimacy even of the sort that Saint Paul ascribed to the "powers that be," because it exists mainly to uphold the market system, which is an ordering of a substantively anarchic (and therefore not divinely appointed in Saint Paul's sense) competition between wills to power—the idol of "liberty," which we are supposed to worship. This liberty is dubious, since it is impossible to choose at all unless one is swayed one way or...