Public rituals of remembrance, especially after collective acts of injury and loss, are a time-honored way for the body politic to heal. They help attach a value to suffering, offer reassurances against a recurrence. They can also demarcate an acceptable end to suffering and grieving.

However, public remembrance is rarely a neutral act. Memory in general is selective; political memory more so. From time primordial, our brains have been wired to give priority to visual cues and patterns of danger: the dark shadow that resembles a predator can still startle the modern human. Trauma etches particularly powerful memories that crowd out less dramatic ones. A memory of vulnerability rendered permanent by government officials and media institutions can determine whom we accept as friends and treat as enemies. Through such memories, nation-states beset by globalization are now fortified, sovereignty is revitalized, and national security comes to dominate other public concerns.

Memory is also a slave to first impressions, a lesson I learned after the initial trauma of 9/11. When the first plane struck the World Trade Center, I was rushing out the door for my weekly commute to Providence, Rhode Island. My home phone rang: a reporter from the local news station was asking if I would comment about reports of a Cessna aircraft crashing into one of the towers. Uncharacteristically, unable to find a context in which to respond, I had nothing to say. Over the next two hours, I hopped from station to station on my car radio, from the somber reports of public radio to the wild speculations of the shock-jocks, like Howard Stern. I heard that it was not a single small plane but several large jets that had been hijacked (the numbers varied); National Guard F-16s had shot down one of them and were in hot pursuit of two others heading for the White House and the US Capitol. Irrationally, I scanned the sky above the highway for aircraft. No story seemed too crazy to put on the air.

In this media-spasm of fear and panic, I tried to glean some hard facts from the rumors. Patterns of recognition, shaped by earlier research, helped me put the pieces together. Having written on international terrorism in the past, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, I was familiar with Al-Qaeda’s strategies and capabilities. I had read the court transcripts of the New York–based trial of the alleged conspirators behind the embassy strikes and been struck by the figures who were fingered by Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, Bin Laden’s former paymaster turned informant, as central to the organization:

Q.  During the time that you were in Khartoum and al Qaeda, did you become familiar with a person by the name of Abu Muaz el Masry?

A.  Yes.

Q.  Can you tell us, is Abu Muaz el Masry a member of al Qaeda?

A.  Yes.

Q.  Can you tell us what his specialty is?

A.  He is member also with jihad group and he’s very good with dreamer.

Q.  Can you explain what it is that Abu Muaz el Masry did with dreams?

A.  If any one of the al Qaeda membership, he got dream after the fajr prayer—

Q.  The fajr prayer, F-A-J-R?

A.  Yes.

Q.  When is that prayer?

A.  Before the sunrise.

Q.  Okay. Continue.

A.  If anyone got dream and he believes that dream could become true, he go and he tell him, Abu Muaz, he got great experience to tell the people what the dream going to be and he’s a scholar for that.

Q. That’s Abu Muaz. You mentioned a person by the name of Abu Anas al Liby. Did he ever have any special expertise?

A.  Could you repeat the question?

Q.  Abu Anas al Liby, did you [sic] have any specialty within al Qaeda?

A.  Yes.

Q.  What was that?

A.  He’s—he run our computers. He’s a computer engineer.

Q.  Are you familiar with the person by the name of Mohamed Shabana?

A.  Yes.

Q.  Is Mohamed Shabana part of al Qaeda?

A.  Yes.

Q.  Did he have a specialty within al Qaeda?

A.  He’s very good with the report, media report, and he got great experience with analysis about ballistics.

Q.  You said he’s very good with report. What kind of reports?

A.  Media reports and he got good analysis about anything you use.²

A dream interpreter, a computer programmer, and a media expert: this clearly was not your father’s terrorist organization. Even before 9/11, Al-Qaeda, although it might translate as the “base,” resembled a global network warped by an apocalyptic vision.

By the time I arrived at the Watson Institute for International Studies, I was fairly certain that Al-Qaeda—which had appeared on my radar screen again after the diabolical bomb-in-camera assassination of Massoud (“the Lion”), leader of the Northern Alliance and bane of the Taliban—had orchestrated the attack. I announced my suspicions to my colleagues, who were all gathered in front of the Institute’s single television set. This announcement was met by a collective look of incredulity mixed with reprobation. What was wrong with me? How could I be so callous, seeking to explain these tragic events? Inexcusable become one and the same as inexplicable.

This would be the first in a series of similar reactions, in which the 9/11 narrative would be framed through images and affect rather than words and analysis. I surmised that the seventeen-minute gap between the first and second strikes on the World Trade Center was well planned, producing a shared psychic experience through televisual simultaneity. Prolonged by the endlessly looping video of the strike and the collapse of the towers, the event lost any detached point of observation: neural and televisual networks converged, immersing viewers in a tragic cycle of destruction and loss. The first impression became the lasting memory: this was an exceptionable injury inflicted upon an exceptionalist nation that warranted exceptional reprisals.

Ten years on, the full consequences of 9/11, from that initial moment of collective visual trauma to its current memorialization, have yet to fully comprehended. I fear it will take, as Freud posited and in spite of our best efforts in the social sciences, a second, possibly worse public trauma for the event to progress from optical impression to cognitive understanding.

While I was writing these reflections, the East Coast of North America shook, from Mineral, Virginia, to my family’s cabin in northern Ontario. Close to the epicenter of the 5.8 earthquake, working at the National Archives in Washington, DC, my sister and her colleagues ran from their offices, searching the skies for the next plane to strike. A thousand miles away in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, my wife emerged from the lake as the dock briefly wobbled and wondered out loud if water in her ear had caused the sudden unsteadiness. Off the grid, beyond the reach of CNN, the Weather Channel, and Al-Qaeda, we briefly forgot a world beset by natural and unnatural disasters. But we then remembered that when the ground shakes, it’s sometimes not just in our heads.

James Der Derian is Watson Institute Professor (Research) of International Studies at Brown University and currently Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He has produced three documentaries with Udris Film, VY2K, After 9/11, and Human Terrain, and his most recent books are Critical Practices in International Theory (Routledge 2009) and Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Routledge 2009).

This emerging norm, it can be argued, was an expression of global civil society, the outcome of a global political debate on intervention that included humanitarian and human rights NGOs; individuals such as Bernard Kouchner, who co-founded Médecins sans Frontières; various think tanks and commissions, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the International Crisis Group; as well as, of course, the traditional and new media.⁵ In particular, the genocides in Rwanda (1994) and Srebrenica (1995) had shocked the “conscience of the world,” in the words of then–UN secretary-general Kofi Annan,⁶ and had led to a new determination among policymakers and policy shapers that these tragic episodes should never be allowed to be repeated.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, shook the kaleidoscope of global political debate. September 11 marked the beginning of the “War on Terror” and muscular interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as indirect, or less overt, interventions in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The rhetoric of the War on Terror has been used to justify Israeli attacks on Palestinians, the Russian intervention in Chechnya, and other interventions. And in many countries, including the United States, the War on Terror has been associated with a range of measures increasing surveillance and restricting human rights. In particular, President Bush acquired far-reaching powers that allowed him to detain suspects for indefinite periods and establish the notorious prison at Guantanamo.

The consequence was a polarization of opinion between those who supported the War on Terror and those who were against it. This debate divided the human rights and humanitarian community and squeezed the space for those who favored the norm of humanitarian intervention. Nevertheless, this was also a period when responsibility to protect and associated concepts, such as human security, peacebuilding, and stabilization, were increasingly adopted by international institutions and governments, even in the United States, and the momentum of the ideas of the 1990s was carried forward.

The Kaleidoscope of Global Public Debate

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan called into question the viability of humanitarian intervention. Even in the case of Libya an intervention that was supposed to protect civilians ended up as a war on the side of the rebels. With the scattering of the consensus around humanitarian intervention, it is possible to identify three broad positions that run through the debates about military intervention in the twenty-first century.

The first position is that of the warriors—the unqualified supporters of military intervention. They include the neocons and the liberal internationalists and those involved in the Save Darfur campaign. The warriors see the use of force as a neutral instrument, a black box, that can bring about the desired results, and they tend to disregard the consequences of the use of military force.

The second position is that of the anti-interventionists. They include pacifists, especially in religious communities, who fear that any use of military force will cause suffering, which is morally unacceptable, and therefore oppose war on principle. This encompasses those who define themselves as left wing, especially those young people who participate in the World Social Forum. They are skeptical that governments can have humanitarian motives and see the rhetoric of responsibility to protect or human security as a cover for great power, especially an American neocolonial agenda. A similar view is held by Islamists, who see the main interventions as being directed against Muslims and argue that the War on Terror is a civilizational clash between the West and Islam in which concepts like RTP and human security have been co-opted. Neither of these last two groups is pacifist, and some of their adherents support the use of force to resist occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Palestine.The anti-interventionists also include realists who argue that states should pursue their national interests and that the suffering of non-nationals is no concern.

Those who support this position often favor negotiations and tend to be more concerned about the wrongs inflicted by the West than about tyrannical behavior by non-Western leaders like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi. They are also highly critical of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The left argues that the court is one-sided, focusing on crimes against humanity rather than war crimes and on conflicts in poor countries rather than the crimes of Western warmongers. Islamists and cultural relativists argue that criminals should be judged in their local contexts according to local conceptions of justice and that the court imposes a Western conception of justice. Pacifists and realists argue that in cases like Bashir in Sudan or Qaddafi in Libya, indictment provides a disincentive to negotiate peace since peace would mean arrest and capture. They also argue that the cases move very slowly, giving a platform to people who espouse extremist ideas.

The third position, that of the humanitarians, has been pulled apart by this debate. Some, the liberal interventionists, have joined the warrior camp. Others, such as David Rieff, have become disillusioned and cynical about humanitarian intervention and have joined the anti-interventionist camp. Those who remain, largely in the human rights movement, argue that humanitarian intervention is different from war and has to be conducted appropriately. None of the interventions that have been subject to public debate, except perhaps the eventual UN/African Union mission in Darfur, could be described as humanitarian. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of military force made things worse. In the case of Libya, it is still far from clear whether an overthrow of Qaddafi will be an end to conflict in that country or the prelude to a long war.

The humanitarians link humanitarian norms to the extension of international law and international justice and argue that states do have an interest in a law-governed world. In response to criticisms of the ICC, they suggest that there should be more emphasis on crimes committed by Western governments, especially the consequences of the use of air power; that international justice supplements local justice and upholds universal norms in situations where local justice can often be subverted by local power brokers;⁷ and that peace negotiations in the context of contemporary forms of violence can never bring sustainable peace unless accompanied by justice mechanisms.

Civil society groups within conflict zones, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq or Darfur, tend to be close to the humanitarian position. It is often civil society that calls for interventions to protect them from violence, but at the same time, they are often the victims of the excessive use of force. Yet those who take part in interventions tend to neglect civil society, focusing on dealing with those responsible for violence or remaining within the protective walls of international compounds. If the humanitarian camp is to regain its influential role, greater involvement of local civil society in international debates is critically important.

Responsibility to Protect and Other Stories

While Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Darfur, dominated the global public debate on intervention during the first decade of the twenty-first century, there were many other interventions in crisis situations throughout the world. Indeed, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute database of multilateral peace operations includes nearly six hundred such missions between 2000 and 2009.⁸ At the time of this writing, some hundred thousand troops are engaged in UN operations worldwide. Other organizations undertaking missions include the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, and the Organization of American States, to name a few.

Both within international institutions and among governments, there has been a growing effort to mainstream concepts like RTP, stabilization, or human security and to develop, or at least to conceptualize, appropriate capabilities, and RTP was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005. Since his appointment as secretary-general in January 2007, Ban Ki-moon has said that he will “spare no effort to operationalize the responsibility to protect.”⁹ He has appointed special advisors on genocide prevention and responsibility to protect and established a $2 million Responsibility to Protect Fund supported by Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In January 2009 he produced a report for debate at the UN General Assembly that set out strategies for implementing RTP, and on September 14, 2009, the General Assembly authorized the secretary-general to seek further financial and institutional resources for implementing and mainstreaming RTP within the United Nations.

It is now standard for Security Council resolutions to refer to the protection of civilians, although the Libya resolution is the first to name the protection of civilians as the main goal, and almost all current UN peacekeepers are now mandated to protect civilians. However, an independent report on the protection of civilians in UN operations finds that there is still insufficient clarity of mandates; a lack of planning, training, and preparation; and a lack of appropriate structures, resources, and tools, despite the perseverance of “many dedicated and creative individuals.”¹⁰

In the European Union, the new Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP—formerly the European Security and Defense Policy), initially developed following the Anglo-French summit in Saint-Malo during the Kosovo war, has been designed for the so-called Petersberg tasks, that is to say, multilateral interventions in crisis situations, rather than the defense of borders. The CSDP incorporates the concept of human security, understood as upholding human rights, and the EU has been developing combined military/civilian capabilities. Indeed, it is the first institution to have a combined military/civilian planning cell, and it has pioneered civilian crisis management, largely consisting of missions aimed at restoring or establishing a rule of law and system of justice. It has undertaken some twenty-five missions, including EU NAVFOR (European Union Naval Force) Somalia–Operation ATALANTA, the current military operation to counter piracy in Somalia, and the missions to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Chad, which were considered successful in using a robust approach to preventing massacres and maintaining order, if too short.¹¹

And in Africa, the African Union, which succeeded the Organization of African Unity, has institutionalized a right of humanitarian intervention in “grave circumstances, namely, war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity” in Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act and established a Peace and Security Council and an African Standby Force. This represents a considerable change from the earlier insistence on non-interference. A number of African countries, including Botswana, Ghana, Lesotho, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Tanzania, have formally endorsed the responsibility to protect.

A particularly significant development in the twenty-first century has been the establishment of the International Criminal Court. Indeed, both by enthusiasts and critics, the ICC is increasingly bracketed together with the responsibility to protect. The Rome Statute, the legal basis for the court, was adopted by 120 states on July 17, 1998, and entered into force on July 1, 2002. As of September 2011, some 117 states have signed and ratified the ICC. Those who have neither signed nor ratified include the United States, China, and India (the United States “unsigned” the treaty). The establishment of the ICC was part of the general pressure for humanitarian norms following the war in Bosnia and the Rwandan genocide.¹²

The new emphasis on crimes against humanity has generated a whole new machinery of transitional justice.¹³ So far, three state parties have referred situations in their territories to the ICC—Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic—and in addition, the Security Council has referred the situations in Darfur and Libya to the court, and the prosecutor has opened an investigation into Kenya. Some twenty-three people have been indicted. In addition to the ICC, the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals established in the 1990s have continued their work. The highly public arrests of Vojislav Šešelj, the leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Radovan Karadžić, the former leader of the Serb Republic, and Ratko Mladić, the general responsible for the Srebrenica massacre, represent further achievements in the institutionalization of humanitarian norms.

Alongside these multilateral initiatives, there have been efforts within many countries to reconceptualize security as something broader than national defense. There has been much discussion about new or nontraditional threats or risks and the appropriate capabilities needed to complement military force; even countries like Russia and China refer to nontraditional threats. And the United States too has begun to move away from classic defense thinking. Members of the Bush administration argued when they first came to power that it was not the job of the military to undertake constabulary duties or nation building.¹⁴ However, the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has led to profound rethinking in the Pentagon. General David Petraeus (now the director of the CIA) produced a new counterinsurgency manual in 2006 that emphasized the protection of civilians, the need for a rule of law, and the integration of military and civilian capabilities.¹⁵ Secretary of defense Robert Gates has been “rebalancing” the defense budget so as to give more space to these new roles. And the State Department under Hillary Clinton has introduced a Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (titled Leading through Civilian Power) to complement the Quadrennial Defense Review and plan civilian capabilities for crisis management.¹⁶

However, for most countries these tasks are often seen as secondary to the core task of defending nations from attack by a foreign enemy. It is argued that the “high end” of defense spending—advanced equipment and war-fighting capabilities—can be applied at the “low end” but not the other way round. The financial crisis has meant a closing in on core tasks, thereby weakening an already fragile capability for the new crisis tasks. Even those directly engaged in international operations, especially the military, recognize the need for change, but few political leaders are ready to embrace new approaches. After Afghanistan and Iraq and the weakening of the humanitarian consensus, there is an increased reluctance to commit resources to difficult and risky missions. For example, it is not clear whether it was political reluctance to commit ground troops or lack of capacity that explains the reliance on airstrikes in the Libya case.

The terms “responsibility to protect” and “human security” have entered the political lexicon. Of course, it is true they are used to justify interventions undertaken for quite different purposes. Thus the Sri Lankan government used the language of RTP to justify its final bloody defeat of the Tamil Tigers. Similarly, the Russian government used both RTP and human security to justify its intervention in Georgia and its breakaway republic of Ossetia, couched in terms of the “allegedly ongoing genocide” of Ossetians as well as the protection of Russian citizens (who were actually Ossetians who had been given Russian passports). Although the war was started by Georgia with an artillery attack on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, in the early morning of August 8, 2008, the Russian response went well beyond the protection of Ossetians or those who had been given Russian passports, involving “massive and extended military action” reaching deep into Georgian territory, as well as large-scale human rights violations.¹⁷

This is not necessarily an argument against using the terms. The use of the language offers a standard by which such interventions can be judged. In other words, rather than abandoning these concepts because they have been misused, it is important to claim back their meaning and apply them as criticisms of such actions.

Conclusion

The decade ended with the political death of Osama Bin Laden, the nonviolent demonstrations that spread throughout the Middle East in the spring of 2011, and the physical death of Bin Laden in the American raid on a house in Pakistan on May 2, 2011.

Alongside the global debate about humanitarian intervention, there has been a debate in the Arab world about resistance to occupation: when is it right to use force to resist human rights violations by a state or by foreign forces? For many young people, Bin Laden and the jihadist movement have discredited Islam. The extraordinary commitment to nonviolence in the protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere is proof of the outcome of that debate.

Despite the visibility of violent conflicts, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, the number of what the Human Security Report calls high-intensity conflicts (more than a thousand deaths in battle per year) has declined dramatically over the last two decades, by some 78 percent between 1988 and 2008.¹⁸ The Human Security Report attributes this decline largely to the spread of global norms against war and interventions and to the greater activism of the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. Nevertheless, there has been an increase in the overall number of conflicts in the years since 2000, and the decline of battle deaths may be because violence is increasingly directed against civilians and statistics on civilian casualties are notoriously poor. In particular, the growing privatization of violence has meant that conflicts may be more low level but also more pervasive and intractable.

If the norm of nonviolence is to be nurtured and protected, especially in the turbulent period ahead in the context of economic crisis and climate change, there needs to be a serious debate about the means required to prevent violence and protect people. Perhaps the end of the decade of the War on Terror will open up space for the revival of the humanitarian idea.

Mary Kaldor is professor of global governance and director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit at the London School of Economics and author of many books, including The Ultimate Weapon Is No Weapon: Human Security and the Changing Rules of War and Peace, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, and Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. A founding member of European Nuclear Disarmament and of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, she is also convener of the Human Security Study Group, which reported to Javier Solana, and now Cathy Ashton.

A lot was of course predictable in the aftermath. It was clear that the US state would appoint itself the “global executioner,” as we suggested then, although less clear how this would work through. It was clear that a pro-war racism against Muslims would blossom in North America and Europe, although it was perhaps unpredictable, even in the wake of then-president George W. Bush’s announcement in the days after 9/11 of a new “crusade,” quite how Christianist the military response would actually be. Equally predictable was the ongoing struggle over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, even if the level of vitriol—culminating in Koran burnings in the United States—surely was not.

Stunning in its extent, rapidity, and comprehensiveness, however, was the collapse of US political and economic power around the world. At the turn of the twenty-first century, neoliberal capitalism looked to many like the jubilant “end of history,” and the Washington Consensus appeared to be a well-stitched global pact among national elites and ruling regimes on all continents. Globalization was widely equated with US economic, moral, and cultural power around the world. Ten years later, with the widespread revolts and revolutions of the Arab Spring—triggered in Tunisia, exploding in Egypt, and thereafter spreading across the region, from Bahrain to Yemen and from Syria to Libya—US global influence arguably now stands at its weakest point since the Vietnam War, if not before.

In 2001, in the wake of the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks, leaders in two European nations conceded that “we are all Americans” now.¹ A decade later, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton seemed especially bewildered when trying to explain how, apparently out of the blue, so many previous allies within the Washington Consensus had been toppled. Washington had even cautiously embraced Libya’s Qaddafi—and he, Washington—as so much history was being quickly erased. Washington was particularly nonplussed by the downfall of Egypt’s Mubarak, who had been the linchpin of US strategy in the Middle East and a shock absorber between US patronage of Israel and Arab rulers’ tacit abandonment of the Palestinians.

In retrospect, what happened is hardly a mystery. The United States quite simply lost the “endgame of globalization”—an endgame they initiated, an endgame whose rules they largely set, and an endgame they refereed—and they lost it in dramatic fashion. It took more than nine years to find the perpetrator of 9/11, Osama Bin Laden—and then, in a country supposedly allied with the United States—and in the meantime, Afghanistan was invaded and ravaged, and the decade-long American war there now stands as the longest in US history, outstretching even the 1980s Soviet conflict in that war-torn land. This was not a winning strategy militarily, nor did it capture the hearts and minds of the people of the region.

The Iraq War is now more than eight years old, and there is less clarity than ever about why that war even began or, for that matter, why the early capture and killing of Saddam Hussein did not end it. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; it too was an erstwhile ally of the United States, and despite the hype, had no weapons of mass destruction. Yet the tally of civilian casualties alone ranges from a low of a hundred thousand to a high of more than a million; the British medical journal The Lancet published an estimate suggesting some six hundred thousand “excess deaths”in the war’s first three years.²

But the implosion of US power was more than simply a matter of ill-begotten wars and imperial overreach. If during the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, a number of social scientists ventured an end to the American century, the dramatic economic expansion of the 1990s and into the first years of the new century dissolved such language, and few would have gainsaid the economic dominance of the United States in that period. The global economic crisis that ensued after 2007 changed all that, as the so-called Great Recession was indisputably triggered in the belly of the beast, namely, by the subprime housing crisis that sat at the nexus of urban construction and global finance, consumption and indebtedness. From the United States, the crisis spread globally, deeply threatening most parts of the Euro economy, from Greece to Spain to Ireland.

What some had glimpsed earlier, in contrast to hegemonic US optimism, suddenly became a cliché, that is, the economic rise of China, and along with it, India, Brazil, and Turkey, among others. Having overtaken a lethargic Japanese economy to become the second largest in the world, China is, according to recent estimates, poised to exceed the GDP of the United States in or around 2016. And yet these economies too are increasingly seen as vulnerable to the continuing global financial crisis that they have so far either avoided or only experienced mildly.

It may not be too much nor too early to suggest that what we have come to call neoliberalism is now “dominant but dead.”³ It is dead insofar as the momentum of change that broadly lay with the political right since the 1970s is now exhausted. The resort to military power on a global scale and intensified securitization against domestic populations in places where that had not previously been the norm suggest a certain desperation. Contributing to this exhaustion were not just military folly, imperial excess, and economic collapse: the anti-globalization movement of a decade ago may have come and gone, but it left a lasting sense that there is—there must be—an alternative. Several prominent theorists, practitioners, and apologists of neoliberalism have jumped ship or recanted, among them economists Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stieglitz, as well as the author of “the end of history,” Francis Fukuyama, and the governments of Latin America never allied themselves en masse with the neoliberal project, in some cases, most notably in Bolivia, openly opposing it. In most of the world, neoliberalism now represents an infill more than an expansionary project, although it has to be conceded that China and India surely represent absolutely vital exceptions.

And yet, at the same time, neoliberalism remains dominant. If there is now a clear sense that the future is suddenly again open, there is very little sense to date of what the alternative or alternatives to neoliberalism might look like. But that is precisely the importance not just of the revolutions in North Africa and southwest Asia but of the widespread anti-austerity revolts across Europe, the sweeping but hardly reported strike waves and civil protests in China, and the peasant and indigenous land seizures in much of central India. The future may not be clear, but the past is clearly implausible.

What, therefore, does this mean for the post-9/11 United States? While the geography of the US implosion has been highly uneven in its global effects, its history has been, to some degree, cyclical. I would argue that the implosion of US power in the last decade represents the latest of three historical moments in a larger American pursuit of its global ambitions. These three moments exhibit continuities but also discontinuities. The discontinuities arise from the various mixes of external and internal challenges to US global ambition, whereas, more surprisingly, the greatest continuity may come from within the project of a global American empire itself. The following risks oversimplification (greater detail can be found in my book American Empire⁴), but I think its broad contours have considerable validity.

The first moment promising the fruition of US global ambition came following World War I when Woodrow Wilson had essentially taken the reins of global control at the Paris Peace Conference, eyeing a League of Nations as the most viable means of averting future violent interruptions to global trade and commerce. The challenge came externally from anti-colonial movements around the world and internally from both socialist and civil rights movements, who had a very different vision of the American future.

The second moment came following World War II when Roosevelt’s United Nations, largely designed inside the US State Department, also faced an external challenge, less from anti-colonial movements, which the United States now purported to support, than from a Soviet-centered bloc and (less openly recognized) from rebuilding European powers threatened by US economic supremacy. Roosevelt and especially Truman also faced internal opposition, again from militant labor unions and workers, who now organized in pursuit of a quid pro quo for their wartime sacrifices, and too from civil rights movements fighting entrenched racism at home.

Yet both moments were also sabotaged by challenges from the far right within the United States itself. During the first moment, it was arch-nationalist and patrician Henry Cabot Lodge who galvanized the far-right rejection of US ratification of the League of Nations. And during the second moment, whatever other forces were in play (and, of course, they were), it was the far right under Joseph McCarthy who so intensified the Cold War as to preclude on the grounds of patriotism any possibility of US trade and commerce with major parts of the Eurasian land mass.

A parallel history is playing out today as we watch the denouement of the third moment of US imperial ambition. This time, the internal opposition to a US-led globalization has been far weaker, although it would be a mistake to underestimate the ideological power of the anti-globalization movement (especially after the 1999 protests in Seattle), a movement which itself was global. The external opposition since the apparent victory of the Washington Consensus is most evident in Arab states, but as the global antiwar movement demonstrated, it has galvanized a broader sense of resentment against the United States. That this resentment has been in large part self-inflicted by the extreme right wing with the wars following 9/11 is precisely the point. The rise of the Tea Party should also be understood in exactly this context. And that President Obama has not significantly reversed this predicament is again precisely the point. Amidst the revolutions of the Arab Spring, in dramatic contrast to the 1989 implosion of official communism in the Eastern Bloc, there was no outbreak of pro-American embrace but rather, by all accounts, a broad popular resentment at violent US incursion into their world and, at the same time, at US support for the dictators who oppressed them. In the streets of Europe people are fighting against, not for, the economic world that the United States pioneered.

The future is more radically open than it seemed on the eve of 9/11, not so much because of 9/11, but because of the response to it. That the United States maintains such unprecedented military dominance even amid global economic crisis is a potentially dangerous situation. The kind of protectionism that might have marked prior such moments is barely plausible today, whereas a dramatic securitization of civil society, even on top of what has already occurred, seems almost guaranteed. Heightened military conflict also seems more likely, if hardly predictable in detail. Yet between the economic and the military, of course, lies the political, and more than in the last several decades, the future is likely to be shaped by the kinds of strategies organized as alternatives to the sources and causes of crises.

Neil Smith is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

But how much easier it would be to make this claim more widely acceptable if it were made with humility, with better knowledge that other civilizations have given the West equally valuable ideas, and accompanied by an acknowledgment that the West has given us some horrible ideas—ethnic cleansing; general epistemic superiority; ethno-nationalism; large, oppressive, totalizing institutions, such as the state and church. The vigorous opposition to the idea of human rights in some parts of the world may be due less to the unacceptability of its content and more to its association with power and privilege. Bizarre? Perhaps. Still, it is sobering to think how much more could be learned—by all—in a climate of humility and mutual respect.

I say this because accompanying the rapaciousness and greed that was unleashed by the West in Iraq, amidst all the bombings and massacres, was an unstated claim to superiority, an arrogance that facilitates wrongdoing and the violation of human rights. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, some of us had hoped that the United States would listen, in time, to the whispers of the oppressed, private murmurs that America may, more or less, have invited the cataclysmic event upon itself, “damnable yet understandable payback . . . reaping what empire had sown”¹—not only listen, but do some soul searching, identify the deeper causes of widespread resentment against America, seriously and responsibly rework its foreign policy.

The offensive against Al-Qaeda, the deployment of excessive force for a limited purpose, was justified, we thought—something that might help track Osama down. But surely wise people with sound moral sense would capture him, level charges of crimes against humanity in an international court, and help set new standards of retributive justice. And then a wider process of reconciliation would be initiated, one that would give everyone an opportunity to eventually shed at least some mutual prejudices and misgivings. The principal actors might then realize the futility of playing out the warped logic of alternating claims to superiority in a competitive struggle for standing. As messages of marginalized groups, hidden under the gruesome rubble of destruction, are finally decoded, greater mutual understanding would prevail. So some of us dreamt.

The trajectory followed by the principal actors could not have verged further from what we had hoped. Yes, some good things did happen. The truth about weapons of mass destruction is out; Bush left office with, if not a shoe, certainly egg on his face; Obama won; and Osama was finally nabbed. Alas, it does not come as a surprise to anyone that the wars meant to come to swift ends continue, the numbers of casualties mount, and innocents die routinely. American corporations are flush with funds even as the economy implodes, another recession may be round the corner, and unemployment in America and several European countries shows no sign of abating. And in Europe, the home of human rights and the welfare state, Angela Merkel and David Cameron threaten to withdraw multicultural policies even before they have been properly introduced.

I cannot hope to cover all the major issues that have emerged since 9/11, not even all those I discussed in my essay published by the SSRC a few months after the catastrophe. In this short piece, I restrict myself mostly to the condition of Muslims in Europe after 9/11 and then make some general remarks that are never voiced in our public and academic discourse. It helps that I am neither Christian nor Muslim, though I would like to think that I have embraced something of value from both. I have the advantage of being an outsider, which offers me the distance from which I might be able to say things that “insiders” may not even notice.

One of the most conspicuous outcomes of 9/11 is the relentless securitization of states and the tightening of immigration controls. Closer surveillance of a few suspects and stricter security checks at points of entry is not the issue. The truth is that all these policies smack of cultural racism, to use Tariq Modood’s term.² For instance, immigrants to Holland are given absurd citizenship tests, such as viewing a clip of homosexuals kissing or nudes on the beach, intended to gauge the levels of their social tolerance. In the state of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, parents are asked whether they are willing to allow swimming lessons for their daughters in order to determine their own fitness for citizenship. France appears to have gone one step further, passing an immigration bill that approves DNA testing and quizzing immigrants on whether or not they respect French values. As Jocelyne Cesari puts it, “These new measures circumvent the logic of immigration preceding integration by requiring that immigrants show signs of integration before even entering the European Union.”³

Restrictions extend beyond new entrants to existing citizens. Thus, in Britain, where a third of all primary-school children are educated by religious communities, applications for state funding made by schools run by Muslims are repeatedly turned down. I believe there are only three to five Muslim schools there currently, compared to two thousand run by Roman Catholics and forty-seven hundred by the Church of England.⁴ Similar problems persist in other European countries.⁵ The problems with these restrictions are manifest in the failure of many western European states to deal with the issue of headscarves (France) and demands by Muslims to build mosques and thereby properly practice their own faith (Germany, Italy) or to have proper burial grounds of their own (Denmark, Austria). In recent times, as Islamophobia has gripped the imagination of several Western societies (exemplified by the cartoon controversy in Denmark), it has become very likely that their Muslim citizens will continue to face disadvantages merely on account of their religious community.⁶

The fact is that migration from former colonies and an intensified globalization have thrown pre-Christian faiths, Christianity, and Islam together in public spaces,⁷ the cumulative result of which is unprecedented religious diversity, the weakening of the public monopoly of single religions, and the generation of mutual suspicion, distrust, hostility, and conflict. European states are largely clueless as to how to deal with such issues or how to handle the backlash of radical right-wing-leaning citizens and politicians. This has been dramatically highlighted by the headscarf issue in France, the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, the referendum against minarets in Switzerland, and the more recent, horrific murders by Anders Behring Breivik.

Why is this so? Because, despite substantial secularization in several European states, the formal or informal establishment of the dominant religion has done little to bolster intercommunity relations or reduce religious discrimination. As it turns out, the widespread belief in a secular European public sphere is a myth. Under the pressure of the demand for equal citizenship rights for new Muslim, Sikh, and other citizens, the religious bias of European states becomes increasingly visible. European states continue to privilege Christianity in one form or another. They publicly fund religious schools, maintain real estates of churches and clerical salaries, facilitate the control by churches of cemeteries, and train clergy. In short, there has been no impartiality within the domain of religion, and despite formal equality, this continues to have a far-reaching impact on the rest of society.⁸

This, in turn, is because issues of radical individual freedom and citizenship equality only arose in European societies after religious homogenization had been established. The birth of confessional states was accompanied by the massive expulsion of subject communities whose faith differed from the religion of the ruler. Such states gradually found some place for toleration in their moral space, but as is well known, it was a tolerance consistent with deep inequalities and with humiliating, marginalized, and virtually invisible existences. For instance, Catholic churches in predominantly Protestant countries could not remain on high streets where the church of the majority stood; they were tucked away in bylanes. Moreover, these church buildings could not look like churches (they had to be ordinary residence halls, for instance).

The liberal-democratization and consequent secularization of many European states has helped citizens with non-Christian faiths to acquire most formal rights. But such a scheme of rights neither embodies a regime of interreligious equality nor effectively prevents religion-based discrimination and exclusion. Indeed, it serves to mask majoritarian, ethno-religious biases—evident in the many different kinds of difficulties faced by Muslims today. September 11 brought this out into the open. European societies faced a choice: introduce a new regime of equality in the religious domain, installing radically novel standards of impartiality with respect to all religions or continue with, and even reinforce, existing biased institutional arrangements. It appears they have chosen to go with the latter, and 9/11 has provided them the justification to do so.

When I first heard the term “Islamophobia” used in the European context, I dismissed it as hyperbolic. I am not so sure now. I can understand a xenophobic response from the right wing, but why this prejudice and fear of Muslims among people who are sane, reasonable, and rights sensitive? Why does it rankle so easily? Why are left-leaning liberals so easily alarmed by Muslims? Here I enter a territory where even angels fear to tread! I put my neck on the block and tentatively say the unsayable, ready to take back every word scribbled here, if corrected.

I think it was David Hume who said that animosities are transmitted from one generation to another and that descendants retain a sense of hostility to old enemies long after the original motive for enmity has disappeared. These kinds of judgments, the stuff of which old wives’ tales are made, seem old-fashioned and are in severe disuse in social science, but as I said, I am willing not only to stick my neck out but also to spit out bitter words stuck in my throat. The traditional enmity between Christians and Muslims survives in the collective memory of both and so too does the urge to compete and settle old scores—not everywhere, not in everyone (Muslims and Christians in the East are certainly not part of this), but with sufficient strength to adversely affect us all.

This is a terrible notion—ahistorical, essentializing, and all that. I hope we can work out a version that is less troublesome and more explanatory. But till then, allow me to continue my train of thought. I remember Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s lament in an article he wrote toward the end of his life—he died a year before 9/11, I believe—that few in the West realize how their perpetual reservations about Muslims and the generally negative perception of Islam follow a pattern set during the Crusades and for more than a millennia of animosity. A wise, civilized man, he scrupulously avoided saying that the animus was mutual. Or perhaps he had reason not to. Because for long periods in the twentieth century, Muslim elites cozied up to the West, while Europe and America have returned that favor rarely and only when required by their interests.

The West has been dealing with Islam since the seventh century. The two have shared borders with each other, competed with and fought one another, been each other’s subjects, tried to convert one another—sometimes successfully—traded with one another, and much else. When the West was less powerful than Muslims, it feared, sometimes even hated them. The Prophet was frequently depicted as a fiend with horns—alas, even Danish cartoons have their own historical legacy. In the past two imperialist centuries, however, the West has dominated virtually everyone, including Muslims, arrogantly dismissing their way of life as inferior. Arabs know and immensely resent this. Americans are today fielding a retaliatory sentiment in a conflict that did not originate with them. Before anti-Americanism came into vogue, there already existed a centuries-old negative, competitive relationship, with alternating, egotistical claims to superiority.

Two peoples who have ruled one another in the past continue to be locked in a struggle for power and domination, landing from time to time smack in the middle of a horrible syndrome. I use this term deliberately: In my use, “syndrome” points, at the very least, to the breakdown of basic trust and common understanding between two peoples. And it encompasses something even more dreadful—a diseased network of neurotic relations, so completely poisoned and accompanied by such a vertiginous assortment of negative emotions (envy, malice, jealousy, spite, hatred) that communities are bound to slide down the slope of still deeper hostility and frenzied mutual destruction.

Typically, when in the throes of the syndrome, animosity circulates freely, depositing layer upon layer of mutual grievance. Over time, chronic paranoia develops, intergroup relations are perverted, and the two groups begin to play antagonistic games, often fighting over nothing at all. Groups demand from one another what they cannot really get, conjure up imaginary grievances, insist precisely on just what hurts the other most—at times, obsessively desiring the very thing that the other wants, at others, the exact opposite, always with the sole purpose of negating the claims of the other. It is an abiding feature of a syndrome that, rightly or wrongly, both sides feel persistently humiliated and pushed around.

A syndrome is set in motion by a long chain of closely nested, mutually interlocking actions between small, impatient extremists belonging to both groups—but eventually, horrifically, it engulfs almost everyone. The primary responsibility for the syndrome usually rests with whichever group is currently dominant, but it can also be triggered by the weaker group.

Put the Tehran hostage issue, 9/11, the London and Madrid bombings—large, insane acts of criminality—and the comparatively smaller issues of headscarves and minarets against this historic backdrop and they appear in a starkly different light. I know some readers must be thinking now of one Mr. Huntington. Sorry, folks, but I am not talking of an inevitable clash of two essentially opposed civilizations. I merely refer to the possibility of long-term historically formed dispositions that some people learn and others get sucked into, collective propensities that won’t just go away on their own but must be intentionally dislodged or tamed. How I wish someone would try to break the syndrome! How about wholly disinterested Western help to the peoples of Libya and Syria, to assist them in throwing out dictators and setting democratic institutions in motion, and then a dignified exit, without profit in pocket, demonstrating that material or strategic interests were never the motive for intervention?

I can’t say how long the syndrome will last. To the outsider, it is clear that the many communities of Christians, Muslims, and secularists can scarcely afford to ignore each other. If they don’t learn to deal with one another constructively, the cataclysmic consequences will befall the whole of humanity.

Rajeev Bhargava is director of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. His books include the classic collection of essays Secularism and Its Critics (ed.) and The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy, both published by Oxford University Press.

With regard to the question of war or politics, the Bush government clearly chose the first, and the easiest, option by declaring a “War on Terror” that was, strictly speaking, either unwinnable, since the acts of terror had to have been already committed, or infinite, since anyone could be, or become, or be accused of being a terrorist. But the administration never asked itself what victory might mean; nor did it consider the costs, monetary or moral, of its reaction to 9/11.

The difficulty was evident in Bush’s repeated use of the passive construction. For example, on September 20, 2001, he declared, “War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. . . . This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.”² The passive victim of treachery would write the script for the restoration of its own healthy vigor. This warrior rhetoric sufficed for Bush to win reelection in 2004, but by 2008 his popularity had sunk so low that John McCain never once asked him to take part in his doomed campaign. The War on Terror—the easiest, because the least complicated, solution—was perhaps morally satisfying, but its political shelf life was short, however effective or ineffective its realization.

The victorious campaign of Barack Obama in 2008 seemed to represent the other pole, the political path, suggested by the German title. Like many others, I thought so and tried to show why and how it did so in many essays in Kommune and Esprit.[3.  I’ll not try to list those articles here; they are available on my website, http://www.dickhoward.com/. I have also regularly published op-eds in the daily paper Ouest-France. While the first of these, published December 28, 2006, carried the optimistic title “Une étoile nouvelle sur l’horizon américain” (A new star on the American horizon), the title of the most recent, published on August 15, 2011, worried about “Ce que le president a oublié” (What the president forgot)—namely, the creation of a coherent political narrative.] As Obama’s 2012 campaign begins to take form, I ask myself whether I was guilty of taking my wishes for reality, which I will address in a moment. But I want first to try to clarify the option not taken in the immediate wake of 9/11, namely, the need to make political sense out of that singular, terrible day—to take the difficult path of politics rather than the easy and anti-political option for war.³

To begin to define that political path, let me translate here the first paragraph of my 2001 essay:

Where were you on November 22, 1963? Even the young remember that date because the assassination of John F. Kennedy on that day began a new political age for a suddenly sobered America. The same question will be posed in a more painful manner for September 11, 2001. However, if the murder of John F. Kennedy was followed by a blind engagement in Vietnam that finally alienated civil society, that same society was also engaged in a “War against Poverty” that was a culmination of the battle for civil rights. Which will it be this time, when we hear of a “war” against a non-identified enemy and society seems to forget itself in a comprehensible patriotic spirit that risks either dissipating in the long term or exploding into a demand for an immediate and terrible revenge?

The civil rights movement to which I referred was political insofar as it created the context in which the existence of economic inequality became socially intolerable. This context was brought to the foreground by the assassination of Kennedy, and LBJ had the political judgment needed to understand the new possibilities before he succumbed to the “logic” of the domino theory that seemed to make war in Vietnam an overriding but unwinnable imperative. What could be the political equivalent to the civil rights movement in the wake of 9/11?

A provisional answer to the need to invent a new politics was suggested by the French title of my essay. It seemed 9/11 could be understood as a sort of wake-up call. Although Bush père had talked about a “New World Order” after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, he treated the military strength of the hegemonic American hyper-power as its ordering force.⁴ This encouraged an attitude among the citizenry that was almost autistic, in the sense that it reflected an inability to take into account the point of view, and the interests, of others. During the Clinton years there was some change, but the justification for the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo was still paradoxical; it combined an immediate empathy for the other whose life was threatened with defense of human rights as a political rather than a moral obligation. That is why there never was a “Clinton Doctrine,” nor could there have been one, despite Madeleine Albright’s efforts.

September 11, 2001, was a wake-up call; it said that the United States is part of the world and that the world is a complicated, messy place from which violence and hatred—and all those other “passions” that had preoccupied eighteenth-century philosophers—cannot be eliminated once and for all, as Bush fils put it, “at an hour of our choosing.” This was the “tragic” aspect of America’s reentry into the world. It is for precisely that reason that politics is necessary. The goal of political action is not to put an end to evil (and thus to history) once and for all; it is to learn to live critically in the world and with an ongoing history, which no single power can control. If the “world” came knocking at America’s door on 9/11, saying that even a hyper-power cannot ignore the vicissitudes that Machiavelli called fortuna, then Americans had to learn how to welcome that unexpected and often unwanted guest who can be neither ignored nor eliminated. That was the challenge, as I saw it, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Where do things stand today? Have Americans learned anything during the decade that followed the shock? Should the United States be congratulated for the election of Barack Obama, who promised a new politics built on the “audacity of hope,” expressed by the rallying chant of “yes we can”? That’s what the Nobel Committee seemed to think in awarding him its Peace Prize in 2009. Or was his election the expression of a climate created by Americans’ recognition that they are indeed part of the world and that they cannot stand simply on a war footing against it? That’s what Obama’s speech in Cairo in June 2009 seemed to promise.⁵ Does this recognition of the need to take into account the standpoints of others carry with it the seeds of a revivification of our domestic democracy? It is unfortunately necessary to answer in the negative and to fear that the same negative applies to the other questions as well.

American democracy today is divided by a conflict of legitimacies. Barack Obama was elected to a four-year term of office, which he took as a mandate to “change the way Washington works.”⁶ To realize this goal, he will need to lead a political process that depends on more than enthusiastically chanting crowds. The Republican opposition first contested the legitimacy of Obama’s mandate, and then, as the economy went from bad to worse despite the administration’s efforts, their right wing mobilized in the midterm elections to gain stunning victories (at all levels of government). This permitted the Republican opposition to claim that they had a mandate that trumped the legitimacy of the president, whom they are determined to dethrone in 2012. The result has been sharp conflict, most recently over the raising of the debt ceiling, and the promise of stalemate, which was the justification for Standard & Poors’ lowering of the US credit rating.⁷

Obama seems to have gotten the worse of this recent conflict. His way of negotiating aims at compromise that is “liberal” in that classic sense defined by the poet Robert Frost as someone who is so altruistic that he refuses to defend his own arguments. As a result, the president is losing the support of the left wing of his party and that of the youthful enthusiasts whose activism was essential to his victory. Although Mr. Obama seems to think that he still has time to reverse the tide, he faces a classic political dilemma most sharply depicted by the sociologist Max Weber nearly a century ago in “Politics as a Vocation”—the political realm is no place for saints.

The president and his staff seem never to tire of claiming that Obama is “the only adult in the room” of squabbling, stubborn, and self-interested politicians who populate that “Washington” that he wants to change. The opposition Republicans, of course, claim to be acting as men of conviction for whom compromise would amount to a betrayal of the principles that they share with their constituents. This is an example of what Weber called a “politics of conviction.” When Barack Obama proposes to compromise with the opposition, putting himself from the outset in a weak negotiating position, he illustrates what Weber defined as a “politics of responsibility.” The president’s expectation is that it will become evident that his politics of responsibility works for the good of the public as a whole, that is to say, in all its diversity, whereas the Republicans’ politics of conviction is based on private commitments to particular moral beliefs that are not necessarily shared by all citizens. In a pluralistic democracy, the claim to express universal ethical values has to take into account the fact that others too have values for which they also claim universal validity. In this sense, the political path proposed by Barack Obama can be said to build from the experience of 9/11 and the failure of the “war” against terrorism.

Unfortunately, if this is the political logic that underlies Barack Obama’s choices, he has forgotten the paradoxical conclusions of Weber’s political sociology. The politics of responsibility still has to answer two questions: Responsible to whom? Responsible for what? To answer these questions, the president would have to give up his quest for reasonable compromise; he would have to choose sides. Because he has not done that, his political proposals have been unfocused; they lack long-range narrative coherence, appearing to be simply improvisations of the moment.

This is an unexpected situation for those who placed their hopes in a presidential candidate whose first claims to a public role were articulated in his writing. Could it be that his identification of his own biography with the history of the United States limits his ability to recognize and to combat the divisions that—as Machiavelli said of Rome—have been the source of its continual growth and transformation? Could it be that, implicitly, Obama does not recognize that politics cannot overcome division and eliminate violence and injustice; it can only make possible the search—even the combat, but not a “war”—for peace and justice? If that is the case, then he too will not have heard the echoes of 9/11 that call for a renewal of the political.

Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University. His most recent books are The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the French and American Revolutions (Columbia University Press 2010) and Aux origines de la pensée politique américaine (Hachette Pluriel 2008). He does a weekly commentary on US politics for Radio Canada and a monthly column on New York cultural life for Esprit. His political commentaries can be found on his website, http://www.dickhoward.com/.

Despite repeated calls for invention of new vocabularies, my own sense is that we have yet to come to terms with the violence of the past and that we have allowed our scholarly terms to be defined in a manner that we are becoming trapped in, terms that are already given in the questions that we ask. After all, do we need to be reminded that the single-most important factor in the decline of the total number of wars since 1942 was the end of colonial wars? Or that in the 1990s the region in which the highest death toll occurred was sub-Saharan Africa, and that it was the indirect death through disease and malnutrition that contributed to the enormity of the violence? I use the collective first-person pronoun to include myself within this trap of not being quite able to define what the right questions should be.

Ten years ago, when I contributed a short reflection on September 11 to the SSRC’s forum, something of this disquiet I feel about the mode of theorizing was already present. I argued that in the political rhetoric that circulated right after September 11, with its talk of attacks on the values of civilization, the American nation was seen to embody universal values—hence the talk was not of many terrorisms with which several countries had lived for more than thirty years but of one grand terrorism, Islamic terrorism. If I am allowed to loop back to my words, I asked, “What could this mean except that while terrorist forms of warfare in other spaces in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East were against forms of particularism, the attack on America is seen as an attack on humanity itself?” Perhaps we should ask of ourselves now the permission to be released from the grip of this master trope of September 11 that organizes a whole discourse, both conservative and radical, in terms of terrorism as the gripping drama of our times. We might then ask, what other questions have been under discussion among different communities of scholars and how might debate be widened to take account of these discussions?

One point I might put forward as a candidate for discussion is how affect is invested in some terms that come to be the signifiers of the pressing problems of a particular decade but then are dropped as if their force has been exhausted by new discoveries. When these terms drop out of scholarly circulation, do they still have lives that are lived in other corners of the world or in the lives of individuals who continue to give them expression? Consider the history of the term “ethnic cleansing,” which came to signify and organize much discussion in the nineties as referring to the pathology of what was termed as ethno-nationalism. As is well known, the term emerged in the summer of 1992 during the tragic events of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the emergence of new nation-states that were making claims for international recognition. Although the composite term “ethnic cleansing” came to be used only then, the idea of “cleaning” a territory by killing the local inhabitants and making it safe for military occupation was known in colonial wars as well as expressed extensively in Latin America with reference to undesirable groups, such as prostitutes, enemy collaborators, and the vagrant poor.

Norman Naimark has made the point that ethnic cleansing happens in the shadow of war. He cites the examples of the Greek expulsion as a result of the Greco-Turkish war, the intensification of ethnic cleansing when NATO bombing started in Kosovo in March 1999, and Stalin’s brutal dealings with the Chechen-Ingush and Crimean Tartars during the Second World War.¹ A chilling aspect of ethnic cleansing is its totalistic character. As Naimark puts it:

The goal is to remove every member of the targeted nation; very few exceptions to ethnic cleansing are allowed. In premodern cases of assaults of one people on another, those attacked could give up, change sides, convert, pay tribute, or join the attackers. Ethnic cleansing, driven by the ideology of integral nationalism and the military and technological power of the modern state, rarely forgives, makes exceptions, or allows people to slip through the cracks.

Yet a concept that was said to be central to explaining major mass atrocities is now rarely encountered—except perhaps in international law discussions on the distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing. Are the kinds of mass atrocities that have occurred since September 11 not amenable to discussion under any of the earlier terms? Do subjectivities shift so quickly? Are issues of intentionality as providing the criteria for distinguishing between genocide and ethnic cleansing already resolved? What is at stake in the fact that ethnic cleansing is a perpetrator’s term while genocide is a term that privileges the experience of the victims? What kind of footing in the world do enunciations made on behalf of all sides in conflicts that draw on such concepts as human rights and human dignity have?

While one can understand why the media might have moved on to other stories, have we as scholars come to terms with why some concepts disappear from our vocabularies so quickly? I want to suggest that a long-term perspective on how we come to speak of violence—the appearance and disappearance of different terms—provides a repertoire of concepts to be mined for understanding how representation of violence in the public sphere was closely tied up with the West’s self-definition that in turn defined the twists and turns in the social sciences. Ethnic cleansing in the nineties was widely understood as the violence of the other just as terrorism now is understood as the violence that the other perpetrates. September 11 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan then become events that need to be placed in the long history of warfare that has generated the concepts of social science—concepts that cannot be divested of their political plenitude even as we recognize that the technologies of war have changed considerably.

Are there other discussions on war that are not quite within the discursive fields that dominate the post–September 11 scenario and the notion of Islamic terrorism? I find it salutary to think that other theoretical discussions are taking place that are outside this frame of reference. For instance, the prolonged civil war in Sri Lanka, in which both Sinhala soldiers and Tamil militants engaged in killing, has led to discussions on the relation between Buddhism and violence and whether there are strains of Buddhism, especially within the Mahayana school, that make room for the exercise of violence. Interestingly, the issues here are not those of justifying warfare but rather of dealing with the anxieties about bad karma generated by the acts of violence.

A sustained analysis of what enabled such developments as samurai Zen, or soldier Zen, to appear in Japan or how it is that Buddhism could find a home within kingdoms as diverse as the Indians, the Mongols, the Chinese, and the Thai deepens our understanding of violence and nonviolence precisely because it has the potential to change the angle of our vision.² Similar discussions from within other traditions, both religious and secular, would help to break the monopoly of concepts (biopolitics, state of exception, homo sacer) that are now routinely used to understand the world. This hope is not an expression of sheer nostalgia for non-Western concepts but a plea to cultivate some attentiveness to those discourses that are (or could be) part of the history of our disciplines. Scholarly discourse cannot simply mirror the ephemeral character of media stories—even when a particular kind of violence disappears, the institutions that were put in place for dealing with it continue to have lives of their own. The braiding of what is new and what is enduring might then define how we come to pose questions that are not simply corollaries of the common sense of our times.

Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology and professor of humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent books are Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary and Sociology and Anthropology of Economic Life: The Moral Embedding of Economic Action (ed., with R. K. Das).

Robinson Crusoe breaks a plate on his way out,
and hesitates over the pieces. The ship begins
to sink as he sweeps them up. Sets the table
and stands looking at history for the last time.

—Jack Gilbert, “The Revolution,” 1982

May Day. It is the feast of pagans and socialists and the namesake of distress. We are ten years into the age of 9/11. George W. Bush is gone and Barack Obama is again casting his voice into the air. No lilting refrain. No poetry. The president is most intent on gravity, although the teleprompter is oddly placed so he cannot look us in the eye. Here is a familiar story retold. Once upon a time, there was a bad man, an enemy to even his own people, like Benedict Arnold or Rasputin or John Wayne Gacy. He declared war on us and “so we went to war against Al-Qaeda to protect our citizens.” Such stories always promise a conclusion and now for the first time we reach it. “After nearly ten years of service, struggle, and sacrifice,” Obama intones, we have “conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden.” This “marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al-Qaeda.”¹

How did the president of the United States, especially this president, come to attribute such high significance to a single outlaw act of lethal violence against an individual seven thousand miles away? Obama is famous for his words and by lingering with them we may bring to light an important change that has occurred in the course of another decade of civic war in America. It is a change measured less by events or persons than by the investments in symbols and words that constitute the all-too-real and all-too-human prospects and constraints of national civic life.

Barack Obama himself is one of these capital symbols. The way a poster operates with color and form he signifies with words. This is how to some extent he avoided being treated as nothing more than color and form. Recall how easily and with what success his voice became the first material for a music video by will.i.am, viewed, actually adored, by tens of millions of people. “Yes We Can” is how most people know and remember the extraordinary speech candidate Obama delivered on learning the promising result of the first primary election.² Two poster words also appear in the video; they are hope and change.

In the dark tunnel of the Bush administration, the body of Americans yearning for change had been growing. Obama stood exalted against that New Hampshire night and declared to that burgeoning we that “we have been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.” What he meant is that they do not believe in you. But I do. Indeed, change and hope are for us, where we reaches now to embrace every American naysayer, the steady rails of our tradition. For “in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” Deny it or see it fail, perhaps. Nonetheless hope is still the truth of those who strive because it is the motor of copious achievement. Given to this thought about themselves the crowd is awakened.

For when we have faced down impossible odds, when we’ve been told we’re not ready, or that we shouldn’t try, or that we can’t, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.

At this a wave of auxiliary voices is growing. “Yes we can.” On the preacher’s tone the refrain is hammered in like spikes in the ties of an advancing railroad. “Yes we can.” It is as if our nature speaks. “Yes we can was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.” Then, “yes,” and now “we,” too, “can.” Since the advent of the Republic we have lived out this spirit.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights—yes we can—it was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness—yes we can—it was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier.

And then comes a culminating passion that bends Obama’s high professorial voice just down. It feels personal, specific to him. But by 2008 many, many Americans have known this passion with uncanny intimacy. It has been marshaled over and over again against our weakness, as if the apotheosis of that founding and its meaning for the world. For there was, too, “a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land.” This is where it all comes together, for, following Socrates or Jesus, yes we can is not the relish of sheer capacity. It is will turned to purpose. It is for us a “yes- we-can to justice and equality . . .” These added words pulse through the crowd. Another wave breaks and another, and “yes we can to opportunity and prosperity—yes we can heal this nation—yes we can repair this world—yes we can . . . ”

This is a spirit of deliverance. It offers the specific relief of seeing an open path, a way toward a wide diversity of lives to be lived and bettered. All those founders followed by teeming slaves and immigrants and workers and women have bent their backs and their will toward justice.

Not just any justice, but an American one. It is rooted in the ancient principle of no man a judge in his own case. This justice renounces retaliation. It is bound, in a uniquely American way, to opportunity. It is one of our deepest traditions. The arc of its repeated arrivals is long and far-reaching. And time and time again we have called it change.

We call it change, but not rupture or innovation. Obama himself is a symbol of this change, but he is nothing new. He was the candidate a long time coming, made by history. What he brought before us in the campaign, the “change you can believe in,” was a visceral collective anticipation of what our civic expectations can do. This change was not spontaneous generation or discovery of a new world. It was something we—Obama and his followers at his impetus—were nursing into life. Something that occurs under the sign of Odysseus, change as a looping journey that returns us home. Yes we can become in fact what we are in imagination, where imagination has its own history and is the measure of our achievement. If someone had asked me in the fall of 2008, I would have said that is what has most changed since 9/11: Obama invested new content in an old topos, change.

It is no longer 2008 when the successor to the presidential offices of George W. Bush declares “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat Al-Qaeda.” Three more long years have passed. Barack Obama is coming out of the backstretch of his first term, entering that curve where modern Democrats—Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and even Bill Clinton—have hit the wall. By now Obama has lost or conceded so much to his opponents that one marvels at their still-intensifying desire to expel him. Only the darkest thoughts can explain this hostility. The president’s salt-and-pepper hair is seasoned with it. There is a gratuitous violence in the air, and people are doing and feeling the kinds of things people do and feel when no one stands in their way. This is not, however, Lord of the Flies. Nor is it the know-nothing liberty of the militias. It is the programmed anti-statism of Grover Norquist. Beck and Coulter and Hannity are disciplined entrepreneurs. They are equipped and mobilized by big money like Richard Scaife, big corporations like Fox News, and burgeoning political movements like the Tea Party. Mindful of the utter perversity of the fact thus named, one may call this institutionalized irresponsibility. This is something new. Do not be misled by Sarah Palin and the sculpted whims of a strategic hedonism. There is more to it. It has deep roots. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Cold War anti-science evangelism exhibited by Michelle Bachmann the way a clever fly-fisher casts out and draws back the line. The public sphere has been colonized by this new and newly armed type of irresponsibility. They are building settlements that will not be swept away.

Meanwhile, mender, mediator, seeker of that communal or maternal we-are-all-in-it-together feeling, Obama is beat back. He has been spit on and shouted down. The fanatics will do whatever it takes to have their way. There is nothing new in that.

Since 9/11 this spitting and shouting has penetrated the language of the presidency. I do not mean that the current president, like the last one, sputters and shouts. I mean to say that the language that Americans need to hear from the White House to believe that they have the leadership and national coherence they believe they need to have . . . this language exists in an environment in which the spitting and shouting is effective, and the Executive, seeking its own effect, must take into account the expectations of its audience, which is the source of its executive power. Once one officeholder relents, it is very difficult to turn back. All the offices are refurnished.

So, now, from this penetration there has arisen a peculiar continuity of office. This president must behave like the one before him. It is not that promises have been made. It is that words have been spoken, people have been moved, and energies have been spent. It is an investment and the temptation to profit from it is great. Faust tells us that in the beginning was the deed, but now Obama must begin his deeds with borrowed words. There is something tacit in the words of Bush which, when repeated by Obama, extort from him afresh in each new iteration the same sort of promise. This is another sort of institutionalized irresponsibility. With his somber look and gaze askew, Obama is speaking to lend reality to the death of Osama bin Laden. And this continuity weighs heavily on him.

The message is passed through “the families who lost loved ones on 9/11” but is in fact directed to all America. Barack Obama is drawn to George W. Bush’s declaration like a moth to the flame. We will not, he insists, “waver in our commitment to see that we do whatever it takes to prevent another attack on our shores.” No pale affinity here. Obama reproduces precisely the punch line of the advertisement that so aptly summarized Bush’s position during his campaign for reelection in 2004: “Whatever it takes.” The President is promising the President’s promise as his own. Obama is speaking Bush’s words. Only the slightest inflection now separates them.

Consider the family resemblances that join and sunder yes we can and whatever it takes. Both are signs of fortitude and purpose. Yet, as here yes we can speaks the will of a plural subject, whatever it takes is ruled by its monolithic object. The former, like a thousand points of light, expresses the diversity of human purposes and projects, while the latter, like a marksman drawing his bead, is blind to what is off its line. Yes we can is a big-tent invocation, calling everyone and everything to achieve greatness. Whatever it takes needs only one iron will and the blindness of rage to conclude its reductive business. We see here a difference between power and force.

We also see here yes we can becoming whatever it takes. The metamorphosis is aided by a mistake. The whatever seems inclusive but is not. It is, rather, a setting aside. In the name of its one goal, gone are essential capacities of civic existence like discernment, judgment, restraint, moderation, compromise, cooperation, and the rest.

“But tonight,” the president tells us, Osama bin Laden is dead, and “we are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to. That is the story of our history, whether it’s the pursuit of prosperity for our people, or the struggle for equality for all our citizens; our commitment to stand up for our values abroad, and our sacrifices to make the world a safer place.”

Yes we can? Point the gun? Pull the trigger? Step outside law and its rules to assassinate an individual? When the president tells us to accept “today’s achievement” as “a testament to the greatness of our country and the determination of the American people,” what is he asking us to invest ourselves in, or divest ourselves of? How withered is this new vision of “greatness”? How ignorant of the foundations of civic life must we become? How shamefully proud in the face of the tragic necessity to murder? To take pleasure in someone’s death can be justified, but it is never right. It is never good. It is never a sign of “greatness.”

What we can, yes, is today, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, caught in a downdraft from Obama’s once ethereal heights. “We can do these things not just because of wealth or power, but because of who we are.” By now the we addressed is not the one assembled in 2008 in New Hampshire and at stop after stop around the country. The we of yes we can has been expelled from the vital stream of the American experiment. Once the new Cicero, Obama tosses out rote and hollow words from a mantra of the Victorian Boy Scouts. His we is no more those founders, nor the striving slaves and immigrants and workers and women, the rich historical pluribus struggling day in and day out to forge that unum. We are meekly and presumptively “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” We can pack our tools and go home.

How much further will the President go? Will he put more distance between himself and Martin Luther King’s yes we can to justice? Indeed. For, when justice appears again in his speech it is more a sickness than a cure. “We know well the costs of war,” Obama drones on, and “yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed . . . ”

And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to Al-Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done.

A single outlaw act of lethal violence against an individual seven thousand miles away may have many names—necessity, tragedy, pleasure, relief, or simply murder—but to call it justice, to offer this one of all acts as proof that “we will be true to the values that make us who we are,” is an offense to the America that sought to arrive, that for a century had been seeking as if to arrive, with the election of Barack Obama, the America that called in that way for what Obama offered: change.

Forget that distinctive American justice, the one that spurs life and its opportunities. This is the retaliatory justice of a gunfighter nation. In it Obama joins directly with George W. Bush, who made his imprint in those days after 9/11 saying “I want justice” the way it used to be, recalling “an old poster out West that said—‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’”³

Conquering the desire for retaliation, conquering institutionalized irresponsibility, has been a long and slow and uncertain process in America. Without this process democracy is impossible. If terrorism is an assault on democracy, it works by undoing this progress. The goal of terrorism is to provoke retaliation in modes that harm the victim more than the aggressor. In this sense Vice President Biden’s reported recent use of the word “terrorist” was a most precise upgrade.⁴

Listen again to George W. Bush’s call for retaliation in the name of justice. This may sound like a script borrowed from John Wayne. In fact it was written for Bush and the rest of us by Osama bin Laden. That declension of justice is a crucial way the attack on September 11, 2001, attained its goal. It instilled in us an overwhelming desire for retaliation and made us feel good about it. George W. Bush, seized by that desire, confused retribution with retaliation, and used that confusion to extract from us, by hook and by crook, agreement to seek this retribution, this justice, where none could be found.

Now, against the backdrop of continuing war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, war that is spreading in quicksand far and wide, President Obama repeats a story that once belonged to President Bush. To the fanatics. To the monocrats. Which we now own. We “went to war to protect our citizens.”

This is not merely hypocrisy. Barack Obama was never a pacificist. It is something far deeper and more tragic. Saying these words, this president loses his historical voice. Yes we can has been overcome by whatever it takes. It more recalls Nancy Reagan’s just say no than Martin Luther King’s I have a dream. Without its agent, justice, a word sacred in America’s second century as liberty was in the first, is lost from the imagination of the citizen. As it turns out, what has changed since 9/11, what has changed according to terms dictated by 9/11, is not the rise of an alternative politics carried forward by Obama but the failure of the historical agency that might have rectified some of the havoc wreaked by Bush.

* * * * *

Once Osama bin Laden’s teams attacked the United States it was easy to see that war was inevitable. Anyone who had studied the history and practices of democracy could have advised—as I did in the SSRC’s symposium in September of 2001—that “we must struggle not to make war against ourselves” and that “the best way to do this is to defend politics.” What I meant is that in times of crisis it is important (now I am again quoting President Obama) “to be true to the values that make us who we are” and to focus on those capacities and constraints that make civic life together possible. A people obsessively attentive to the demands of an enemy, distracted by panic, and by those disorders drawn into ignorance and forgetting, will be a major cause of their own further suffering. In short, my small counsel was think politics, not war.

Called upon to expand that first essay into a book, I quickly saw why my advice would be difficult to follow. The first reason was that nearly everyone else insisted that 9/11 was a radical break with the past. What I saw instead was a rhetoric of rupture that disguised essential lines of continuity and provided, on the basis of those very continuities, opportunities for some actors while foreclosing them for others. I knew that it is very hard to make reasoned judgments and take effective action if you cannot see what in your situation is changing and what is staying the same. Although I held to my conviction that it would be essential to concentrate on our own civic life, another fact appeared even more brutally opposed to it. The relationships formed among citizens in America, which is to say our civic life and the fabric of democracy, are to an extraordinary degree figured through our everyday experience of war. This experience has rarely been firsthand; it mostly involves indirect connections to war-fighting overlaid with mythic and mundane representations of violence. For this reason, the entanglement of war and civic life does not come easily into view. It is nonetheless as old as the Republic, something woven tight across the nineteenth century, intensified with the advent of the Cold War, and ultimately developed into the new social configuration I came to call civic war. How, then, could a people who for decades had had their public life bent to conform to war “defend politics” against the exigencies of war? This is the question I tried to answer in Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen.⁵

In other words, my attention was focused for quite some time on what did not change with the events of September 11, 2001. It was Osama bin Laden who had sought to sever our ties to our own history. History is useful for citizens and I believed that some among us should undertake to sew those ties back together. I was also moved by two other truths about history to stress continuity. The first is that nothing but the flick of a switch changes like the flick of a switch; although birth is unprecedented for the newborn as death is final for the dead, even these are events in the course of time, space, and relationship—continua like families, friendships, nations, and the world are what give form and meaning to all human events. The second truth is that our history depends on our acts, even if it does not come out as we wish it would. Those early claims that “everything changed on 9/11” were not descriptions. They could not be because we had not yet acted. They were rather prognoses motivated by interest. I sought to show them as such because I believed that reflective knowledge should be part of our upcoming actions.

Now a decade later things are different. It is possible to point to many changes. There are the wars, Afghanistan being doubly new as America’s longest war. But careful research has shown that even these wars were not simply responses to the 9/11 attacks. The fact is that Osama bin Laden and his criminal band produced very few direct effects. People died, monumental buildings collapsed, Americans were shocked and scared. These are very, very important facts. But the answers we seek today to the question what has changed? lie elsewhere. The citizen must look for changes across the spectrum of civic life. This is the decade of Google. Rampant pornography. Newspapers in a nosedive. Political parties imploding. The ever-more precipitous plight of the poor. A housing bubble puffed and popped. This is the decade in which the United States went from a formidable surplus to an insurmountable deficit, and the little good that deficit produced was appropriated by the rich. Which has had more impact on public life in America: 9/11 or Citizens United? We will for generations to come be finding invisible or overlooked effects of 9/11 in the corners of society and culture.

This much is clear now. It has been the proliferating consequences of how we reacted to and have continued to live the direct effects of 9/11 that have made the most difference. Shock and fear are transitory. Deep changes emerge only as shock and fear are prolonged into social practices. It is the representation of shock and fear, and the use of those representations in social interaction and communication, that disseminated a diffuse but palpable sense of emergency in the United States. This “emergency” has been pervasive now for ten years. It is renewed every time some agent or agency taps into it. In this new cultural environment, of course the social practices of reason have become more difficult. Of course in a culture bent on manufacturing images of downside risk, hedge funds have dominated markets. Of course the resistance that keeps pretensions in check has eroded and power has had its way.

Let us, however, take a more classical and long-term perspective. Public life has its cycles. The Bush administration was a disaster from every point of view—financial, social, cultural, military, administrative, judicial, moral. Yet it would be a mistake to think that this fact alone, this polyphonic catastrophe, is the most significant change that occured in the wake of 9/11. These things happen. Across the spectrum from disaster to mundane mistakes, from corruption to crime . . . these are to be expected always and especially where power is by fear unleashed.

What counts is how we go forward. What matters is the capacity of a society to correct error and excess, to find new bearings. It takes time to build those resources, those countervailing forces, and to muster them to new ends. History—not only the narrative, but the material facts of the human condition here and now—is a reserve for action. The edge of history is where people—with their experience, with their capacities, with their beliefs, with their will—come together. This reserve is where Barack Obama set his tap. He opened a powerful flow.

If you had asked me what has changed? in 2008 I might have said this: in response to the second and overwhelming assault on our civic life, the one by George W. Bush and his monocratic cohort, the one which followed in turn the first assault by Osama bin Laden and his murdering thugs, a long-grown historic capacity for democracy was coming to fruition. This fruit surpassed by far the little morsels of public fusion and false consensus we like to think carried us through those first dark hours. It seemed that change had come into its own.

But the wheel turns again. From Day One and Ground Zero, the opportunistic parasites of 9/11 suckered the American people into investing in another set of symbols. We dedicated ourselves first and wholeheartedly to the subprime language of terrorism. Only later did we work our way back toward the traditional American language of change. What we have learned since the election of Barack Obama is that these two consuming commitments cannot abide together. Like everything at the core of politics, the struggle between them is being played out in the symbolic realm. Like most effects that make language what it is, the historic contradictions between the speech-world of terrorism and the speech-world of change are occurring largely behind our backs. Whatever it takes is crushing yes we can. The weapons of monocracy—shock, fear, emergency, war, intolerance—are overpowering the instruments of democratic reaction against them. Perhaps a stronger leader, someone with more staying power, less wedded to bad compromises and superficial consensus, could have held out.

But the question of Obama—can he rise against this overwhelming adversity and find again his historic voice?—has already been answered. Fifty years of civic war—as “cold war” and “culture war” and “tea party”—have made whatever it takes too much for yes we can. In the course of the Obama administration the significance of Obama has changed. Unlike during the first seven years of the age of 9/11, the whole historical field of resistance to what George W. Bush represented has been swept away. The symbolic capital of a century has gone bust. This is, in my view, the most significant change in the last decade. It is not that change has been given new content; it is that change has been rendered meaningless. And the great opportunity that arose unexpectedly on the heels of 9/11 has been lost.

Peter Alexander Meyers is professor of American studies at the Université Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle and a recurring visitor in the departments of Politics, Philosophy, History, and Sociology at Princeton University. His book Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen (University of Chicago Press 2008) situated the political culture of 9/11 in the long arc of American history. A new work, Abandoned to Ourselves (Yale University Press, forthcoming), is about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the prospects for political sociology. Follow his blog at http://democraticcitizen.blogspot.com/.

Back in 2001, one major problem anticipated for sudden, large humanitarian and reconstruction investment was that if such funds passed directly to project recipients without Afghan government structural oversight or central planning, the result would be a failure to build governance capacity and government accountability: rentierism without a state. In the intervening ten years, corruption and graft within the state apparatus at all levels have been so amplified that neither ordinary Afghan citizens nor foreign donors expect fair dealings from state representatives. In particular, the Afghan National Police and the court system have demonstrated pervasively corrupt practices, such that citizens cannot expect protection in ordinary security matters or fair and efficient treatment of legal disputes. Bribery at multiple levels is a normal component of the execution of any contracts requiring government approval. Four examples reported to me in-country by individual interviewees in 2009 will serve as illustrations:

1.   The female head of an Islamically inspired NGO providing young women and men with education for income generation (the women are trained through coursework and internships for office management and secretarial jobs, which provide middle-class living wages, at the moderate tuition cost of about US$20 per month) reported that the meter-reader assigned to their neighborhood came to them with a proposition: he would underreport their electric usage (for their housing and their training facility) if they would provide him a kickback for doing so, thus benefiting them both. She refused to do that on Islamic ethical grounds. Her electricity was cut off, and restoration of power took two weeks.

2.   The same individual leased a house with her family in Kabul. Having been required to pay the total rent for the period in advance, they were then confronted by another family to whom the landlord had also rented the house, with a move-in date before their lease was up. The new family came daily to beg them to leave because they had no place to live and had also paid the landlord. The first renter refused to leave before her lease was up. The landlord’s suggestion was that the two families should accommodate each other, the one moving out a little early, the other moving in a little late. The landlord made no offer to adjust the rent for either, and in any case, affordable housing being very limited in Kabul, it takes perhaps two to three months to find a new place to live. The problem was unresolved when related to me. There is no effective legal recourse in such blatant breaches of contract, which other interviewees described as pervasive. This interviewee and other respondents attributed such “un-Afghan” behavior, in a country where oral contracts were formerly sacrosanct, enforced by witnesses and public suasion, to an essential breakdown of trust among the population. “Trust” appeared as a key word in my 2009 interviews.

3.   At Herat University, construction had been halted, as of 2009, for more than a year on half-finished buildings funded by an external development grant. The money allocated for the project had, according to university officials, been received by the Ministry of Higher Education in Kabul but not transferred to the university for payment of contractors, for reasons unspecified. The contractors had therefore halted work. The university was prevented from seeking funding from other sources to finish the much-needed construction because the money was nominally in hand but simply not in their hands. No resolution was in sight.

4.   The female head of an NGO seeking certification from the ministry appropriate to her NGO’s tasks refused to pay a bribe to the clerk receiving the application paperwork. When she complained to his superior about the inaction on her application and the bribe solicitation, she was told, “You have now turned a $10 problem into a $100 problem” (that is, the bribes required for intervention up the chain of authority are incrementally larger).

As these grassroots moments describe, well-educated Afghan women activists are now, ten years out, an established though minority force in development institutions. Many of the initial post-9/11 NGO leaders had formed their organizations and initiated projects during the Taliban period or even before, operating from bases in Pakistan’s Afghan refugee community. Some have records of activity dating back to the Marxist government, whose aggressive programs for Afghan women became the target of mujahideen reprisals and were perceived as examples of anti-Islamic interference, but which nonetheless trained and inspired some members of that older generation.

After 9/11, Kabul University and regional universities again became accessible to the next generation of women students, many of whom gravitated toward journalism/media or law programs as available, as well as medicine and education, professions formerly attractive to qualified women. Government positions, however, still rarely pay a wage sufficient to support even a small family. Bribe-taking thus amounts to a form of fee for service at lower-level positions (clerks, teachers, beat cops), the incumbents of which generally must find one or more jobs or income sources on top of their government work to make ends meet. Professionally qualified men and women as well as service support workers seek employment with NGOs and foreign-government institutions, whose local-hire pay scales, though not comparable by factors of twenty and more to wages paid to their international-hire colleagues, are at least geared to cost-of-living considerations for ordinary Afghans.

The impressively motivated, growing cadre of Web-savvy, internationally oriented young urban professionals, male and female, seeking such jobs is still only a small subset of the large population of Afghan youth. While literacy rates are variously, even hazily, understood (as described in my 2001 essay for the SSRC), a recent NPR news report stated that the literacy rate (not defined) for (mostly male) state security (police and military) trainees in foreign-run Afghan programs was 14 percent.¹ Death threats against civilians hired to support the military presence, including the small sector of internationally oriented young technocrats, are now common. For example, this month (August 2011), a young, self-trained male computer-systems technician of my acquaintance who worked as a dispatch supervisor for a company providing fuel to the military occupation was forced by “Taliban” death threats to relocate from his hometown of Herat to the more secure Kabul office of his company, where he generally now spends twenty-four hours a day. Within the past two years, satellite offices of UNICEF providing services in two western Afghan towns were forced to close due to death threats to their staff. Scattered but persistent attacks on reopened and new girls’ schools in rural areas, generally, but not always, when no students are present, as well as direct threats to and occasional attacks upon teachers and girl students, have been an ongoing problem throughout the past decade. Heavy intimidation, including physical attacks, from various quarters has come to bear on some young urban women who have taken visible roles in television broadcasting and at NGOs and foreign-government agencies.

Concerning the viability and credibility of Afghan government institutions, the NGOs with programs for protecting abused and trafficked women, particularly those running the few available safe houses, are very apprehensive of the government’s stated intention to put oversight of all such facilities in the hands of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. While from a structural viewpoint this may seem like a step toward governance, the ministry is historically without a budget of any effective size and without any capacity to assert itself as a policymaking entity within the government. Some supporters of ministry control over women’s protective facilities allege that the shelters are themselves supporting trafficking and licentious behavior by women. Women’s advocates fear that this ministry’s oversight will simply facilitate attempts by abusive families to reassert control over women who have sought protection and that deaths will ensue. The ministry lacks any mandate or human resources to expand or improve protective services for abused women.

While the Afghan Constitution promulgated after 9/11 stipulates gender equality under the law, it also stipulates that no Afghan law will be constitutional if it contradicts sharia (Islamic law) principles, which themselves stipulate inequalities in inheritance and access to divorce as well as the principle of male authority within families. Minimum ages for marriage have since been set by law, but the minimum age for females is lower than that for males. In any case, court cases contesting underage marriage are, to my knowledge, nonexistent. Generally, young women fleeing to shelters are running from forced arranged marriages, common even though sharia stipulates that the woman’s freely given consent is required for legal marriage. Their families view their flight as an intolerable breach of contract and family authority, which the family then tries to reenforce.

A certain number of elected parliamentary seats are now constitutionally reserved for women, but women activists complained in 2009 (before the widely disparaged reelection of President Karzai and contested parliamentary elections) that female candidates are often surrogates for commandants (called “warlords” in English) running political machines backed by guns. Independent women elected to the provincial representative council in Herat ran freely in their first-term campaigns, conducting public meetings and speeches. In 2009, running for reelection, they had to be accompanied by armed bodyguards and were unable to participate safely in announced public meetings. Their male supporters were intimidated, and their candidacies were denounced by opponents as un-Islamic. One elected woman parliamentarian serving in 2009 was a well-educated relative of an equally well-educated (and progressive) longtime friend and associate of mine. When I asked how she was doing, he replied, “She’s just like all the others; she’s just there for herself, not to serve the people.”

Between death threats, pervasive public disillusionment and skepticism, everyday corruption and institutional deadlock, there is a minefield—physical, psychological, and logistical—through which the small population of dedicated public servants and private professionals must work their daily way. What future for Afghan women? Access to education and training for (mainly urban) women and such women’s own activism have made for significant strides in the last decade. Many female activists view with apprehension the withdrawal of the safety net provided by the foreign presence, even while acknowledging that it is increasingly tattered and highly flawed. It seems safe to expect a new diaspora of unclear dimensions as the situation deteriorates. Under current conditions, neither the planned, substantial withdrawal of foreign forces and agencies nor persistence of the status quo seem to offer much hope for improvement.

Whither, then, the agenda for “rescue” of Afghan women articulated by Laura Bush when she was assigned the president’s weekly message just prior to the beginning of the US bombing in October 2001?² Recall, also, George W. Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union speech, in which he asserted, “The mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes . . . Today women are free.”³ This triumphalist “rescue” claim was reiterated by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state in at least three different contexts in 2010.⁴ The Afghan Women’s Network, an umbrella organization of female-run Afghan NGOs, commented pointedly on the absence of actual Afghan women at the table in at least one of these venues.⁵

Compare, however, then-defense secretary Robert Gates, in June 2010, to the effect that the United States is only pursuing its national security interests in the Afghan intervention, not undertaking social reform: “We are not there to build twenty-first-century Afghanistan. None of us will be alive that long.”⁶ In this he reasserts the Orientalist chronotope of Afghanistan’s culture and society as radically and incorrigibly distant from ours in time as well as space, at the same time giving the lie to the cultural rescue agenda rearticulated by Hillary Clinton just weeks before. The (neo)colonialist pretext of the rescue of colonized women has been widely and trenchantly critiqued.⁷ I will only say here that Mr. Gates and we were, and are, in fact looking at twenty-first-century Afghanistan. The role of foreign intervention, including our own, in making it what it is, is hardly a triumphal story. Nor is its conclusion clear.

Margaret Mills, who began research in Afghanistan in 1974, teaches general folklore, Middle East (especially Afghan Persian) culture and oral literature subjects through the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Department and the Center for Folklore Studies at Ohio State University and is a research faculty associate of the Ohio State Mershon Center for International Security Studies. Her current research includes studies of oral narrative performance and of Afghan citizens’ discussions of contemporary politics. She welcomes reader comments.

A few months after 9/11, taking part in a program broadcast by a public television station in Chicago and, along with my American academic colleague, answering questions from viewers about our region, I felt how grateful they were to Uzbekistan for its support of the United States in the wake of its tragedy (not long before, Uzbekistan had offered its airbase in Khanabad to assist in the military campaign the United States was launching on Afghanistan). Since then, Operation Enduring Freedom, as that campaign was named in October 2001, has tied together the fates of the United States and Central and South Asia. Tens of thousands of American troops have been sent to fight the war in Afghanistan, and cargo for that war effort has been delivered via the territory of Uzbekistan, along with a few other transport corridors. A geo-strategic partnership between the United States and Uzbekistan was declared following a March 2002 meeting between presidents George W. Bush and Islam Karimov.

What effect has this partnership had on political development in Uzbekistan and the rest of Central Asia? To answer this question, one should take into account how US foreign policy is being designed and the kind of revision it underwent in the aftermath of the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in September 2001. In my own observation, US foreign policy is driven by at least the following three factors: (1) the grand policy doctrine adopted by each US administration that reflects the philosophy of and priorities for the current historical moment; (2) values embedded in the foundations of the American polity, namely, the values of individual and civic freedom and democracy, which often play a role in how US politicians react to world events (as one of the characters in John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance eloquently stated, “the United States is a republic, and a republic is a state in which the people are the boss”); and (3) operational and institutional pragmatism employed by various departments and diplomatic missions dealing with everyday foreign affairs.

The reality is that, in responding to world affairs, the institutional pragmatism is sometimes at odds with what the values of freedom and democracy would command. And in some cases, as the Bush era exemplified, the grand policy doctrine can be deliberately elevated to the level of grand ideology. It was probably a great temptation for the Bush administration to react to 9/11 by adopting an ideologically driven agenda that could be articulated in the style and spirit of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” That ideological doctrine crystallized around the all-pervasive concepts of a “War on Terror” and an “Axis of Evil,” aiming to mobilize all “good” and “decent” nations around the world for a crusade against the forces of “evil,” of course, under the moral and political leadership of the United States. The countries that were included in the Axis of Evil indeed were among the most repressive and authoritarian regimes in the world, and the “war” would be waged on behalf of ideas of freedom. However, it was worrisome that the doctrine acquired the features of a dichotomous, black-and-white ideology with religious overtones, thereby risking oversimplification in describing the scope of international issues and their solutions.

Preoccupied with the War on Terror, the Bush administration reexamined and redesigned many directions of its foreign policy, including its politico-geographical outlook. The culmination of that conceptual shift was the decision to realign some of the State Department’s geographical frameworks, focuses, and priorities. In February 2006, the Central Asian delegate from the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs was moved to the bureau dealing with South Asia, which was renamed the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. That structural reassignment meant that all Central Asian “stans” would be now associated with the other “stans,” Pakistan and Afghanistan (and India), a quite logical decision from the linguistic-toponymic point of view. But the decision also reflected a swing in the US view of its priorities in the region. Central Asia would be hereafter seen primarily not as part of the post-communist world that is experiencing a “transition” to democracy but rather in light of the War on Terror. That verdict was evidently reached due to Central Asia’s proximity to the countries of major US security concern, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and also thanks to its predominantly Muslim population.

That politico-geographical realignment played perfectly into the hands of autocrat Islam Karimov, who had long before 9/11 made a war on Islamic dissent the cornerstone of Uzbekistan’s internal politics and the means of boosting the international legitimacy of his regime. Asserting himself in the role of a US ally in the War on Terror, Karimov hoped to be given carte blanche in his dealings with his internal political opponents. However, he overestimated the degree to which the US administration would turn a blind eye to the gross violation of human rights in Uzbekistan. When, in May 2005, hundreds of innocent protestors in Andijan were shot dead by Uzbek government troops, Americans and Europeans, who were brought up in social environments where the respect of human rights is a daily norm, had a knee-jerk reaction to the shocking reports about the massacre. The US administration was so appalled by the scale of the atrocity that it decided to distance itself from the Karimov regime, at least for a while, and moreover, was instrumental in helping a few hundred Andijan refugees who escaped the massacre get asylum in the United States and other Western countries. But that natural reaction cost Operation Enduring Freedom an airbase, as Mr. Karimov was quick to retaliate by revoking his agreement to rent the United States the Karshi-Kanabad (K2) airdrome, which was vital for supplying non-lethal cargo to Afghanistan.

That is not the only instance when US policy in the region has been driven by human rights concerns. At the height of the geo-strategic partnership with Uzbekistan, the United States managed to convince the Uzbek authorities to adopt, although to a limited extent, an “open-door” policy. Indeed, some local NGOs were granted official registration and a number of international organizations and development agencies were accredited and allowed to operate in the country. But that honeymoon period in the US-Uzbekistan partnership didn’t last long, and as the series of “color revolutions” swept Georgia, Ukraine, and later Kyrgyzstan in 2003–2005, Karimov decided to close the Uzbekistan door. Beginning in 2004, hundreds of local NGOs were forcibly shut down, and practically all American NGOs and Western press correspondents were expelled from the country.

In 2006, the Bush administration, seeking to restore the geo-strategic partnership with Uzbekistan, resumed its wooing of the Karimov regime (having decided to dump the human rights baggage as unnecessary ballast hindering the achievement of major strategic goals in the region—knocking out Al-Qaeda and the Taliban). These efforts have continued under the Obama administration, which has distanced itself from the rhetoric and excesses of the War on Terror but is continuing basically the same policy of treating Central Asia primarily as a transport corridor for supplying the Afghan theater of operations. Although the most controversial policies adopted by the previous administration, such as extraordinary rendition, black sites, and waterboarding, seem to have been abandoned and the War on Terror has become a more technical and less ideologically charged “overseas contingency operation,” the core of the US foreign policy toward Central Asia hasn’t changed. And Uzbekistan, with its advantageous geographical position bordering on the relatively stable northern part of Afghanistan, has only become more essential to US military success as the Pakistan corridor has become hampered with the deterioration of the security situation in that country.

The shift toward real politics resulted in the agreement achieved in 2009 with Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan to establish and develop the so-called Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a logistical infrastructure designed for the transport of non-lethal cargo into Afghanistan. Tashkent again allowed the United States to use its facilities, this time its airport in Navoi as NDN’s key logistical junction. Henceforth, anything that could jeopardize the deal on NDN would be sacrificed, and as a result, US pressure on human rights issues in the region has significantly weakened. For instance, the United States extended its full support for Kazakhstan’s chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2010, in spite of that country having been criticized by human rights groups for cracking down on political opposition and civic freedoms.

The US administration has itself been experiencing internal pressure from different directions. The American academic and intelligence communities are divided into two camps advocating opposing foreign policy in Central Asia. If figures like S. Frederick Starr and the editors of the Jamestown Foundation advocate the geo-political priorities (following the logic: if not we, then Russia and China) in dealing with the authoritarian “stans,”¹ then experts like Eric McGlinchey point out the risks for the United States and stability in the region associated with negligence of human rights and social discontent among the local population.² Some advocates of improved relations with the Karimov regime at any cost would claim in lobby conversations that Karimov guarantees a certain political stability and keeps down all kinds of radical Islam. Certainly, the appearance of stability and the seemingly problem-free environment for NDN in Uzbekistan apparently satisfy US expectations for the observable future.

As a result, the operational and institutional pragmatism professed by the current makers and performers of US foreign policy commands the preservation of the status quo. Therefore, any social and political changes in the region will take place not thanks to American and European interference but due to mainly internal developments, as it has been with the Arab Spring, which took the West by surprise. However, one can object that the situation in Central Asia is considerably different from that in Northern Africa. Unlike the Middle East and Northern Africa, Central Asia lacks proximity to Europe and the respective cross-border civil and media networks that could transmit the ideas of democracy. For this and other reasons, the authoritarian regimes in Central Asia (with the exception of Kyrgyzstan) look truly unshakable. But how many observers had predicted that Hosni Mubarak would in 2011 undergo arrest and trial for corruption and abuse of power? What is undeniably unquestionable is that Central Asia faces a great deal of uncertainty and unpredictability.

In light of the decision by the Obama administration to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan by 2014, there have been some expectations that the United States could stop viewing Central Asia principally through the prism of the War on Terror. However, most recent reports suggest that thousands of US troops, including special forces and air power, may stay in Afghanistan until 2024 to help “build up the Afghan army and police,”³ a decision indicating a lack of confidence in DC that the ten-year-long military mission there leaves a sustainable legacy.

In the meantime, the situation in Afghanistan doesn’t raise hopes for either stability or democracy in the region. The current ruling regime has been harshly criticized for its corruption and lack of legitimacy. Hamid Karzai appears to have missed his chance to assert himself as the embodiment of the Afghan people’s will, and he may face the same fate as the Soviet-backed Najibullah, deposed in 1992 and eventually prosecuted by the Taliban in 1996. The expectation that the democratic process in Afghanistan would come to be a good exemplar for the Central Asian “stans” has turned out to be an illusion. Central Asia remains full of and surrounded by autocratic regimes, all lacking cross-national connections that could transfer “viruses” of democratic change.

In May 2011, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a list of “specially designated countries (SDCs) that have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members,”⁴ that is, that pose a terrorist threat. The inclusion of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan on this list perfectly resonates with the policy that sees Central Asia mainly as part of a conceptual framework for the War on Terror. While Astana, searching for other than Tashkent means of raising its international legitimacy, was furious that it was included in this category,⁵ there were understandably no signs of discontent or objection from Uzbekistan. Karimov seems to be entirely satisfied with such a view of the region by US policymakers, as he himself fits perfectly into this geo-political outlook.

Yet one should realize that, facing a huge and constantly growing labor surplus, the corrupt Karimov regime, like other local autocracies, finds itself sitting on a powder keg. What rescues it from social explosion for now is the country’s free-riding on massive, visa-free, labor out-migration to the more prosperous Russia. But the ability of the Russian economy to absorb more and more labor migrants cannot match the rate of population growth in Central Asia. According to some estimates, around three hundred thousand young people are joining the labor force in Uzbekistan each year.⁶ Will Russia welcome these new hordes of youth hungry for jobs?

Even economically more affluent and politically more liberal Kazakhstan is witnessing a rise in social discontent fueled by the global recession that began in 2008 as well as rampant political corruption. In May 2011, thousands of workers in Kazakhstan’s richest industry, oil, went on strike in the Manghystau region. Their strike has proven to be the longest in the history of Central Asia. As of this writing, in August 2011, the strike is still going on.

Presidents Islam Karimov and Nursultan Nazarbayev, unchangeable and unshakeable in their rule since 1990, are now both of an age that portends the end of their political careers. Both have uncertain plans and opaque mechanisms for political succession, prompting various elite factions to intensify their struggles for power. Some of these factions may opt, at some point, to support rebellion against emerging favorites as the only way to secure their own futures. Thus, if not the long awaited victory of democratic forces, then a long run of instability is a very likely scenario in Central Asia’s observable future. I would expect this instability to only heighten over the next five or six years.

Alisher Ilkhamov is research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and author of a chapter in the forthcoming book The Neopatrimonial State in Africa and Beyond (Routledge).

What the War on Terror has disclosed is that the world’s mightiest power cannot conquer and pacify even relatively weak and divided countries. Initial victory proves illusory in the face of hostility to the victors and contested ideologies. The bombast of the United States and the West has been disclosed. The rhetoric of the “coalition of the willing” to bring democracy and peace to Afghanistan and Iraq has been shattered by the reality of car bombs and anti-personnel landmines. The killing goes on. As the “American Century” has dissolved in a decade, it has become clear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq symbolize the steady decline of Western power—that is, the ability of the United States and its allies to shape the world in their own image and according to their interests and rules.

After the dust settles, one finds a new multipolar world, with the center of economic gravity shifting to the East. The West no longer holds a premium on geopolitical or geoeconomic power. Different discourses, or concepts, of governance have become more commonplace and challenge the old Western orthodoxy that informed the postwar consensus. At the multilateral level, the emergence of gridlock marks many of the world’s most pressing international negotiations. Why? Decision-making has stalled in most of the key international decision-making fora, affecting climate change, trade rules, financial market reforms, and nuclear proliferation. The West can no longer write the rules as it once could. The emerging powers of the East and the South can veto the deals the West puts on the table even if they cannot yet write the new agenda.

The War on Terror has weakened the UN system, marginalized the Security Council in the face of great geopolitical tensions, and reasserted power politics at a time when such politics alone cannot resolve many of the central global challenges and risks we face living in a global age. Fighting “the other” misses a deep and more fundamental point—that on many of the most pressing issues of our time, “the other” is now our collective problems and collective threats. Reasserting our identities as Americans, British, French, Chinese or Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu will not generate the means to address or resolve these issues.

Ten years on from 9/11, we see that the “end of ideology”—the much-heralded victory of democracy and markets—was as naive as it was misleading. Instead, we inhabit a much more complex mosaic of languages and discourses, of ideas and interests, and of identities and political associations. This is a much messier world than was understood by the architects of the American Century. It is a world that does not easily bow down to the destructive power of bombs and missiles. Consent and reconciliation cannot be carved out by armored vehicles and drones. The complexities of difference, culture, identity, and human associations can be changed only by creating spaces for voice and self-determination, spaces free of domination, whether this is the domination of conquering powers, fanatical religions, or authoritarian rulers.

This messier world is the terrain once again of politics, where politics matters just as much as ever. Yet unlike in previous eras, the nature of our politics needs to be worked out at many levels, from the local to the global. We live in an era where the fate and fortunes of countries are increasingly intertwined. I call this a world of “overlapping communities of fate.” Whether the focus is on economics, security, the movement of people, communications, or culture, there is now a global dimension to the forces, processes, and outcomes that bind human societies together. This creates both huge opportunities for development and prosperity and greater risks and challenges.

Throughout modern history, from the late sixteenth century to the present period, the business of politics and the decisions of public life largely unfolded within the borders of states, unless these were pierced by violence. States and governments, autocratic or democratic, made decisions within and for those in bounded territorial spaces. Yet today, most of the challenges we face are problems that spill over borders. Preoccupations with state interests or the welfare of particular people above all others cannot alone unlock the proper nature and form of politics in a global age. Or to put the point another way, state-first politics, realism, and hegemonic raison d’être are inadequate and insufficient ways of pursuing politics in dense webs of connections between peoples and communities. The alternative is a politics based on mutual recognition, the singular importance of each and every human being, and public decision-making that is transparent and accountable to all significantly affected by its impacts irrespective of borders. In sum, realism is dead, and cosmopolitanism maps the way ahead.

‪David Held is Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics, co-director of Polity Press, and general editor of Global Policy.‬