Global Terror, Global Vengeance?

It seems generally accepted that the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington mark the beginning of an era of a new kind of violence. We are supposedly dealing with a form of terrorism so exceptional that it makes traditional concepts of war obsolete. Classical warfare between nations or alliances always involved States, and remained within the armature of recognized international law. It is said that the current struggle against terrorism no longer fits into this conceptual and juridical framework. Thus September 11, 2001 presumably made us cross a new threshold in that it manifested a type of violence that radically changed the nature of modern conflict.

Such a conclusion is seductive and can seem well-founded. Nevertheless, it is insufficient, if not erroneous, in that it presents the terrorism of 9/11 as the ultimate stage in the process of techno-military modernization that emerged out of the Industrial Revolution. During the Cold War, this process culminated in the strategic mastery of thermonuclear arms. It must be acknowledged that this modernity is by no means outdated; the end of the Eastern and Western blocs makes possession of atomic weapons by the newly independent states of these former blocs an even greater risk. Thus the attacks of September 11 do not allow us to consider this page as having been turned. Rather, the attacks open a parallel or divergent path of “terror” alongside the classical nuclear threat.