Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent is a big book, enormous in concept, ambition, and sweep, full of portent for transnational politics in the twenty-first century. Portentousness in a book can be a good thing, provided it delivers as promised. This brilliant, polymathic book delivers more intellectual punch on the fraught relationship between state and society, terrorism and terrorists, than any book I know. Let me simply adopt Niall Ferguson's judgment, on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, calling Terror and Consent the "most profound book on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 - indeed, since the end of the cold war."
Not everyone feels this way; one indicator of the book's intrinsic interest is the volatility of the reviews. The Economist was distinctly cool; Bobbitt's grand ambition, it said, "is confusing, hard to digest, and perhaps wrong." But a problem with much current analysis of terrorism, terrorists, and US responses is that it thinks small. No lack of windy tomes, true, but while much genuinely serious stuff is admirably analytic, breaking matters down into bits and pieces, it seemingly dares not synthesize the bits back into a whole again. Today's most serious efforts tend to avoid anything resembling grand strategy for winning a long-term struggle against terrorists and terrorist organizations, and the states that sponsor and shield them.
Favored instead is the narrowing method of cost benefit analysis and (adopting one version of it) a tendency to favor defensive, protective, immediate measures that are most obviously cost effective. Talk of "victory" or "winning," meanwhile, might be thought to propose talk of "war" - but these days few dare call it war, at least if one wants to remain respectable among Western policy, academic, and political elites. Governments shrink back, in fear of precisely the Muslim backlash their timidity invites, and increasingly cannot even bring themselves to identify the terrorists as Islamist, let alone Islamic. Terror and Consent, for its part, is heterodox on a long list of things. Bobbitt thinks the struggle against terrorism is plainly a war, to be called a war, fought as a war, against religiously-driven Islamist ideologues who seek to establish, he says, their vision of the caliphate and which he flatly calls "states of terror" that must be defeated. Nonetheless, changing conditions of twenty-first century war, because of changing conditions of the twenty-first century state, mean that war is not as it has long been.
Regnant approaches to terrorism are driven not just by narrow cost benefit analysis, but by a still narrower focus on something we might call "event-specific catastrophism": preventing the next attack. This is as true of the Bush administration as of its leading opponents. What has the Bush administration focused upon, in speech after speech to the public? The imminence of the next attack, and the need to prevent it. One hopes this is mobilizing rhetoric for larger policies against jihadist terrorism, but in considerable part, the uncertain next attack is the focus of policy - a long-term strategy, if one can call it that, even after seven years, of just trying to make it to the next day unscathed.
This is understandable, considering what administration officials see every day in threat assessments. The US attorney general since late 2007, Michael Mukasey, mused publicly how constant and serious the threats against the United States are; despite no successful homeland attacks since 9-11, he is "surprised by how surprised I am." Self-serving administration rhetoric? Perhaps. But despite much discursive rhetoric about long-term policy and the war on terror, much US policy is what, in a strategically informed plan, might well be considered the last defensive perimeters. Airport security, daily monitoring of cell phone traffic, internet analysis in hopes of seeing spikes that might indicate imminent terrorist action, watch lists, and many, many cement barriers. Presumably no one in Britain is reassured by the fact that the Glasgow attack was prevented not by perceptive police work, nimble intelligence agents, deep penetration of homegrown terrorist cells - but simply by a physical barrier at the airport. But perhaps people are comforted; the cement barrier worked, after all, effectively and cost-effectively, while the rest of the counterterrorism apparatus, at enormous absolute and relative cost, did not. Still, these are fundamentally defensive measures aimed at preventing the next attack, counterterrorism in a vital but stiflingly narrow sense. The cost benefit analysis underlying such planning, shaped toward event-specific catastrophism, is necessary and fruitful, but bears little resemblance to planning or conducting a "war" on terrorism or, really, any strategic conceptual response to jihad that goes beyond preventing particular events of uncertain probability and magnitude.
Terror and Consent, by contrast, offers strategic thinking on an unapologetically grand scale. There is nothing minimalist about it. It is synthetic across three large fields: history, law, and strategic international politics. In an age where academic specialization is supreme, Bobbitt's ability to move across fields is bound to annoy narrow disciplinarians - it will seem to some to be a very old-style grand explanation of the kind that academics gave up a couple of generations ago, and they will find particulars to quarrel over. Bobbitt is able not only to range across academic fields, but also to combine academic and real world experience - a Democrat by affiliation, he has served in senior positions in both law and intelligence in the Clinton and Bush senior administrations. Bobbitt understands political theory and he understands the practicalities of governing. Terror and Consent's core insight is that transnational jihadist terrorism must be understood on the largest historical scale, and that requires understanding the shifting nature of the state and society in both the liberal democratic West and the rest of the world. Sometimes nothing but the large historical scale will do. Why?
Jihadist transnational terrorism gets going by being able to exploit the interstices of the state system, not just on a geographical basis - the failed state of Afghanistan, for example - but on a historical basis, as the nature of the state moves from its incarnation in the twentieth century to something quite different in the twenty-first. Readers, in other words, should not be confused wondering why the book seems peculiarly focused on the historical and political theory of the evolving state, rather than narrowly on terrorism today. Bobbitt's deep point is that Al Qaeda terrorism, and what might eventually replace and transform it, cannot be understood without reference to the state system and its evolution over a long period of time. This leads Terror and Consent into a long walk through the history of the state in the West. Once again, narrow specialists will register many particular objections, and if one rejects in principle the notion of grand synthetic history, then one's reaction will be positively allergic. Bobbitt tells us, as a deliberate caricature, a kind of rough historical sketch (and picking up the thread of his earlier masterwork, Shield of Achilles), that the "princely state" system of Europe eventually gave way to the nation-state system that gradually emerged in the nineteenth and then dominated the twentieth century. Wars of the twentieth century were wars of Westphalian nation-states, and enemies in the wars of the twentieth century nation-states were themselves, by and large, nation-states; even the wars of de-colonialization were fought largely by parties that aspired to the status of nation-states.
Since the end of the Cold War, at least, however, liberal democratic nation-states - what Bobbitt calls "states of consent" - have been moving toward something different from the nation-state, something Bobbitt calls the "market-state." In the market-state, consent becomes less that of the citoyen and much more that of the consumer, for whom the state is a supplier of services. The market-state itself bears some resemblance to a corporation, outsourcing and privatizing significant activities, and is both more relaxed about its territorial sovereignty while at the same time willing to extend its regulatory reach beyond its borders. Globalization's increased wealth is one driver of the market-state, but so is the secular (in both senses of the term) drive of individuals toward greater individual liberty. "States of consent" contrast with "states of terror," the end aim of the transnational, nongovernmental and, today, Islamist terrorist groups that are also able to grow in the eco-system of economic globalization and the relaxed conditions of, and among, market-states. States of terror are the evil twin of the states of consent - parasitical upon and enabled by the states of consent, at once pre-modern and post-modern but never really modern, and irremediably hostile toward states of consent.
Bobbitt's market-states crucially retain key markers of states. This is not the dissolution of the state, the disaggregation of the state, eagerly awaited by watchful academics of international law, scanning the horizons for the breakdown of state sovereignty and the rise of some form of global governance and so to fulfill, after many heartbreaking centuries, the academicians' utopian, universal, planetary dreams. On the contrary, it is precisely because market-states continue, for Bobbitt, meaningfully to be states that they are able to have national interests, marshal resources against the states of terror, and provide for security for their citizens. And vice-versa. Indeed, in considerable part because Bobbitt insists on market-states as states, he likewise insists that the response to terrorism is a war on terror. Criminals, yes, but also enemies: states make war upon their enemies. War enables forms of strategic thinking about jihadist terror organizations that neither cost benefit analysis nor the legal conception of terrorists purely as criminals allows as a conceptual frame. The double-sided vision of Bobbitt's market-state leads Terror and Consent to a remarkably rich strategic vision of how concretely to make war against terror, terrorists, and violent jihad - a vision that will make everyone, however, on every side of the strategic debate, unhappy in some measure.
Law, including international law - the Geneva Conventions, for example - is crucial. The Bush administration's forays into nearly Schmittian arguments of permanent emergency displacing the rule of law have been as disastrous as they are wrong. On the other hand, while deeply respectful of international law, Bobbitt does not think it - its meaning, interpretation and evolution - lies in the hands of international law professors and international bureaucrats. Bobbitt is a committed multilateralist, not a purveyor of utopian supranationalism. His is a nuanced and practical international law regime gradually shaped by the practices of states as conditions shift - very much, in fact, the pragmatic view that the US State Department has held of international law over many generations. As to domestic law and terrorism, Terror and Consent is, for example, decisively against Alan Dershowitz's `special circumstance' arguments for torture and many other alterations to existing presumptions of the rule of law. Yet the constitution is no `suicide pact' for Bobbitt - he endorses preemptive detention for terrorist suspects, significant increases in electronic and other surveillance, and coercive techniques short of torture in some circumstances, among other things.
Terror and Consent sharply criticizes the Bush administration for the incompetence of its post-invasion Iraq policy. It observes that many mistakes arose from the profoundly erroneous belief that this was a war of nation-states in which the fall of the regime completed things whereas, in the wars of market-states and terrorist and insurgent groups, the war was just getting underway. Yet Bobbitt not only supported the Iraq war, he firmly believes (unlike many others following Iraq) in preventative war - he thinks we will need more of it over the long run, not less, because of the nature of terrorist threats. His strategic vision embraces carrying war to an enemy defined as such.
Each bit of this will discomfit someone. But the success of Terror and Consent as an argument depends largely on whether `market' and `state' can be corralled together as Bobbitt proposes or whether, instead, the categories eventually fly apart. In my estimation, the argument is highly persuasive; its success as policy in the real world, however, depends upon something different: whether the market-state partakes of more than simply the ethic of the market. The logic of the market, after all, is to write off the past as past, treat sunk costs as sunk, cut losses and get out as soon as cost benefit analysis says things are looking dim, look not sentimentally back to the past except as a source of future dividends, coolly calculate anticipated future flows of value, mark to market, and each and every day ask, "But what have you done for me lately?"
Is that really enough? If those are indeed the values that the market carries into the market state, is the market-state sufficiently nurtured by other values to have the will to defend itself as a political community? As consumers and not - in the older sense of the word, at least - citizens? Defend itself as a political community against not only external terrorist enemies, against states of terror, but also to have the courage to defend core internal values, not just of the market, but of liberal democracy - as against those, for example, who would see liberal democracy converted, in the name of multiculturalism, to a form of religious tribalism and religious communalism?
George W. Bush and Tony Blair have found it weirdly easier, after all, to send whole armies to fight in faraway places than ever to say no to demands of communalist, ultimately illiberal, Muslim groups at home; easier to fight wars abroad than to insist at home upon the liberal separation of church and state, mosque and state; insist upon a public sphere that is neutral as between varieties of religion but which insists on the independent values of a liberal society; insist that this means limits, firmly drawn and enforced, to today's tightening ratchet of one-way religious accommodations; and, finally, insist that these limits are integrally part of liberal toleration, a regime of liberal toleration that is a species utterly apart from fashionable and, for liberal values, fatal multiculturalism. Communalism is not liberalism; the religious communalism of the Ottoman Empire was, in its way and time, a relatively humane order, but it was not and never could be liberal. It is, however, the path of least resistance that Britain appears to be taking.
A believer in liberty and consent, I should greatly like to share Bobbitt's hopes for the market-state. It does not take a conservative to wonder, however, whether this is enough to sustain liberal democracy in the face of spiritual threats requiring a vision and courage to stick with it, rather than the cold, reactive calculus of net present value. A long tradition of what Lawrence Solum has called the "left Burkeans" - Christopher Lasch, for example, or Zygmunt Bauman - has argued that the market is as much socially corrosive of the values of liberal democracy as it is materially supportive. The market and liberal democracy are both sustained by wells of social capital that stable material prosperity helps deepen, but which are not the moral logic of the market itself.
The market of the market-state is not self-sustaining. On the contrary, it requires a form of social life that goes outside it in order to function in the long term. Honor, loyalty, sacrifice, courage, gratitude to those who came before - these are not the evident virtues of capitalism, but they are necessary virtues in a liberal-democratic-capitalist form of life. Without them, society eats its seed-corn, devours and uses up today the social capital bequeathed by the past to bless the future. Even after the marvelous argumentation of this marvelous book, therefore, room remains to question whether the market-state pays sufficient attention to the spiritual habits of the heart that make the market-state - and the willing defense of the market-state, states of consent as against states of terror - over the long struggle of years in this twenty-first century, even possible.
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Top reviews from other countries
Steven Senior
An important contribution to the debate around terrorism, even if you don't agree with it.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 2, 2015
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Völkerrechtsreform statt Völkerrechtsbruch
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A threshold book on a vital subject.
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