Academic

Williams on the War on Terror & Legitimation Crisis

By Lawrence Solum

Daniel R. Williams (Northeastern University - School of Law) has posted Averting a Legitimation Crisis and the Paradox of the War on Terror on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Rarely in the war-on-terror literature do we get an attempt to capture a Gestalt understanding of the "War on Terror." This article brings together five books that, when examined collectively, create an opportunity to see the War on Terror as something beyond just a struggle against a particular form of terrorism or merely a politically controversial feature of the outgoing Bush Administration. The ambition here is to discover the function of the War on Terror within an emerging neo-liberal world order.

Most useful in that discovery is Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent, perhaps the most comprehensive disquisition so far on terrorism and the War on Terror. It argues that Islamic terrorism is a product of the emerging new State. "Market states of consent," as he calls them, are emerging as the dominant states of our globalization age (often called "neo-liberalism"), and al Qaeda is a reaction to this global development. This article uses Bobbitt's thesis as a launching point for the claim that protecting civilians becomes the way a State averts what Jurgen Habermas terms, a "legitimation crisis."

The threat of a Habermasian legitimation crisis, this article suggests, must be appreciated in order to understand how the War on Terror functions within a world order that the United States wishes to manage (and that Bobbitt fervently believes we must manage). This understanding takes two forms: one, terrorism seeks to provoke a "legitimation crisis" by communicating, through its dramatic violent acts, that the state cannot fulfill the limited obligation of sovereignty-to wit: protecting its own populace; and two, flipping the first point, the State uses "terrorism" to generate a War on Terror that exists to permit the State to overcome a legitimation crisis that otherwise would be provoked by the State's inability to deal with the crises generated by a ravaging (read: neo-liberal) form of globalization.

Bobbitt's Terror and Consent may be the most important book on the scene, and so it anchors the discussion here. The other four under consideration, in crucial ways, allow us to unveil the hidden geopolitical agenda within Bobbitt's impressively scholastic disquisition on terrorism and the War on Terror. Fighting terrorism, the article concludes, is not so much a problem as it is a paradox, for terrorism and the War on Terror are caught in a self-contradiction. Only a deep reawakening of our national identity can resolve that self-contradiction. So, while Terror and Consent usefully situates the War on Terror within the realities of globalization (and on that basis offers proposals to improve that "war"), the other books examined here may provoke concern that Bobbitt's new and improved "War on Terror" keeps us on a road to catastrophe.

Habermas's Legitimation Crisis--that takes me back!  "Legitimation Crisis" was published in translation in 1975, and I remember reading it with tremendous interest as an undergraduate!

This interesting essay surveys & comments on recent literature, focusing on Bobbitt's erudite, provocative, and profound book.  Recommended.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on September 15, 2008 (boomark / email).