A new political journal I just encountered, tonight, Democracy, has an excellent article detailing a very persuasive case for pride and humiliation as the basis for terrorist movements.
A Matter of Pride
What is really powerful about Bergen and Lind's analysis is that they go beyond a very persuasively argued case made by several scholars that poverty is not the cause of terrorism, as many liberal activists, journalists, and others have claimed to a very persuasive positive case for pride and humiliation being the basis for terrorist movements.
"What motivates someone to join these revolutionaries, terrorists, and murderers, if not economic conditions? In a word, humiliation. Look again at Nazi Germany. While economically weak in between the world wars, what really motivated many to embrace Nazism was that they lost World War I, and the conditions of that loss. Hitler’s goal, supported by much of the German elite and the vast Prussian officer class, was to reverse the verdict of World War I and proceed to create a Eurasian empire capable of dominating the world.
No concessions by the Western democracies short of acquiescence in National Socialist imperialism would have satisfied Hitler and like-minded Germans. Indeed, the outcome of World War I enraged Arab nationalists as well as German nationalists–and it still does today. Bin Laden sees the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which led to the carving up of the Ottoman Empire, as the beginning of Arab humiliation. For bin Laden, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, like the Versailles agreement for Hitler, is a humiliation that must be avenged and reversed: "We still suffer from the injuries inflicted by … the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France which divided the Muslim world into fragments," he said.
The central role of communal humiliation in inspiring terrorism is the key finding of University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape’s study of suicide bombers, Dying to Win. According to Pape, two factors have linked Tamil, Palestinian, Chechen, and al Qaeda suicide bombers. First, they are members of communities that feel humiliated by genuine or perceived occupation (like the perceived occupation of the sacred territory of Saudi Arabia by virtue of the presence of U.S. bases, in the eyes of bin Laden and his allies). Second, suicide bombers seek to change the policies of democratic occupying powers like Israel and the United States by influencing their public opinion–in a sense making the occupying power suffer the same level of humiliation they have felt.
The "humiliation theory" of radical violence helps explain why so many terrorists come from middle-class or wealthy backgrounds. Unlike economic deprivation, national or religious humiliation can be painful to all members of a community. In fact, communal humiliation is likely to aggrieve the affluent members the most, precisely because their freedom from a day-to-day struggle to survive liberates them to brood over slights to the community in which they are natural leaders. It may also explain why so many are willing to sacrifice innocent bystanders for their cause. They are fighting for an abstract idea of national, ethnic, or religious pride, not the masses.
To be sure, humiliation can be an outgrowth of poverty. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has suggested a variant of the deprivation theory, citing the sense of personal and collective humiliation associated with poverty: "Sure, poverty doesn’t cause terrorism–no one is killing for a raise. But poverty is great for the terrorism business because poverty creates humiliation and stifled aspirations and forces many people to leave their traditional farms to join the alienated urban poor in the cities–all conditions that spawn terrorists." This has the merit of making humiliation a possible intermediary between poverty and political violence. But the possibility of a connection between poverty and humiliation nevertheless fails to provide a sufficient cause. A 2002 UN study of the Arab world showed that it has the second-lowest per capita growth of any region worldwide, which seems to support the deprivation thesis. But consider that while sub-Saharan Africa has done even worse economically, and while it has been the location of major terrorist attacks (the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya by al Qaeda, for example) and is the home of 160 million Muslims, the region has not given birth to either an indigenous terrorist group or a radical ideology. To be sure, impoverished Sudan briefly served as a base for al Qaeda’s (overwhelmingly affluent) Saudi and Egyptian leadership. But it was never more than that. It will always be the case that well-organized, well-funded, and well-educated terrorists will make use of failed states, but those states are rarely if ever the source of terrorism. As historian Walter Laqueur has noted, "In the forty-nine countries currently designated by the United Nations as the least developed hardly any terrorist activity occurs." And in the same way that poverty is never the primary cause of terrorism, prosperity is hardly the cure. Alexis de Tocqueville was only the first of many to recognize that revolutions often occur in times when populations experience rising expectations about living standards. At least in some societies, the diffusion of wealth and education may help radicals recruit new allies."
The amount of education and the generally affluent backgrounds of many if not most terrorist leaders makes poverty a fairly unpersuasive cause of terrorism, even as poverty may be among many hardships experienced by populations that support and rationalize terrorism, and Bergen and Lind make a powerful argument in this vein.
But what is particularly powerful about these authors' analysis is their argument that pride and humiliation from military, economic, political, and/or ideological defeat or failure is rationalized as a basis for violence and political conflict. It's a very powerful analysis because it explains well left and right wing terorrism and political violence (and I would add much political and ideological conflict, as well), and, strangely enough for an author like Michael Lind who has described himself as a "radical centrist," their recommendations are "anti-radical" as much as anti-terrorist.
"Regardless of where they stand on this debate, it is clear to most that no conceivable concessions, short of acquiescence to their scheme of expunging Western influence from the Muslim world and bringing Taliban-like regimes to power throughout it, can appease bin Laden, his followers, and his allies. Moreover, "Marshall Plans" for the Middle East, however justified they may be on other grounds, will not make al Qaeda and its sympathizers feel less humiliated. For instance, as a result of the 1978 Camp David peace accords the United States has transferred tens of billions of dollars to Egypt. This transfer of aid coincided with the worst period of terrorism in Egypt’s history; Islamist terrorists assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and killed more than 1,000 other Egyptians during the 1990s.
The first priority, therefore, of an anti-radical strategy must be defending the people, territories, and interests of the United States and other targeted regimes against terrorist attacks. Passive defenses to keep terrorists out are important, along with active security measures. Israel has successfully reduced the infiltration of suicide bombers by means of its security fence, and Saudi Arabia is building a fence of its own to prevent terrorists from crossing into and out of Iraq. While making it more difficult for terrorists to inflict damage, the United States must work with other nations, including unsavory ones, to apprehend jihadists if possible and kill them if necessary. The military has a role to play in some circumstances, but this is primarily a task for international police and intelligence collaboration. Disrupting clandestine cells and networks is particularly important, because of the role of peer-group socialization in the making of jihadists.
While bin Laden and his allies must simply be defeated, their appeal to potential new recruits can be limited by policies that reduce feelings of collective humiliation in the Arab and Muslim worlds. According to a recent National Intelligence Estimate, the American occupation of Iraq is now inspiring jihadists in the way that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, Russian control of Chechnya, and Indian rule over Kashmiri Muslims long have done. Ending the humiliating occupation of Muslim populations by non-Muslim nations will remove some of the major grievances that jihadists use as a recruiting tool. Conversely, to perpetuate these deeply resented occupations in the name of fighting "Islamofascism" will only help the jihadists.
In addition, major Muslim nations that are sources of jihadist recruits must change too. Along with fighting non-Muslim occupiers, al Qaeda seeks to topple governments in Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan. Al Qaeda draws many of its recruits from closed societies that are intolerant of dissent; it is no coincidence that Saudis and Egyptians play such a key role in al Qaeda. If there were more open societies in the Muslim world, there might be more political space for Islamists who reject terrorism when out of power and who, if they gained power, would abide by the norms of the international system. This would likely reduce the appeal of al Qaeda as an alternative to conventional political participation.
Reducing poverty in the Middle East and around the world is a laudable goal in itself, for humanitarian reasons. But it would be a mistake to treat prosperity as a universal solvent that can deprive jihadists like bin Laden of allies and sympathizers in populations that feel humiliated by foreign domination or frozen out of politics. Ultimately, both foreign occupation and domestic autocracy are political problems that must find political, not economic, solutions. The campaign against jihadism and the campaign against global poverty are both justified. But they are not the same war."
A commenter calling himself "romat" on the website version of this article makes a strong counter-argument that perceived political impotence is a better explanation. As s/he argues:
"To the kind of terrorism to which your are speaking, terrorist actions against civilians, or mass terror, these are manifestly acts of felt *political* impotence born of desperation. You can talk all you want about how those feelings come about, and I'll agree that poverty is not typically or ever one of them (unless you classify the poor storming food storage depots as terrorism).
The underlying belief - really, strategy - of these sorts of terrorists - Al Qu'eda being a good example - is that terrorist action will act as a spark to mass uprising against the declared enemy by the indirect vehicle of eliciting state repression, since the latter invariably follows in response to terrorist action. A good, simple example worth studying toward understanding this kind of political thinking was right here in the U.S. a few decades ago, the Weatherman faction of SDS, and they certainly weren't political reactionaries, or particularly humiliated.
In the circumstances of Iraq, this script of impotence has morphed in some cases from the actions of an isolated band of Islamic warriors into a strategy of guerilla war (much different than the IRA and Zionists before them?). There's nothing like turning a large group, such as the Sunni population, in particular the army, police, civil servants and many professionals, into enemies. Nonetheless, who is going to deny that the Sunnis haven't and aren't still feeling impotent in the face of U.S. Occupation policy, including the setup of the Iraqi puppet government?"
And in many especially more autocratic situations, this perception may be matched by substantial enough reality to make terrorism more likely than in more democratic countries where more open, democratic institutions create more real opportunities for democratic engagmement and less feeling of impotence.
The pride/humiliation theory explains, better, why anti-democratic groups that have little proclaimed interest in more open, democratic institutions except as they facilitate their pursuit of their narrower ideological ends engage in terrorism, political violence, and political bullying to achieve their ends, even when more open, democratic institutions are available, as with left and right wing terrorism in the more mature democracies like the United States and Europe.
In both more autocratic and more democratic countries, plenty of democratically-committed activists help to build and expand more democratizing institutions, while terrorist and radical counterparts manipulate and undermine those same institutions. I would add that mainstream groups too often legitamize radical and terrorist action in both autocratic and democratic nations by using their threats of violence and bullying to, they believe, strengthen their hand in leveraging preferred political action.
What is powerful about the pride/humiliation theory is that it accounts for anti-democratic and quasi-democratic groups, many if not most of which rationalize authoritarian and autocratic methods and governing philosophies, as well as ideologies with poor ideas and ideologies hostile to democratic engagement, especially thoughtful intellectual debate and discussion, using terrorism, political violence, and political bullying to avoid ideological, intellectual, and democratic engagment in an open and free marketplace of ideas, with best ideas prevailing.
Terrorists and autocratic ideologues -- including state-ruling ideologues like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-Il -- do use the more repressive reactions by democratic and autocratic governments to rally support for their causes, as the commenter suggests. But they do not do so out of any genuine respect for democratic ideas and institutions that they simply lack access to and power in engaging, as a "political impotence" or "deprivation" theory might suggest. They do so, generally, out of disrespect for both those institutions and the democratic ideas that nurture them, both in mature democratic societies and in more autocratic societies.
Groups like the Weathermen and Hamas do not simply act out of a sense of impotence in the face of autocratic measures by governments. Hamas, for instance, has not, in the least, given up its terrorist ideology with control of the Palestinian government, nor have they, at all, engaged the more fundamentally democratically peace process with the more democratically mature Israeli government. The Weatherman acted in America, the oldest and most democratically mature democracy in the world, in the 1960's and 70's, with some of the most open and democratic institutions in the world and in the history of democracy, even given an American government and society that was far less open and democratic than the America of the early 21st century. Radical left groups and leaders established political magazines and journals, worked and were active in American universities, found audiences on national and local television programs, and even found allies in and/or were elected to democratic office.
What Hamas and the Weatherman, as just two examples, had in common was that they had poor ideas and violent, anti-democratic ideologies. And the failure of those ideas and ideologies as either governing philosophies and in the larger marketplace of ideas (Hamas won electoral support from Palestinians in the most recent elections, but it hardly has secured support from the international community or marketplace of ideas and is unlikely, I believe, to hold onto national support in Palestine, especially given a taste of the failure and incompetence of their governance).
Lind and Bergen's pride/humiliation thesis better explains why groups and individuals with poor ideas or groups or individuals with even good ideas that they are uncertain and afraid will experience more sustained, popular support -- meaning their fears and insecurities about their ideas lead their efforts more than the strength of their ideas, which are the more sustainable path to the growth of democratic ideas and institutions and progress on issues that socieites face -- pursue more violent, aggressive, and forceful strategies is because they lack faith and confidence in their ideas and lead with force out of fear and insecurity in those ideas rather than confidence in their efficacy, whether those ideas are strong or weak.
Al Queda is hardly concerned with the efficacy of a more theocratic Islamic governing philosophy. They want no debate on the issue, at all, because they fear the fate of a more theocratic Islamic ideology and lack faith and confidence in the rigor of an engaged, intellectual marketplace of ideas. Islamist, leftist, fascist, Nazi, and other terrorist groups may feature intellectuals in their movements and engage intellectually, but it is generally engagement that lacks a genuine respect for either the democratic institutions or the process of intellectual engagement which assumes humility and a need to engage those who disagree with them because they might be wrong. Generally, these ideoligies do not even consider that they might be wrong. Pride, not genuine intellectual engagement about complex issues, features in their thinking about their efforts, and makes more genuine intellectual engagement difficult, though not impossible, to engage, as peace processes in Northern Ireland, Spain, and around the world illustrate.
Desperation and feelings of political impotence are often a cover for intellectual and political arrogance in the face of such engagement. The intellectual humility needed for mature democratic engagement necessitates democratic engagement and a respect for democratic institutions and dialogue to create the safety and genuine security - political, material, personal, and even emotional security - needed for honest debate and discussion to take place. Many groups persistently take that security for granted and often undermine it by alligning themselves with groups and engaging in, themselves, political violence and bullying. But that security is necessary for more genuine democratic and intellectually honest engagement to take place.
Terrorism in more autocratic societies and nation-states is more likely to be explained, in part, by political impotence and desperation. And genuinely democratic revolution and rebellion in the face of autocracy - meaning military or political action genuinely meant to remove repressive government and establish democratic institutions rather than topple either autocratic or democratic institutions for more autocratic or repressive ends - is certainly distinct from terrorism which does not share those ends or which destroys or undermines democratic institutions in the name of other ends.
Bergen and Lind do a brilliant job of arguing for the need to, as they say, "reduce feelings of collective humiliation" and use four examples, American occupation of Iraq, Israeli occupation of Palestine, Russian occupation of Chechnya, and Indian occupation of Kashmir to illustrate areas where respect for legitimate claims of self-determination, a fairly important and established democratic principle, by local Muslim populations, would much more powerfully account for the concerns of people living in those areas than military force or political imposition.
In each of these areas (as is also true of every democratic and autocratic society in the world) there are plenty of legitimate concerns about poverty, political impotence and lack of access, and other rationalizations for terrorism and political violence. But what each of these cases also have in common is political groups without explicit or necessarily implicit democratic commitments that use violence in lieu of democratic engagement with established or functioning democratic institutions as an explicit strategy of effecting their ends, democratic institutions and norms be damned.
The bottom line for most if not all terrorist groups, by definition - meaning distinct from groups with more explicit democratic commitments and which engage democratic institutions with respect for those institutions and democratic norms - is they generally favor their ends completely independent of political access and power, except when they are convinced that they can successfully threaten or impose their will on populations, in lieu of persuading them.
Pride, or lack of democratic humility, is a much better explanation for the behavior of such groups than political impotence or poverty, even as these explanations might also explain the behavior of such groups in more autocratic countries or support for these groups when poverty is used as a rationalization or rallying theme or ideological underpinning.
Bergen and Lind's argument is a powerful and valuable argument in the on-going debate and discussion about constructively and effectively addressing the problem of terrorism in the international community and within sovereign nations. And, very powerfully, it undermines excuses and rationalizations for terrorism and political violence by too sympathetic observers and advocates.
Pride is not an ignoble motivation for terrorists groups, alone. Political parties, activist groups, journalists, commentators, scholars, and citizens, all of us, engage politics too proudly, too self-righteously and with too little willingness to acknowledge that we might be wrong about either means or ends, which is the reason that democratic and intellectually honest discussion and debate are the most ideal forms of democratic engagement. They have serious consequences on the quality of our democratic debates, discussions, elections, policies, ideas and the credibility of democratic institutions, generally.
But an important distinction must be made between those who engage with respect for democratic institutions and norms, intellectual honesty and engagement, and a general respect for the marketplace of ideas and those who seek to circumvent and manipulate those institutions and lack faith, trust, confidence, and respect for those institutions, norms, discussion, and ideas, especially those who use violence to challenge and undermine those institutions rather than challenging them and reforming them respecting democratic norms and means. And even in more repressive societies and with more autocratic states, a distinction must be made between those who engage in political activity, even violent activity, with explicit democratic commitments and respect for or a commitment to establishing democratic institutions and norms and those who lack respect for democratic institutions and norms and/or see democratic institutions as irrelevant or as a means to an ideological end.
There is an assumption behind my analysis that is important to question: that good ideas take root, especially in a more open and democratic marketplace of ideas. A corollary to that assumption is that good ideas are the more ultimate judgment on policies, governing, issues, culture, and power than power alone and who captures it. It's a legitimate and important question. But they are both ideas that history bears out both in real institutions - ideas like democracy will out because they are better ideas and form stronger governments and societies and ideas like autocracy fail because they are failed and worse ideas and form weaker governments and societies - and in form and process - historians center their judgments (rather than homogenously settling on any one final judgment or idea) around better ideas of the form, substance, consequences, etc. of better institutions, cultural trends, resolution of important issues, choices and thinking of democratic actors, etc.
Historians, scholars, and other democratic thinkers center their judgments around ideas and institutions that they believe better support the values that support the long-term growth of the culture, as much as match their more narrow biases. And it is that long term democratic marketplace of ideas that animates the judgments and outlooks of future generations. Better ideas always win out, long-term, independent of the immediate political and historical moment, by definition, because it is that democratic marketplace of ideas that reflects the ideas and values that a culture deems valuable enough to pass on to future generations.
Political violence and bullying neither respects stronger democratic institutions, norms, ideas, and judgments, nor is is able to overwhelm those stronger democratic institutions, norms, ideas, and judgments because those norms, ideas, and judgments are the more final verdict on the efforts of groups who engage in political violence and bullying and because they support stronger cultures and governments capable of stronger, more thoughtful, and more effective ideas, institutions, and action than their anti-democratic or democratically ambivalent counterparts.
As Stephen Ambrose wrote in his counterfactual assessment of the Normandy Invasion, there was very little question that the democratic Allies would defeat Hitler's Nazi regime, the real question was how long it would take and how many people would die in the process. The democratic allies, both by virtue of being democratic and their stronger, more thoughtful, more resource-rich capacities, their military victory and more sustainable cultures and political institutions, and by the clear judgment of history, were stronger than the Nazi regime. But even had they lost critical military victories and/or been overwhelmed by the force of the Nazi regime, as John Keegan and others have postulated, it is highly unlikely that democratic citizens of Allied countries would have somehow permanently submitted to a Nazi victory or even Communist imposition had the Soviets won a hot war in the race to Berlin or in its aftermath.
There was and would be a clear democratic consensus that Naziism, Communism, or any other anti-democratic philosophy did not support the growth of their peoples and cultures, just as citizens of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union eventually concluded, because as an objective fact of history they did not. And democracy and a democratic marketplace of ideas did and do support their cultures and peoples better. Power can only ignore realities of life and history for so long before those realities catch up with their power. It is both a democratic marketplace of historical reflection that renders and would, in the case of a Nazi or Soviet victory, render that judgment. And that is the clearest possible judgment that history has to render on undemocratic institutions or less then fully democratic institutions, governments, or cultures.
And, similarly, terrorists and groups that engage in political violence and bullying cannot will out over democratic societies and governments, especially the more consistently they apply democratic principles like self-determination, intelligent and constructive engagement, distinctions between different terrorist groups and possibilities for constructively combating and dealing with their threats, military force and law enforcement that is most discriminating, least threatening, and least destructive to civilian populations possible, the most humane and least aggressive means possible of dealing with terrorist threats, and honest and genuinely democratically committed engagement with democratic and non-democratic partners, citizens, and populations.
That is why analyses like Michael Lind's and Peter Bergen's are so critical to developing a more effective response to threats like terrorism. The better we understand who we are dealing with the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their claims, causes, and means, and the consequences of our actions on past, present, and future political and cultural realities, the more effectively we will defend ourselves and the democratic institutions that they are so hostile to.
