Globalisation's Chernobyl September 11 exposed neoliberalism's shortcomings as a solution to the world's conflicts
By ULRICH BECK
The terrorist attacks on America were the Chernobyl of globalisation. Just as the Russian disaster undermined our faith in nuclear energy, so September 11 exposed the false promise of neoliberalism.
The suicide bombers not only exposed the vulnerability of western civilisation but also gave a taste of the conflicts that globalisation can bring. Suddenly, the seemingly irrefutable tenets of neoliberalism - that economics will supercede politics, that the role of the state will diminish - lose their force in a world of global risks.
The privatisation of aviation security in the US provides just one example, albeit a highly symbolic one. America's vulnerability is indeed very much related to its political philosophy. It was long suspected that the US was a possible target of terrorist attacks. But, unlike in Europe, aviation security was privatised and entrusted to highly flexible part-time workers who are paid even less than employees in fast-food restaurants.
It is America's self-image that creates its vulnerability. The horrible pictures of New York contain an as yet un-decoded message: a state can neoliberalise itself to death.
Neoliberalism has always been a fair-weather philosophy, one that works only when there are no serious conflicts and crises. It asserts that only globalised markets, freed from regulation and bureaucracy, can remedy the world's ills - unemployment, poverty, economic breakdown and the rest. Today, the capitalist fundamentalists' unswerving faith in the redeeming power of the market has proved to be a dangerous illusion.
In times of crises, neoliberalism has no solutions to offer. Fundamental truths that were pushed aside return to the fore. Without taxation, there can be no state. Without a public sphere, democracy and civil society, there can be no legitimacy. And without legitimacy, no security. From this, it follows that without legitimate forums for settling national and global conflicts, there will be no world economy in any form whatsoever.
Neoliberalism insisted that economics should break free of national models and instead impose transnational rules of business conduct. But, at the same time, it assumed that government would stick to national boundaries and the old way of doing things. Since September 11, governments have rediscovered the possibilities and power of inter-national co-operation - for example, in maintaining internal security. Suddenly the necessity of statehood, the counter-principle of neoliberalism, is omnipresent. A European arrest warrant that supersedes national sovereignty in judicial and legal enforcement - unthinkable until recently - has become a possibility. We may soon see a similar convergence towards shared rules and frameworks in economics.
In this sense, terrorism has achieved the exact opposite of what it intended: it has brought forth an era of globalised government, the cross-border invention of politics through networking and co-operation. It turns out that resistance merely accelerates globalisation's development.
Here, then, is the central paradox: globalisation is the name given to a strange process that is driven forward both by those who support it and by those who oppose it. Just think of the precision with which the terrorists choreographed their attacks on New York and Washington, knowing that their deeds would be transmitted live around the world by global media networks.
Does this mean that globalisation itself is the root cause of terrorism? Was September 11 an understandable reaction to a steamroller that is going to destroy even the most remote corners of the world? No. No abstract idea, no God, can justify or excuse the attacks. Globalisation is an ambiguous process but one that cannot be rolled back. Smaller and weaker states in particular are turning away from autarky in an effort to catch up with world markets.
But we need to combine economic integration with cosmopolitan politics. Human dignity, cultural identity and otherness must be taken more seriously in the future. Since September 11, the gulf between the world of those who profit from globalisation and the world of those who feel threatened by it has been closed. Helping those who have been excluded is no longer a humanitarian task. It is in the west's own interest: the key to its security.
To turn back the hatred felt by billions of people, the wells that will always nourish Osama bin Ladens, globalisation must become accountable and its fruits and freedoms must be distributed more fairly.
The danger is that the exact opposite will happen: that the imagined risks and false promises of security will instead create a spiral of expectations that can only end in disappointment. There is a risk that trans-national co-operation will become a means of creating fortresses, states in which both the freedom of demo-cracy and the freedom of markets are sacrificed on the altar of private security.
The author is professor of sociology at the university of Munich and at the London School of Economics