The Unmaking of Global Order

This article was external pageoriginally publishedcall_made by the external pageDanish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)call_made on 17 October 2016.

Global Jihad has never presented an existential threat to European nation states, the US or the liberal world order. Neither the US after 11 September, nor France after the violent attacks in 2015, were fundamentally under threat as sovereign states. Global Jihad is asymmetric warfare that can cause extensive damage and misery, but in military terms, it is not capable of defeating sovereign states.

The Mujahidin (holy warriors) only succeeded in forcing the Soviet Union to retreat from Afghanistan in the 1980s because they received massive support from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US. Global Jihad is therefore not in itself an existential threat: neither to nation states, nor to world order. On the other hand, the reaction to global Jihad and to terrorism has dramatically shaken up the foundations of national as well as international liberal order.

The number of traditional wars between states is falling, whereas rebellion, civil war and sectarian conflicts are becoming ever more prominent in global armed conflict. This trend has been apparent since the end of the Second World War. Moreover, although the London-based think-tank Institute for International and Strategic Studies has concluded that external pagethe total number of armed conflicts is in declinecall_made, there is the worrying addition that they are becoming more violent with more victims, both in terms of number of fatalities and the number of people driven out of their homes, either as internally displaced or as refugees across national borders.

Conflicts in the Middle East and South Asia in particular spring to mind in this context, especially the violent developments in Libya, the Horn of Africa, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and not least, events played out in Iraq and Syria over the past 15 years, that have escalated even more since the Arab Spring in 2011. Jihad networks play a significant role in all of these conflicts, and led by the US, Western states are also involved in them all to combat the networks and, in addition to the risks entailed for the soldiers deployed and Western interests in the conflict zones, this leads to threat of terrorism. Furthermore, the conflicts have led to huge streams of refugees, internally in the conflict-torn countries, to neighbouring countries, and in 2015 to Europe.

After the 9/11 2001 terrorist actions, the US decided to combat terrorism militarily; first in major wars to prompt regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then as secret operations including “targeting killings” by drones or special forces, such as when Osama Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May 2011. The military efforts have been followed up by stricter legislation and anti-terrorism initiatives, including increased surveillance, limitations on access to administrative documents, checks on cash flows and bank information, and establishment of the Department for Homeland Security to coordinate efforts such as the reform of the organisation of the intelligence community.

The American military operations to regime change were justified by the George W. Bush government in that spreading democracy and establishing a liberal world order based on international law and international conventions would be the best safeguard against terrorist action. But with the additional point that the US reserved the right to unilateral operations, including pre-emptive strikes on sovereign states, if these states constituted a threat to the world order e.g. by providing a safe haven for global terrorists (external pageThe National Security Strategy of the United States of America, The White House, September 2002call_made).

The rest of this article argues that the most serious threat to development of a liberal world order is the way in which liberal states have decided to wage the War on Terror and the different contradictions of the idea of a liberal world order. The article argues that the way in which liberal states, spearheaded by the US, have waged the War on Terror is a greater threat to a liberal world order than the threat from transnational and global Jihadists and terrorists.

Sunni Muslim Jihad networks and the War against Terror
In most of the conflicts in the regions mentioned above, Sunni Muslims dominate the rebel groups and the Jihad networks with a political Islamic ideology that either is inspired by, or is close to, the one we know from al-Qaeda and Islamic State. However, there are also rebel groups with members loyal to different sects within Shia Islam such as the Houthi group in Yemen. There are also Shia Muslim militia in Iraq fighting with the Iraqi army against Sunni Muslim Jihad networks and Hezbollah in Lebanon, who support the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus against both secular and Sunni Muslim-based rebel groups. Nevertheless, the West has primarily waged war against Sunni Muslim-based Jihad networks since the 11 September 2001 terrorist actions against Washington and New York triggered the American “War on Terror” response with support from the West.

Today, militant Sunni Muslim Jihad networks operate in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Sahel, other parts of Africa, including Nigeria, and the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, particularly in Yemen, in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and in South-East Asia and Central Asia and the Caucasus. They also have offshoots to people and networks in North America and Europe, where they increasingly commit terrorist actions or constitute terrorist threats.

Although these networks operate in regional contexts, with local agendas and often without either organisational links or direct contact with leaders of Islamic State and al-Qaeda, they are perceived by Western states, or indeed themselves, as in some way part of global Jihad. This also applies, for example, to an individual who commits a violent action in the EU entirely by himself, and who at the last moment shouts praises to Islamic State and dedicates his action to the Caliphate.

Fifteen years into the War on Terror, alias the war against the Sunni Muslim global Jihad network, started in October 2001 with the war in Afghanistan, the threat from these networks is greater than ever before. Neither the American nor the European intelligence services consider the threat of major and complex terrorist attacks, like that which levelled the World Trade Center in September 2001, as particularly great, but on the other hand they see a growing risk for many smaller and more primitive actions with knives, axes, hand weapons and suicide belts, or other tools such as trucks that plough into crowds of people, as occurred in Nice in July 2016 and previously in Iraq and China.

These more primitive acts of violence can be very bloody, however, as in the Nice attack in which more than 84 people were killed. Such acts terrify populations in the countries in which they occur, and they force governments to take action and anti-terror initiatives like in France that, because of terrorism, is in a state of emergency and at the same time involved in military action against the Jihad networks in Sahel, Syria and Iraq.

Fault line conflicts
Wars between ethnic and religious groups have been called “fault line conflicts” by Samuel P. Huntingdon, the American professor of international politics at Harvard University, in his book The Clash of Civilizations. With regard to these wars, he highlights that both sides involved in the conflict tend to “engage in massacres, terrorism, rape and torture”, exactly as the world has witnessed in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya and the other conflict zones.

In his analysis of fault line conflicts, Huntington continues: ”They are protracted conflicts. When they go on within states, they have on average lasted six times longer than interstate wars. Involving fundamental issues of group identity and power, they are difficult to resolve through negotiations and compromise. When agreements are reached, they often are not subscribed to by all parties on each side and usually do not last long. Fault line wars are off-again-on-again wars that can flame up into massive violence and then sputter down into low-intensity or sullen hostility only to flame up once again”.

Such wars are difficult to contain, and therefore they have a strong tendency to spread by involving and mobilising groups and individuals in the “regions of origin”, i.e. countries bordering on the wars and in the states that involve themselves in the wars. This can also be as exacerbated threats of terrorist action, e.g. from diaspora groups that support enemies of Denmark, for example in Syria and Iraq, and which Denmark is involved in defeating like the Islamic State. In contrast to wars between states, fault line conflicts are more bloody, entail a significantly greater risk of civilian casualties, are harder to contain, and they mobilise groups and individuals across borders, eventually actually becoming global.

Huntington’s theory has been criticised for having an essentialist view of civilisations; that it breaks a given civilisation down into a series of ahistorical characteristics based on a narrow interpretation of religion and ideology. Even though this criticism is true, it does not necessarily imply that the concept of fault line conflict is essentialist: The concept is primarily used here to describe war in which sectarianism and identity politics play a greater role, but identity is precisely an historical and context-determined concept that changes in time and place.

Fault line conflicts develop when the core power in a territory loses control, is actually removed, or dissolves, as was the case in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Sahel countries. This means that the task involves more than defeating rebel groups and Jihad networks, political solutions and reconciliation. A central power must be established before order and stability can be restored. As things look now, this will take a long time in the states mentioned above, which are all currently fragmented into various weak and sectarian local and regional power centers. Defeating Islamic State in Syria and Iraq will therefore not end the fault line conflicts in the Levant, but as Huntington predicts, it is likely to get them “sputter down into low-intensity warfare or sullen hostility only to flame up once again” (Samuel P. Huntington: external pageThe Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Ordercall_made. New York: Touchstone Books 1998: p. 253).

After 15 years, the War on Terror has still not delivered many, if any, good and sustainable results, but it has contributed to a number of fault line conflicts currently raging in the Middle East, from Libya in the west to Afghanistan in the east, and from Syria in the north to Yemen in the south. These conflicts are now in danger of spreading to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and several states in North Africa; they have provoked terrorism in Europe and North America, and they have caused the huge refugee problem.

Of course, it is not right to cast all the blame for this tragedy on the War on Terror. Illegitimate authoritarian regimes in the Middle East have also been a catalyst for the growth of the Sunni Muslim Jihad networks, which developed in earnest in the 1970s with the war in Afghanistan, in the 1990s with the civil war in Algeria and with the first Iraq war (1991) and its significance for Saudi Arabia, the consequences of the second Iraq war (2003) and the way authoritarian regimes dealt with the Arab Spring after 2011. The Middle East and South Asia are fertile territory for the Jihad networks and they have been nourished by authoritarian regimes, but the liberal Western democracies, with the US at the head, have been deeply involved in the development, from massive support for the Jihad network in Afghanistan in the war against the Soviet occupation (1980-1992) to the strategy to topple regimes in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011): The foundation for growth of global Jihad has been established by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, but the years-long military intervention in the conflicts has caused the Jihad networks to spread in line with the growth in the number of fault line conflicts.

The threat from global Jihad
The answer to the question of “how non-state transnational actors challenge national states and development of the liberal world order” is therefore not entirely straightforward insomuch as the growth of “non-state transnational actors” depends on, and is affected by, how states and national states as well as the liberal world order act in relation to them. The influence of non-state transnational actors on world order is growing exponentially in line with increasing globalisation in which, for example, the Hungarian-British financier George Soros can invest considerably more funds to promote liberal and democratic political trends in specific areas of Eastern Europe than the American and British governments combined.

Whether this challenges, or rather supports, the liberal world order is debatable, but it is hardly of relevance in the current context, in which focus is on the transnational movements behind political violence, rebel wars and terrorism. Neither is there anything homogenous about the issues, but rather there are groupings of vastly different agendas from right wing and left-wing extremism to the already mentioned Sunni Muslim Jihad network. We will restrict ourselves to global Jihad in this article.

This does not make the question any easier to answer, however, precisely because the global Jihad networks have spread and have become involved in ever more fault line conflicts as the War on Terror has unfolded. It is true that the US President, Barack Obama, and the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, stopped referring to the war against the Sunni Muslim Jihad network as the War on Terror, but despite this, not least Obama has actually intensified the war considerably during his term of office. Clearly, it cannot be claimed that there is a simple causal link between the expansion of the War on Terror and the increase in the number of fault line conflicts in which Sunni Muslim Jihad networks are involved, because the development is obviously much more complex. However, it is impossible to ignore that there is a link.

The reaction to terrorism
Although the two major terrorist attacks in France against Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and against soft targets in Paris in November 2015 brought France into a state of emergency, the country has at no time been under existential threat as a sovereign state and in fact, only about six months after the November attack, France was in a position to host both the European Championships in football and the annual Tour de France. However, the stronger security measures, the state of emergency, and the extensive anti-terror initiatives have without doubt had a negative effect on liberal due legal process and the sharper polarisation between critics of Muslim immigration and the Muslim immigrants themselves, even though, all things considered, France is still an open and liberal democracy.

In the US too, the 11 September attacks led to significant intrusions on due process, both as comprehensive surveillance of American citizens and, in the period immediately after the attacks, detention of thousands of Muslims without a warrant and without informing relatives (those arrested simply disappeared), and restrictions on access to public documents etc. (as in Denmark).

In Denmark, particularly after the terrorist actions in France in 2015 and the shootings at a political meeting and at a Synagogue in Copenhagen in February 2015, a number of tighter laws have been introduced that have led to wider authority for the intelligence services and the police, more surveillance and control, and restrictions on freedom of expression. Politicians and lawyers still discuss whether Denmark has gone too far with restrictions on constitutional rights and possible invasions of privacy, but irrespective of whether the initiatives are considered necessary or whether they are criticised, there is widespread political consensus that Denmark is still a free and liberal society with a generally high level of due legal process. Despite this, in Denmark as in other European states and in the US, basic liberal values have been compromised to combat terrorism and global Jihad.

Turning to the international justice system, the slide in interpretations of a liberal world order is even clearer in relation to the War on Terror, which in a Danish context was particularly apparent in connection with the debate on how to react to Syria’s use of chemical weapons against Syrian rebels in August 2013:

As early as in 2002, with its National Security strategy, the George W. Bush government argued for the legitimate right of the US and the “free world” to conduct so-called pre-emptive military strikes without a UN mandate. Initially, the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and his government maintained that the war in Iraq was based on resolutions by the UN Security Council, but later, in 2005, Anders Fogh Rasmussen argued that he was impelled to go to war without a UN mandate. This met massive criticism from the opposition and from the Conservative People's Party, which was part of the Fogh Rasmussen government.

Although the American and Danish standpoints referred to weapons of mass destruction as the justification for a war circumventing the UN, it was also clearly encouraged by the security policy philosophy that developed in the US in the wake of reactions to the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. In 2013, the chair of the Danish Foreign Policy Committee at the time, Mette Gjerskov, said that, “Danes will just have to get used to going to war without a UN mandate”. With support from a majority of the Danish parliament, the Helle Thorning-Schmidt government declared that Denmark would respect a US appeal for support for a military operation against Bashar al-Assad, even if the UN Security Council did not sanction this appeal.

Irrespective of opinions about this, the trend is clear: In 2003, Denmark required a UN mandate to go to war. In 2005, the prime minister argued that it could be necessary for Denmark to enter a war without a mandate and was met with massive criticism from one of the government parties and in particular from the opposition. In 2013, the government and a majority of the opposition agreed that war without a mandate from the UN could be both legitimate and necessary. This process demonstrates that there is great willingness among liberal states today to enter a war without a UN mandate, and this links back to the War on Terror and threats of global Jihad. If the liberal world order means an order based on international law, in which conventions are both the legitimate and legal basis for war, then the War on Terror has greatly eroded the basis for such an order: Legally, because the liberal states today are more willing to wage war without a UN mandate; and legitimacy has been impaired because the War on Terror has been based on a desire to spread democracy and the liberal order, but in fact it has always resulted in the opposite, even though everyone can agree that Saddam Hussein’s regime was unusually abhorrent and that Islamic State has absolutely no legitimacy for its brutal use of violence and support for terrorism.

The liberal world order has lost its legitimacy
The wars conducted in the name of the War on Terror have been justified in the ambition to spread democracy and the liberal order, but they have ended as fault line conflicts, which naturally impairs both the credibility and the legitimacy of the idea of the liberal world order. This loss of legitimacy has been reinforced by a number of factors such as the establishment of Guantánamo, use of torture by the US against suspected terrorists who were detained under the George W. Bush government in defiance of the liberal principles of due process, illegal transports of prisoners (renditions), use of weapons in contravention of the Geneva Conventions – and in particular under Barack Obama, thousands of targeted killings of alleged terrorists without due process carried out by drones or in secret operations (such operations are today being conducted in an unknown but high number of states throughout the world).

In the documentary film external pageDirty Warscall_made, Jeremy Scahill quotes a CIA agent as saying that the US conducts targeted killings in up to 70 states. There is no doubt that such operations contravene the principles of a liberal world order and international conventions on waging war, and this has been admitted by proponents for such an order at the same time as they argue for the necessity to defend the very same order. Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian professor of human rights and international politics at Harvard, described the War on Terror and its clear breach of international principles of law in his 2004 book, external pageThe Lesser Evil.call_madeexternal pagePolitical Ethics in Age of Terrorcall_made. He argues that these breaches are necessary to combat global Jihad. This challenges and weakens the idea of a liberal world order.

There is no doubt that global Jihad poses a threat through terrorism in the West, China and countries in Africa, and an even greater threat to civilians through the fault line conflicts in the Middle East and other states. The War on Terror started in Afghanistan with the removal of the Taliban regime and bombing of the al-Qaeda stronghold in the Tora Bora Mountains in autumn 2001. Both the Taliban and al-Qaeda were out of Afghanistan by spring 2002, but the war continued because it was not just about combatting terrorism after 11 September, but also about spreading the liberal world order through war and the strategy to oust regimes. The goal was to establish democracy in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq and to see democracy spread as ripples in a pool to the other Arabic countries. Instead, we have seen the creation of fertile soil for Sunni Muslim Jihad networks to operate in all Arabic countries and threaten or commit terrorist actions globally. Therefore, the threat against the liberal world order originates more from the way in which liberal states have chosen to combat global Jihad than from the Sunni Muslim Jihad networks themselves.

The US cannot and will not establish order in the Middle East
Although the War on Terror was rhetorically declared as over in 2009, it continues undeterred today, but without the George W. Bush government’s vision of spreading and consolidating a liberal world order. For the US today, it is not about spreading a specific world order, but about reducing the terrorist threat against the American homeland and the European allies, securing the US’s allies in the region, in particular Iraqi Kurdistan and Israel, and stabilising the Middle East as much as possible by reducing the level of violence. It is about anti-terrorism, about securing allies, and about stabilisation.

Regarding the situation in Syria and Iraq, there are no solutions in sight, and in fact, solutions are not actually what the US looking for. The ambition of the US is neither a democratic Iraq nor peace and reconciliation in Syria. The Barack Obama government realised long ago that these ambitions were entirely unrealistic and impossible for the US to achieve. If a new and sustainable order is to be established in Syria and Iraq, the region itself will have to make it happen. For the US, the bar is much lower. The US goal is best summarised as status quo with less violence, and the US intervention is now better described as conflict management rather than conflict resolution.

It is also difficult to draw up a model by which the US could realise any more ambitious goal. Russia and Iran consider Bashar al-Assad as the legitimate leader of Syria, and all the opposition groups as illegitimate terrorists, while it is extremely difficult for the US and Europe to see al-Assad as the solution to the Syrian problem. Saudi Arabia and Turkey want to oust al-Assad, and Turkey is in open war with the Kurds, who are supported by the US and who the US hopes can contribute to reducing the level of violence.

Ideas of dividing Syria into small enclaves as in the Balkan solution are therefore not attractive to Russia, China, Iran, Turkey or Saudi Arabia. What can the US do about it? In Iraq, the US and the alliance against Islamic State support a sectarian government carried by Iran and Shia Muslim militia. Right now, this Shia-dominated government is working with the liberal world to fight Islamic State, but at the same time, it supports the Bashar al-Assad regime and seeks to dominate Iraqi Kurdistan. A change of regime in Baghdad, actively supported by the US, will bring the US in direct collision course with China, Russia and Iran, just as the US is already on a collision course with its otherwise traditional ally, Turkey. For the US, it seems almost impossible that all these pieces will ever fall into place, and therefore the US is aiming much lower: only to reduce the level of violence, secure Iraqi Kurdistan and combat terrorism. In other words, the liberal world order in the Middle East is on hold, and the US is now concerned about its own security and not about saving the world unilaterally and spreading the liberal world order.

It seems very likely that fault line conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa, Sahel, South Asia and other places will continue for many years to come. This will clearly lead to more pressure from refugees, both in the region and on European borders, and this in turn will lead to further restrictions, new border controls and demands for changes (in this case impairments) to refugee and human rights conventions. In a number of areas, the US and the liberal states have already put the liberal world order on stand-by in their reaction to the challenge from global Jihad.

About the Author

Lars Erslev Andersen is a senior researcher of International Security at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS).

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