The world of Stalinism, with its ethnic cleansings, deportations, labour camps and deliberately induced famines, was a radical departure from anything that might have been expected in Western Christian thought or in the Enlightenment tradition, for which everything was in principle rationally explicable. Yet that world held out for much of the twentieth century, and a few offshoots, in North Korea, Burma or Laos, survive to this day. This is of interest to our argument only because twentieth-century trends in state systems show that unexpected developments can suddenly appear and persist, generating social realities with which no one had previously reckoned. In this light, the belief that all societies will sooner or later follow the OECD model proves to be a mere illusion, and an ahistorical one at that. For the Western experiment has been going on for just 250 years, and history will not come to an end when that experiment is over.
Other systems of rule existed for considerably longer and collapsed in the end. But until now – with a few exceptions – much less attention has been given to the fall of societies than to their rise, so that there are as few models of systemic implosion as there are of unexpected variants of development. Which theory of the state allows for capitalist autocracies such as Russia or China, or for a modern fundamentalist state such as Iran? And which has room for the ‘anachronistic’ intrusion of seemingly old causes of conflict into modern processes of development?
The major conflicts of the twentieth century appeared to take place under an imperial and, later (in the Cold War), ideological aegis. But since the brief post-1989 period of Euro-American euphoria came to a rude end, we have seen a revival of fault lines that one would have thought more typical of the nineteenth century than the twenty-first.
What today look like religious wars undoubtedly belong to an earlier time in history, and although they involve reactions to modernization and globalization they are real and tangible conflicts that have arisen under the aegis of religion, in which highly charged terms such as ‘Crusaders’ or ‘failed states’ are used to label the two antagonistic sides. Once a conflict is defined in such a way that the groups stand radically opposed to each other as ‘us’ and ‘them’, mediation is no longer possible and the hostilities will last at least until one side or the other is victorious. This is the logic common to jihad and the ‘war on terror’: a peace agreement between equals is ruled out in faith wars. The opposing sides constantly reinforce the attitudes and claims that each has about the other.
Faith wars therefore impact on the reference frameworks that are part of the hostile configuration. Mirror-image fundamentalisms emerge, such as the sects in the United States which, exploiting pseudo-scientific disputes over creationism and evolutionism, have spilled over into Europe too. It is still hard to say what value shifts might develop out of these mirror reactions, but if, in the thoroughly secular 1960s (the age of civil rights movements, anti-colonial liberation wars, growing liberalization in the West and occasional stormy weather in the East), anyone had predicted that violent conflicts would soon be dominated by religion, he or she would certainly have been pronounced ignorant of earthly reality.
Yet that is how things are today, four decades later. And just as religious wars are back, so too are class conflicts, albeit in a new form. With globalization and the supranational operations of companies and hedge funds, class society too has emancipated itself from nation-state boundaries. The chief executive of an automobile corporation, the manager of an investment trust, the IT specialist, the manual worker from a low-wage country and the illegal migrant worker – all represent, in their very different ways, the global asymmetry of opportunities for economic activity. Whereas transnational business has for a long time operated outside narrow legal frameworks, using national regulations only as opportunity structures for technological, fiscal or political decisions as to location, both skilled and unskilled labour can follow in the same direction and achieve income levels that would be utopian in their place of origin. The return of class society thus happens in a space beyond the nation-state, outside the traditional institutions for conflict resolution that were often the product of long and hard struggles in the past. At the same time, there are no international trade unions or supranational economics or social ministries capable of taking effective action to moderate the disparities. It is not yet possible to see the kind of conflicts that will emerge in this new class society.
Finally, there is the revival of resource conflicts, and, as we have already seen, these are likely to become more intense as the world’s reserves of oil, uranium, water, and so on, dry up. Disputes over resources thought to lie beneath the Arctic Ocean or the Antarctic ice give a foretaste of the return of resource imperialism, which was thought to belong to history. The fight to conquer and divide has already begun (see pp. 93–95 above).
The dominant conflicts of the twenty-first century are therefore global class, faith and resource conflicts. And, in the absence of effective transnational players or a monopoly of force in relations between states, we may say that there is scarcely any scope to regulate these new-old conflicts. To be sure, judging by recent cases of violence linked to the environment and resources, it can be assumed that such conflicts will never be one-dimensional but will either involve interdependent factors at the outset or come to do so as they progress. Here issues such as justice, ethnicization, revenge, and so on, also play a role in sharpening the conflict.
The Cold War age of system rivalry and competing utopias, which seems almost idyllic in retrospect, is over for the time being. What is now at stake, after a peculiar turn in history, is a series of hot conflicts over space and resources, which over the coming decades will have a fundamental impact on the shape of Western societies. We know from the totalitarianisms and genocides of the last century how quickly an attempted solution to social problems can turn into sharply divisive formulas and deadly actions.
Of course, history does not repeat itself. Formats for the resolution of security problems will look different in the twenty-first century, if only because new communications media have triggered a competitive spiral between terrorists and security services and shifted the locus of international tensions. The scale of the violence has also changed things, especially since (quite apart from Iraq and Afghanistan) Western countries have deployed their means for the internal and external use of force to regions where this makes direct confrontation inevitable. Two clear cases in point are the prevention of illegal migration, where the control of borders is being de-territorialized, and the increasing efforts in internal security matters to make ‘pre-criminal activity’ liable to punishment.1
The return of private armed forces in national and international conflicts seems curiously pre-modern, but paradoxically it is closely linked to the modernization of violence. After the end of the Second World War, and at the latest by the end of the Cold War, the dawning of something like a post-heroic age placed classical forms of offensive warfare and the use of torture and other such means under increased legitimation pressure. But since, even in the post-heroic age, particular interests still require violence to assert themselves, there has been a trend in recent years to turn both military and police functions over to private companies. It has been predicted that in future private companies will also intervene in conflicts over raw materials.2 Such shifts in the use of force to the private sector have hollowed out the state monopoly of violence and parliamentary control over military action, representing a retreat from the levels of control achieved in the previous period.
A similar delegation of power takes place when potential frontier violators are arrested in buffer countries, thereby avoiding incidents in border regions and the violence that is often associated with them. In such cases, too, the use of force is turned over to another party – not a private agency, though, but the authorities of another state.
An analogous trend is visible in attempts to make certain actions punishable even before a crime is committed – for example, strategic or technological activity in the field of terrorism. Though desirable in the eyes of the authorities, this has dire implications for democracy: it changes the law-based state into a preventive state (as Heribert Prantl put it), automatically placing its citizens under suspicion. But if ‘the boundary between the innocent and the guilty, the suspicious and the unsuspicious, is removed’,3 so that telephone and internet data can be routinely recorded, bank accounts monitored and an individual’s daily movements followed, irrespective of any suspicion, then the result is an erosion of the rule of law.
Both these sets of reactions to real and perceived problems are changing the face of Western democracies. But the less the rule of law is observed in crisis situations, the weaker are the weapons of civilization against arbitrariness and violence, and the more radical the attempted solutions to social problems will become.