In both eras, these same technological innovations brought into being something else the world had never seen before: an era of international terrorism. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a relatively small group of radical anarchists wreaked havoc across Europe and the United States. In the twentieth century, the same thing occurred with Islamist terrorists. In both epochs, the new transportation and communication technologies provided the tools to conduct these new forms of coordinated internationalized destruction, as well as the means to broadcast the news of the events across the world in real time.
Compounding these developments, immigration increased exponentially just when national communities had begun to struggle from the impacts of a global economy in transition. Fear that foreigners were taking away jobs and introducing dangers to the nation became intensified by new forms of sensationalized media. As tensions developed between immigrant groups and host-country citizens, anti-immigrant backlashes came to permeate politics and feed nascent defensive nationalism across the Global North.
In 1893, during a performance of Rossini’s opera William Tell, a bomb was hurled into the Barcelona Opera House. Thirty or more people were killed. Again, on February 12, 1894, a young man threw a bomb into a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. For the belle époque, the randomness of these bombings was an unfamiliar horror. There had been acts of public violence before, but the targets had all been state officials—tsars, unpopular politicians, or perhaps a group of soldiers or policemen. Now, for the first time, the targets were “innocent people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”1 “In an age unaccustomed to terrorist attacks on women and children, the shocking spectacle of their murder at the hands of anarchists drove many observers into a frenzy.”2
The attacks were conducted by anarchist extremists. Though small in number, they were empowered by a new deadly technology: dynamite. Alfred Nobel’s 1866 invention proved to be the ideal delivery system for a poorly funded, anti-establishment movement. Explosive devices could be hurled anywhere by anyone—into crowded cafés, religious processions, and operatic performances. For the first time in history, lone actors could easily target large numbers of civilians. The new forms of violence were terrifying, not only for their arbitrary lethality, but also their global scale. The violence was not restricted to any one country. Nor was it restricted to the European continent. Anarchist terrorism first appeared in the United States in 1886 with the bombing of a labor rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago. The bombing shocked the nation. Seven police officers and at least four civilians were killed, and dozens were injured. Fifteen years later, an anarchist assassinated President William McKinley in 1901. Even more deadly was the 1920 bombing of Wall Street, which left 30 people dead and 143 seriously injured.
The internationalization of these terrorist attacks, and the fact that “the dynamiting and assassinations often took place in several countries simultaneously . . . magnified their psychological impact and made them seem part of one vast terrorist conspiracy.”3 The sense of alarm was further intensified by “the fact that the blasts seemed linked together in chain reactions of violence that were impervious to police efforts at prevention.”4 For example, “Between March 1892 and June 1894 eleven dynamite explosions rocked Paris and killed nine people. In Spain, bombs hurled at a Corpus Christi procession and at a theatre audience in Barcelona caused deaths by the score.”5 The years 1892 to 1901 came to be known as the “Decade of Regicide.” More monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers of major world powers were assassinated than at any other time in history. Among those assassinated were President Sadi Carnot of France in 1894, Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas of Spain in 1897, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, and King Humbert of Italy in 1900. “Never before had European statesmen and monarchs been assassinated in such rapid succession.”6
The new internationalism provided the means for anarchist violence to spread across borders. It is also what motivated it. Anarchist terror was launched as a desperate attempt to stop global capitalism. The assassin who shot McKinley, “When asked later why he had shot the president, Czologosz replied, ‘McKinley was going around the country shouting about prosperity when there was no prosperity for the poor man.’ ”7 Indeed, a founding premise of anarchist theory was that capitalist society was a place of constant violence; it was embodied in “every law, every church, every paycheck was based on force.”8
Yet, anarchists initially did not set out to target civilians. The turn to terror came after some true believers, frustrated by the fact that the masses had not risen up in revolt, felt that impassioned speeches and mass-produced tracks had been too paltry an approach. Other means would be required to awaken the proletariat to the dangers of capitalism’s destructive force. It was argued that “In such a world, to do nothing, to stand idly by while millions suffered, was itself to commit an act of violence.”9 For a handful of the most radical anarchists, this not only necessitated that capitalism be opposed with equal ferocity, but it also justified terrorist acts against the general public. The solution was what was called “propaganda of the deed.” No longer would their message be communicated through public speeches and media—it would be transmitted through violent acts: assassinations and bombings across bourgeois society. As Emma Goldman explained, anarchist violence was an unavoidable response to “capital [which comes], like a vampire, to suck the last drop of blood of the unfortunate.” She described how there were “millions of unfortunates who die in the factories, the mines, and wherever the grinding power of capital is felt” and concluded that therefore, “Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean.”10
During the same period, waves of immigrants were coming to England and the “New World,” especially from Italy, Germany, and China. The migrations, which largely occurred in response to the agrarian depressions of the 1870s and 1890s, produced fear in receiving countries that were also trying to cope with the economic instability. The most immediate fear was that this massive influx of people would put downward pressure on unskilled wages. In several countries there was an anti-immigrant backlash. Advanced nations shifted away from open immigration. In the anglophone countries, United States, Canada, and Australia, the first restrictive immigration laws were adopted in the 1880s. But it was not only the anglophone countries. Immigration restrictions were set in Denmark and Germany. Even Argentina and Brazil reversed their open-door policies in the 1880s.11
Initially, anti-immigrant legislation enacted in Canada, Australia, and the United States was targeted specifically against Asians. In the United States, bans on Chinese immigration began in 1888 and were strengthened over the next three decades. By 1891, the ban had been extended to “the immigration of persons likely ‘to become public charges’ as well as those ‘assisted’ in passage.”12 Australia hardened its immigration laws between 1890 and 1930. Like the United States, Australia’s policy was predominantly an anti-Asian immigration policy. “Australia maintained a strict policy aimed at keeping the country one of British and Irish descent, while avoiding persons of ‘yellow’ skin.”13
If Asians were feared for job competition, European immigrants were feared for posing an economic as well as a security threat. As the anarchist threat intensified, anti-immigration sentiment became increasingly focused on European emigres. Although anarchists came from all classes of the population, in the public imagination it was the migrants from Italy, Germany, Eastern Europe, and Ireland that were behind all the problems caused by radical labor “degeneracy,” and terrorism. Indeed, anarchist ideology was burgeoning among the new proletariat, many of whom had emigrated from those countries. Working in miserable factory conditions and living in urban squalor, it is not surprising that a portion of these recent settlers became radicalized and joined labor movements as well as anarchist causes.
The scope and visibility of anarchist terrorism helped advance the mounting nativist backlash in Europe and the USA. In addition to being subject to increased surveillance and arrest, immigrant groups across Europe became subject to mob violence. Jensen describes how:
Mobs sacked the homes and schools of immigrant Italian workers and other Italian-speakers residing in the Austrian Empire. In Trieste, they wrecked Italian cafes and a gymnastic center; in Linz and Budapest, employers summarily fired Italian workers. Hundreds of Italians fled back to Italy . . . On the outskirts of Berlin a mob burned down a slum-dwelling housing fifty itinerant Italian workers.14
The same was true in the United States, where a popular backlash against immigrants exploded:
Anarchists lost their jobs and had their possessions confiscated; on occasion they were beat up. Anarchists were arrested simply because they were anarchists. In Rochester a grand jury was asked to indict the city’s 100 anarchists on the charge of conspiracy to overthrow the government, although eventually it refused to do so for lack of evidence . . . More than fifty suspected anarchists, including Emma Goldman were arrested in Chicago and held without bail for seventeen days on suspicion of involvement with the assassination.15
The fact that “the Age of Anarchist Terrorism” coincided with the beginning of the “Age of Mass Journalism” only helped intensify these fears.16 Sensationalism sold copy. And little was more sensational than terrorist bombings. The papers exploited and exaggerated the danger anarchists presented to society. One Italian journalist described anarchism as “the most important ethical deviation that may ever have disturbed the world.”17 The new mass journalism, thus, escalated fears of migrants. Even though only a handful of individuals on the fringes of society were engaged in violent acts, the press painted them as part of an organized league of international anarchists who sought to undermine world security. In 1908, Frank Harris captured the impact the media had had on Americans’ perception of the danger posed by the anarchists. He describes how:
the whole American population was scared out of its wits by the Haymarket bomb. Every day the Chicago police found a new bomb. I thought they had started a special manufactory for them, till I read in the Leader of New York that the same piece of gas-piping had already served as a new bomb on seven different occasions . . . Everyday there were illegal arrests by the hundred; every day hundreds of innocent persons were thrown into prison without a shadow of evidence; the policemen who could denounce and arrest the greatest number of people got the quickest advancement. The whole town was frightened to idiocy.18
Frank Harris also describes the hysteria that developed after one of the men accused of the Haymarket bombing, Luis Lingg, blew himself up in his prison cell before he could be executed:
The city seemed to go mad; from one end of the town to the other men began to arm themselves, and the wildest tales were current. There were bombs everywhere. The nervous strain upon the public had become intolerable. The stories circulated and believed that afternoon and night seem now, as one observer said, to belong to the literature of Bedlam. The truth was that the bombs found in Lingg’s cell and his desperate self-murder had frightened the good Chicagoans out of their wits. One report had it that there were twenty thousand armed and desperate anarchists in Chicago who had planned an assault upon the jail for the following morning. The newspaper offices, the banks, the Board of Trade building, the Town Hall, were guarded night and day. Every citizen carried weapons openly. One paper published the fact that at ten o’clock on that Thursday night a gun store was still open in Madison Street, and crowded with men buying revolvers. The spectacle did not strike any one as in the least strange, but natural, laudable. The dread of some catastrophe was not only in the air, but in men’s talk, in their faces.19
The turn of the twentieth century also witnessed the birth of a new form of international terrorism—Islamic jihadism. As in the century before, the globalization of terror was both enabled by and a response to hyper-globalization.
Islamic terrorism had existed in the 1960s and 1970s, but it took a fundamental turn in the 1980s. The ideology of the global ummah, or Pan-Islamism, dates back to the late nineteenth century, when European empires ruled the majority of the world’s Muslims. Pan-Islamism holds that Muslims are one nation, or umma, which must be united to meet the challenges of the modern world. However, with the creation of independent national states across the Muslim world in the early twentieth century, the focus of political Islam shifted away from the goal of uniting the ummah, to one focused on gaining political representation of Islamic parties within individual nation-states. There were Muslim groups that used violent tactics in the mid-twentieth century, like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization; but mid-century hijackings, bombings, and assassinations were carried out with the goal of forcing the international community to take action on specific national issues.
It wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that the ideology of the global ummah was revived. The revival developed in response to the ever-increasing imposition of American imperialism, the capitulation of corrupt and oppressive Middle Eastern governments, as well as to what was perceived to be the West’s general hostility to the interests of the Muslim and Arab worlds. In short, the revived Pan-Islamist ideology was “based on the view that the umma [was] being systematically oppressed by outside forces, and that all Muslims [had] a responsibility to help other Muslims in need.”20 What emerged as a new form of Pan-Islamism, which “represented a macro-nationalism [that] transcended the nation-states.”21
Osama bin Laden is the personage perhaps most closely associated with this movement. In the 1990s, bin Laden was the figurehead of the first Islamic terrorist network, al-Qaida. Al-Qaida, which translates as “The Base” or “The Foundation,” had humble beginnings. It began as a military operation organized to support the Afghan fight against the invading Soviet army, in what was then referred to as the Afghan “holy war.” Focused as it was on stopping the tide of Soviet expansionism, bin Laden’s multinational, Sunni Islamist fighting organization was cultivated and supported by the US government. Following the ancient proverb, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” bin Laden’s forces received seed funds and training that was directed by the United States and delivered to the rag-tag group of fighters sequestered in the Afghan mountains with the help of the Saudi Arabian and Pakistani governments.
In 1989, bin Laden began focusing his animus on the Saudi/United States alliance. By 1992, the mission of al-Qaida had been established: they would now target the United States and her allies. When, in 1995, the United States stationed some 550,000 coalition troops in the Saudi desert during the prosecution of the 1991 Gulf War, bin Laden was so enraged by what he believed was an affront to Saudi Arabia’s sovereignty that he wrote an open letter to the Saudi king, in which he “declared war on the United States and called for a guerrilla campaign to oust US forces from Saudi Arabia.”22 Over the next five years, al-Qaida developed into a streamlined training center. By the turn of the century, bin Laden had created a sophisticated operations center in Afghanistan that processed thousands of recruits and was capable of launching large-scale campaigns across the globe, while being virtually unassailable in its rough mountain refuge.
Thereafter, Islamic terrorism spread rapidly. In the early 2000s, the world saw a proliferation of global jihadist movements from the Islamic State (IS) to Boko Haram to smaller extremist movements linked to al-Qaida. The broad appeal of these globalized Islamist movements was “growing resentment” among people across the Muslim and Arab world “over conspicuous wealth, accumulation, the increasing gap between rich and poor, an awareness of structural exclusion on a global scale, and the erosion of time-honoured approaches to social welfare as the market demands cuts or the abolition of transfer payments.”23 Islam promised to be the antidote to the neo-liberal American order. Islamists scorned the secularism of advanced capitalist economies that extolled “the cult of individualism” above the community and separated duties to the state from religious observance. Their goal was, hence, to stop the spread of American capitalism and militarism that was enslaving the world. Indeed, the attack that brought al-Qaida to world attention and came to represent this new form of Islamic threat, the 2001 bombing in New York City, had as its target the building most symbolic of United States’ hegemony over global finance—the World Trade Center.
The reach of new technologies was as critical to the genesis of these new forms of violence as was the changing global order. Of course, none of this would have been thinkable without jet-propelled airplanes. Jets had made intercontinental travel accessible. It also made it exponentially more lethal. Whereas the anarchists had used dynamite to bomb cafés, the 9/11 World Trade Center bombing made use of a large jet plane carrying tons of fuel to blow up two of the tallest buildings in the world. The catastrophic power of an airplane bomb introduced the world to a whole new order of terrorism.
Changes in communication also played a vital role. Cell phones and “social networking media, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogging platform”24 enabled terrorist groups to develop a global following. The Internet was used by tech-savvy terrorists to spread of jihadist propaganda and recruit followers from all over the globe. With their agile use of the new technologies not only could jihadist groups find converts from all corners of the globe, they were also able to internationalize their targets. Cell phones and the Internet enabled an individual or a relatively small group of Islamists working remotely from any strategic compound to terrorize people virtually anywhere.
The new technologies facilitated the development of “an entirely new pattern of attacks, namely ‘globalized suicide attacks,’ ” that were markedly “distinct from the traditional, localized pattern of suicide attacks” used by national groups in the 1970s, such as the Lebanese Shiite political party and militant group, Hezbollah; and the Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey, the PKK.25 The 1990s saw “a rise in the number of suicide attacks, the number of countries targeted by suicide attacks, and the number of organizations that plan and execute suicide attacks.”26 The “unprecedented numerical rise, geographic spread, growing lethality and marked increase in the number of groups employing suicide missions every year,” had “amounted to nothing less than a full-scale globalisation of this tactic.”27
As with anarchist terrorism, the unpredictability of the location of these acts and, in some cases, the synchronization of terrorist attacks across countries added to the fear they produced. In 2014 alone, there were Islamic terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, Denmark, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, the United States, Turkey, Kuwait, Tunisia, Cameroon, India, Bangladesh, Australia, Bangladesh, Somalia, Chad, Niger, Egypt, Philippines, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Russia. And the list goes on. The randomness of the targets was equally terrifying. Included were bombings of tourist beaches in Bali, Indonesia, and Egypt; attacks to the financial capital of India; a bomb planted at the Boston Marathon; a savage attack on people shopping at a mall in Nairobi; and the beheading of cartoonists working for the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
Finally, to amplify the effects of their actions, Islamist groups used shocking means of violence. They employed visually arresting methods, such as beheadings of kidnapped journalists filmed and posted to the Internet, explosions in holy places while innocent people gathered to pray, and machine gun attacks on harmless revelers at a concert. It was the ruthlessness in addition to the randomness of this new form of terrorism that induced horror and panic across the world.
As had happened a century earlier, Islamist terrorism of the late twentieth century was made global as much by the spread of liberal imperialism as by the modern technologies that made it feasible. In reaction to US expansionism, radical Islam jumped “from a desperate national struggle into identification with the global ummah.”28 Al-Qaida’s targets were even similar to those of the anarchist terrorists who preceded it: “US imperialism, [and] symbols of globalization.”29 Each was in its essence a “fight against the global order.”30
The late twentieth century has been characterized by some as the second “age of migration.” Although the total numbers of immigrants moving globally across boarders may not be as statistically significant as that would suggest,31 there were important ways in which migrations did increase, particularly to the countries with advanced economies.
It was in Northern America and Western Europe that very high rates of migration were experienced from 1965 to –1990. One estimate suggests that by 1999, “one in every 13 persons living in the West [was] an international migrant.”32 Salt and Clarke (2000) found that in by 1992 in Western Europe “total numbers of recorded foreign workers . . . had risen by 23.1% to 7.3 million,” up from 5.9 million only four years earlier and that these “increases in Western Europe’s recorded foreign workers occurred almost entirely in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”33 One of the contributing factors to this surge in migration was greater access to passenger air travel. The development of the air passenger industry allowed the period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s to become a time of “unprecedented migration.”34 Another contributor was the “global trend toward laissez-faire economic policies,” which not only lifted barriers for trade and capital flows but also increased migration flows: a trend that “further accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 heralding an age of ‘market triumphalism.’ ”35 In fact, starting in the 1960s, several countries relaxed their immigration laws.36
By the turn of the century, this influx of foreigners had begun to create serious tensions, particularly in communities already reeling from the loss of industrial jobs who were fearful of job competition. At the same time, international terrorism was on the rise, and it was associated with immigrant groups—this time Muslims. The high visibility of the Islamic terrorist attacks helped produce a backlash against Muslims, what most academics today refer to as “Islamophobia.” Fear of Muslims was not, of course, wholly new, but it did dramatically escalate after the spectacular obliteration of the World Trade Center buildings. “Prejudice against Muslims in Western countries preceded the 9/11 attacks in the United States, but those events and other acts of violence by terrorists since that time have created a climate for increasing anti-Muslim attitudes in many countries.”37
In the United States, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “prompted the profound realignment of the US immigration system from increased surveillance and data tracking” to changes in intelligence agencies and local law enforcement.38 Immediately after the attacks, hate crimes against Muslims peaked.39 Sensationalized news fanned the flames of this anti-immigrant sentiment. As in the preceding century, rising migration and Islamist terror came at the same time as the emergence of twenty-four-hour cable news. Fear of foreigners was intensified by the new forms of media that exploited the emotional force of anti-immigrant stories. Sensationalism, characteristic of the period of Yellow Journalism, came to be the currency of the new cable networks. No matter that those perpetrating terror represented a small fraction of followers of Islam, scare headlines, “breaking news” segments, and editorial commentary contributed to the increased fear and distrust of Muslims as a whole, as well as foreigners more generally. “One American media outlet, Fox News, was especially given to sensationalism following the events of 9/11.”40 Indeed, studies have found that regularly watching Fox News is correlated with holding negative attitudes about Muslims.41
Donald Trump’s presidency also appears to have inflamed anti-Muslim sentiment. His rhetoric against Muslims heated up the issue of Muslim immigrants as did his “Muslim Ban,” an executive order he issued one year after taking office that prohibited entry to the United States of people from six predominately Muslim countries. In fact, the year Trump came to power, anti-Muslim attacks, which had been in abeyance after the dramatic uptick following the 9/11 attacks, increased by 44 percent.42
Fear of Muslims went far beyond the shores of America. Across Europe anti-Muslim sentiment had begun to fester during the 1990s. Several right-wing parties were established. But Islamophobia had remained largely on the fringes of the political scene up until the bombing of the World Trade Center. After that horrific attack, anti-Muslim sentiment came raging to the fore. Attacks of foreign residents increased, and extremist parties gained powers even they could not have even dreamt would be possible a decade earlier.
In many ways, the Islamophobia that gripped Europe in the early twenty-first century was not dissimilar from the panic that took hold of Europe in the nineteenth century over the “Jewish Question.” In Sweden, the far-right part, the Sweden Democrats, “focused [on] anti-Islam narrative . . . identifying Islam as public enemy number one.”43 The Danish People’s Party (DPP), described Islam as an “anti-modern, anti-democratic, patriarchal, violent dogmatic religion belonging to a lower level of civilization.” In Holland, the now defunct LPF (Lijst Pim Fortuyn), formed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack, “called for a stop to all Muslim immigration.”44 And when the far-right Polish party, Law and Justice, came to power in 2015, not only did acts of hatred and xenophobia become more frequent, but the government “refused to take in non-Christian refugees as part of an EU relocation plan, citing security concerns.”45
Aside from trying to curtail Muslim immigrations and painting Muslims essentially as the anti-Christ, a series of anti-Islamic reforms were introduced across Europe, some more successful than others. For example, in 2004, France banned young girls from wearing veils in state schools and then passed an even more controversial law in 2011 that banned the wearing of a niqāb (the face covering that only leaves the eyes visible) in public places.46 Belgium’s lower parliamentary house voted to ban all face coverings in public the year before. In Switzerland in 2009, “a thin majority of voters ‘supported a proposal to ban the construction of minarets throughout the country.’47 One of the leaders of the anti-minaret campaign charged that the structures served as ‘beacons of Jihad’ and landmarks of an intolerant culture, which puts its God-given, Islamic law over the law of the country.”48 The building of a Mosques also became a lightning rod in Poland, when, in 2010, 150 people protested at the site, chanting “Blind tolerance kills common sense.”49
In both periods, the dislocations caused by economic change were magnified by the dramatic movement of peoples and the emergence of violent terrorist movements dedicated to the destruction of the liberal political order. In response, economic nationalism came to be merged with a generalized fear of international forces. The world was poised for an era of defensive nationalism.