The summer of 2015 may prove to have been a decisive moment in European and global history. The dramatic arrival of hundreds of thousands of people during a relatively short period of time, traveling via the Balkans and Hungary and toward Austria, Germany, Sweden, and other high-income European countries, will be forever remembered by those who witnessed these events as they unfolded. The swift arrival of 1.3 million asylum seekers, predominantly young men from the hotspots of global conflicts, like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, took the political systems of several European countries, and the European Union itself, by surprise.
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The following think-piece by an active participant in the European public discussion on immigration policy, written well before the European parliamentary elections of May 29, 2019, is understood as a contribution to the European and international political debate and not (so much) as a “pure” scholarly article. It begins with a stark prognosis: the earthquake-like outcome of these elections will strengthen the far-right political parties all over Europe, dramatically weakening the European center and left, and breaking down the “welcome culture” initiated by German chancellor Angela Merkel’s famous statement of late summer 2015—”We can do this” (“Wir schaffen das”)—which signaled a temporary and short-lived “air superiority” for multiculturalism, cultural pluralism, and the welcoming of masses of refugees from the Middle East and North. One of the main reasons for the predictable decline of the Left on the European continent is, in my opinion, its inability to find credible solutions to the problems of immigration and integration. This article summarizes a forthcoming analysis by the author under the tile Islamism, Arab Spring and the Future of Democracy: Developing a World Values Perspective, under contract at Springer Publishers, N.Y. Sixteen years ago, on a bright and beautiful September morning in New York, Islamist terror against the West reached a new stage. The attacks, which began at 8:46 local time, killed 2,996 victims. To equate “Muslims” with terrorism is unjust—just recall the heroic example of the Jordanian Air Force pilot Muath Safi Yousef Al-Kasasbeh, who, on January 3, 2015, was burnt alive by ISIS after his F-16 crashed during an operation across ISIS territory. He, too, was a believing Muslim and a Jordanian patriot. “Muslims” today also include the 9 percent of the Arab population who, according to data from the ACRPS Institute in Qatar, advocate the diplomatic recognition of Israel, despite the prevailing climate of anti-Israeli hysteria. Recent initiatives to utilize household and personal mobile technologies to further specific security, surveillance, and counter-terrorism objectives pose significant challenges to civil liberties and personal well-being. The social and political statuses of these technological systems are just emerging: they are rapidly being infused into home settings and mobile devices, apparently under the control of users but under at least the partial monitoring and operation of various governmental and corporate entities. Individuals are being increasingly surveilled by sets of security-related mechanisms in their home automation and mobile communications devices as well as by other manifestations of the “Internet of Things” (IoT). This paper focuses on the modern practice of using law, both national and international, to achieve policy goals and political ends that usually are the result of tactical military action. Lawfare, as this practice is referred to, is now a crucial tactic in the modern era of international relations, where war is largely carried out in a far from traditional manner. Lawfare, then, is a unique form of irregular warfare that can be employed by nations against one another and against insurgents in asymmetrical conflicts at home and abroad. This new reliance on irregular and asymmetrical warfare generally and lawfare specifically is reflective of Hegel’s view of the end of history, particularly as articulated by Alexandre Kojève. Basically, that as individuals gain equal recognition, the mode of satisfying desire will necessarily take the form of law and bureaucracy. Europe’s effectiveness in combatting terrorism has been diagnosed many times as being very low. There is increasing solid evidence about the devastating nature of global Islamist terrorism and its thousands of victims each month, from Nigeria to Southeast Asia and also, increasingly, in Europe. A recent survey by the French daily Le Monde revealed that in Europe alone, there have been 2,239 victims of terrorist attacks since 2001. Increasingly, global terrorism is not only a political problem; it also has become a global public health problem, despite certain tendencies among Western social scientists to portray global terrorism as a relatively rare phenomenon. |
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