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The ideology of counter-terrorism

An effective counter-terrorism policy requires the identification of domestic or international threats to a government, its civil society, and its institutions. Enemies of the state can be internal or external. Communist regimes of the twentieth century, for example, focused on internal enemies. State security forces arrested dissidents, class enemies, and members of ethnic or nationalist groups deemed threatening to the Party, imprisoning them and securing “confessions” of their sins against the regime. In contrast, modern US counter-terrorism policy developed in reaction to an external enemy – militant anarchism.

In the late nineteenth century, an extremist ideology threatened Western society. Militant anarchists bombed financial houses, government buildings, and fashionable “bourgeois” cafes. In coordinated and lone-wolf attacks, men claiming an allegiance to anarchist principles assassinated the president of France (June 1894), the prime minister of Spain (August 1897), the empress of Austria-Hungary (September 1898), and the king of Italy (July 1900).

Major news outlets carried sensationalized stories of bomb-throwing anarchists, while mainstream writers from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Joseph Conrad and Henry James penned novellas on the subject. European officials feared that the intellectual justification given to violent acts against the state, known as “propaganda by deed,” would motivate both social revolutionaries and the socially discontent.

American policymakers viewed anarchist terrorism as a European phenomenon. They believed that militant anarchism was a foreign and revolutionary doctrine disseminated by European immigrants living in urban centers and publishing radical newspapers. Both American and European officials believed that the “subversive” press radicalized their domestic populations.

Threat perception shaped government response. Continental European policymakers viewed anarchist terrorism as a domestic threat that required a transnational security system backed by international treaties. United States Congressmen viewed anarchist terrorism as a foreign threat that necessitated stricter immigration legislation. The law remained unchanged, however, until a self-proclaimed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. McKinley’s murder shattered Americans’ complacency that their institutions protected them from political violence in the name of regime change.

In 1903, US officials turned to immigration law to institute America’s first counter-terrorism policy. The Immigration Act of 1903, better known as the Anarchist Exclusion Act, prohibited alien anarchists from entering the United States and allowed for their deportation any time within three years of arrival. Immigration inspectors were given law enforcement powers to police the borders and ports of entry.

No mention was made that Czolgosz was a first-generation American citizen of Eastern European ancestry. Self-radicalized, alienated, and on the fringes of society, Czolgosz’s embrace of an extremist ideology in the hopes of acceptance in a community resonates today as one of the major dangers facing Western governments: homegrown terrorism.

“Our Statue of Liberty – she can stand it” by Charles Taylor, c. 1886, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
“Our Statue of Liberty – she can stand it” by Charles Taylor, c. 1886, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Obama administration has made combating “extremist ideologies that radicalize, recruit or incite to violence” a major part of US counter-terrorism policy. A month after the Charlie Hebdo attack in France, the White House hosted a summit in February 2015 on Countering Violent Extremism. President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry declared that the greatest threats came from (a) “domestic terrorists and homegrown violent extremists in the United States” and (b) “terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIL.”

With the rise of foreign terrorist fighters traveling to Syria and Iraq, and potentially returning to Europe and the United States, along with social media’s ability to reach and recruit at home, the distinction between external and internal threats is further eroding. The fear that US citizens will carry out terrorist attacks has added to the debate over domestic surveillance and the National Security Agency’s data collection programs.

US counter-terrorism has changed significantly since 1903 when the federal government relied on the Bureau of Immigration to protect the nation. In the early 1900s, the United States lacked a national police force, meaning that investigations of alleged anarchists already inside the United States fell to municipal police, a skeleton crew of Secret Service agents in the Treasury Department, or were outsourced to private security firms like the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

A plethora of federal government agencies are involved in counter-terrorism today with operating expenses in the billions. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks and the enactment of the Patriot Act, the US government has possessed the legal tools to spy on its own citizens.

Studies of terrorist organizations, their structure and leaders, motivations, operating budgets, and violent ideologies have long overshadowed examinations of counter-terrorism strategies. Scholarship on government or multilateral responses to terrorism are far and few between.

But counter-terrorism policies have their own ideologies. Looking back to previous periods of terrorist violence and seeing how European responses differed from those of the United States should raise questions about contemporary approaches:

How does threat perception, national culture, government structure (e.g. Congress in the United States and Parliament in the United Kingdom), and legal traditions (common law, civil law, religious law) shape governments’ responses to terrorism? What worked or didn’t work in the past?

Lastly, are US policymakers focused on the right threats?

Here, history has another lesson. While anarchist assassinations and stories of spectacular bombings captivated the Western imagination in the 1890s, it was a bullet fired by a militant nationalist that brought Europe to its knees in June 1914 and sparked world war.

Heading image: Statue of Liberty by Melwyn DSouza. CC0 via Pixabay.

Recent Comments

  1. richard J. campbell

    Dear Oxford Press:
    You are just beginning to scratch the surface. Please see the below listed Office of the Inspector general complaint focused on “terrorism studies”:

    And: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dear-donald-trump-richard-joe-campbell?trk=prof-post

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