01_Security Dialogue 34/3 20/8/03 3:36 pm Page 255

Outlook

The Silence of Words: On Terror and War

ULRICH BECK*
University of Munich, Germany & London School of Economics, UK

The terrorist resistance against globalization has had an effect directly

counter to its aims: It has introduced a new era of globalization. In this
new form of globalization, the focus is not on the obsolescence of the
state as the sole form of the political, but rather on the transnational
reinvention of the political through networking and cooperation. The
violence of 11 September 2001 stands for the failure of traditional
state-based concepts like ‘war’ and ‘peace’, ‘friend’ and ‘foe’, ‘war’
and ‘crime’ to seize, analyse and propose approaches to the new
geopolitical reality. We live, think and act in terms of concepts that are
historically obsolete but that nonetheless continue to govern our
thinking and acting. This article seeks to name the silence of certain
concepts and to measure the distance between concept and reality by
bringing the concept of ‘risk society’ to bear on the new problems that
face us in the ‘global risk society’.

I
N THE HISTORY OF HUMANITY, 11
September 2001 will stand for many
things, among them the failure and the
silence of language in the face of this
event: ‘war’, ‘crime’, ‘enemy’, ‘victory’
and ‘terror’ – ‘the concepts melt in your
mouth like mouldy mushrooms’ (Hugo
von Hofmannstahl, 2000: 51).
In response to the attacks on New York
and Washington, NATO invoked the par-
ticipation of the Alliance, although there
was no question either of an attack from
outside or by one sovereign state against
another. Thus, 11 September 2001 does not
represent a second Pearl Harbor. Nor
did the attack concern the US military
machinery, but rather innocent civilians.
The deed speaks the language of genoci-
dal hate, knowing no ‘negotiation’, no
‘dialogue’, no ‘compromise’ and thus,
finally, no ‘peace’. Correspondingly, the
very concept of an ‘enemy’ is erroneous in
this context. It arises from an imaginary
world in which armies are victorious
or vanquished in battles sealed by
‘armistices’ and ‘peace agreements’. Still,
the terrorist attacks are not merely a
‘crime’, not a case for ‘national justice’.
Even less are the concepts and institu-
tions of the ‘police’ appropriate for these
actions, whose devastation was equivalent
to that of a military battle. The police are
incapable of eliminating a cell of perpetra-
tors who obviously fear nothing. As a
result, ‘civil defence’ loses its meaning,
and so on. We live, think and act in con-
cepts that are historically obsolete but
which nonetheless continue to govern our
thinking and acting. In any event, if the
military, caught up in the old conceptual
world, responds by conventional means –
carpet bombing, for example – I fear this
will be counterproductive: it will only
create new bin Ladens.

© 2003 PRIO, www.prio.no

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Vol. 34(3): 255–267, ISSN 0967-0106 [038112]
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Thus, the suicide terror attacks, even
months after they happened, remain in-
comprehensible: the difference between
war and peace, the military and police,
war and crime, and national and interna-
tional security are, from within and with-
out, completely annulled. Who would
have thought that domestic security –
Germany’s, for example – would have to
be defended in the most distant valleys of
Afghanistan? And already another false
concept: ‘defend’! The difference between
defence and attack is no longer clear. Must
we still say that the USA is ‘defending’ its
domestic security on the territory of other
countries, in Afghanistan, etc.? Yet, if all
these concepts are false, if our language
fails in the face of this reality, what has
actually happened? Nobody knows. And,
if that is the case, would it not be more
courageous to be silent? The explosion of
the Twin Towers in New York was fol-
lowed by an explosion of verbose silence
and meaningless action. To cite Hugo von
Hofmannsthal once again: ‘I was no
longer capable of seizing reality with the
simplifying gaze of habit. Everything fell
into pieces, the pieces into more pieces,
and nothing more could be gathered into a
concept. The individual words swam
about me, running together as eyes which
stared at me and which I stared back at’
(Hofmannsthal, 2000: 51).
This silence of words must finally be
broken. We must no longer remain silent
about this matter. If it were at least possi-
ble to name the silence of certain concepts,
to measure the distance between concept
and reality, and to cautiously build
bridges of understanding into the novelty
of reality that emerges from our civiliza-
tional actions, this would probably not be
much, but at least something would be
gained. Here, I would like to explain the
concept of ‘global risk society’, and
against that backdrop to criticize a series
of concepts and attempt to define them
anew: first, the concepts terror and war;
second, the concepts of economic global-
ization and neoliberalism; and, third, the
concepts of state and sovereignty.
Security Dialogue vol. 34, no. 3, September 2003
What Does ‘Global Risk Society’
Mean?
What do events and threats as different as
Chernobyl, global warming, the debate on
human ethics, the Asian financial crisis
and the threat of terror attacks have in
common? They all illustrate the discrep-
ancy between language and reality that I
call ‘global risk society’. I will explain
what I mean by this through the following
example.1
A few years ago, the US Congress gave a
scientific commission the task of develop-
ing a symbolic language that would make
clear the danger posed by the US storage
site for atomic waste. The problem to be
solved was the following: How should the
concepts and symbols be constituted in
order to communicate to those living
10,000 years from now?
The commission was made up of physi-
cists, anthropologists, linguists, brain re-
searchers, psychologists, molecular biolo-
gists, gerontologists, artists, etc. First of all,
they had to clear up a simple question: will
the USA exist at all in ten thousand years?
The answer was, of course, simple: USA
Forever! However the key problem – how it
is possible today to begin a conversation
10,000 years into the future – eventually
proved to be insoluble. The commission
looked for examples from the oldest sym-
bols of humanity, studied the ruins of
Stonehenge (1500 BC) and the pyramids,
researched the reception of Homer and the
Bible, and heard explanations of the life
cycle of documents. These, however, only
reached a few thousand, not ten thousand
years into the past. The anthropologists
recommended the symbol of the skull and
crossbones. A historian however recalled
that the skull and crossbones meant resur-
rection to the alchemist, and a psycholo-
gist carried out experiments with three-
year-olds: if the skull and crossbones is
stuck on a bottle, they cry in fear, ‘poison’;
1
See Schirrmacher (2000), to whom I am indebted
for this example.
01_Security Dialogue 34/3 20/8/03 3:36 pm
Ulrich Beck The Silence of Words: On Terror and War
if it is stuck on a wall, they enthusiastically
call out, ‘pirates!’
Other scientists suggested literally cover-
ing the floor of the storage facility with
signs made of ceramic, iron and stone, con-
taining all types of warnings. However,
the judgement of the linguist was clear: it
would only be understandable for a maxi-
mum of 2,000 years. Indeed, what the
scientific meticulousness with which the
commission proceeded made clear was
precisely what the concept of global risk
society signifies, uncovers and makes
understandable: our language fails in the
task of informing future generations about
the dangers we have introduced into the
world through our endeavours to benefit
from certain technologies. At the speed of
its technological development, the modern
world increases the global difference
between the language of quantifiable risks
in which we think and act and the world of
non-quantifiable insecurity that we like-
wise create. Through our past decisions
about atomic energy and our present deci-
sions about the use of genetic technology,
human genetics, nanotechnology and com-
puter science, we unleash unforeseeable,
uncontrollable, indeed even incommuni-
cable consequences that threaten life on
earth.
What then is actually new about the risk
society? Have not all societies, all humans,
all epochs always been surrounded by
dangers that those societies were first
formed to provide defence against? The
concept of risk is a modern one. It presup-
poses decisions that attempt to make the
unforeseeable consequences of civiliza-
tional decisions foreseeable and control-
lable. If one, for example, says that the risk
of cancer for smokers is at a certain level
and the risk of catastrophe in an atomic
energy plant is at a certain level, this
implies that risks are avoidable negative
consequences of decisions that seem
calculable as the likelihood of sickness or
accident, and thereby are not natural
catastrophes. The novelty of the global
risk society lies in the fact that our civi-
lizational decisions involve global conse-
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quences and dangers, and these radically
contradict the institutionalized language
of control – indeed the promise of control
– that is radiated to the global public in the
event of catastrophe (as in Chernobyl, and
now also in the terror attacks on New
York and Washington). Precisely this con-
stitutes the political explosiveness of the
global risk society. This explosiveness has
its centre in the mass mediated public
sphere, in politics, in the bureaucracy, in
the economy, though it is not necessarily
contiguous with a particular event to
which it is connected. Political explosive-
ness can be described and measured
neither in the language of risk, nor in the
number of dead and wounded, nor in
scientific formulas. In it ‘explodes’ – if I
am permitted this metaphor – responsi-
bility, claims to rationality, and legitimiza-
tion through contact with reality. The
other side of the admitted presence of
danger is the failure of the institutions that
derive their authority from their pur-
ported mastery of such danger. In this
way, the ‘social birth’ of a global danger is
as much an unlikely as it is a dramatic,
indeed traumatic, world-shattering one. In
the experience of shock radiated by the
mass media, it becomes recognizable
for one global second that the silence of
words or – after an etching by Goya – the
slumber of reason creates monsters.
Three dimensions of danger can be
differentiated in the global risk society,
each following a different kind of logic of
conflict. These spin out or repress other
themes, destroy or enthrone priorities:
first, ecological crises; second, global
financial crises; and third – since 11
September 2001 – terrorist dangers caused
by transnational terror networks. In all
three of these dimensions of danger, and
beyond all differences, a common model
of political chances and contradictions can
be seen in the global risk society. In an age
in which belief in God, class, nation and
government disappears, the known and
recognized globality of danger is trans-
formed into a source of associations, open-
ing up new global political prospects for
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action. The terror attacks have brought
states closer together and have sharpened
the understanding of what globalization
actually is: a worldwide community of
destiny confronted with violent, destruc-
tive obsession. How then is politics possi-
ble in the age of globalization? My answer
is: through the perceived globality of dan-
ger, which renders the apparently recalci-
trant system of international and national
politics fluid and malleable. In this sense,
fear cultivates a quasi-revolutionary situa-
tion, which admittedly can be used in
quite different ways.
Again and again, one asks and dis-
cusses: what can unify the world? The
experimental answer is an attack from
Mars. This terrorism is an attack from
‘inner Mars’. For a historical instant, the
dispersed camps and nations of the world
are unified against the common enemy of
global terrorism.
It is precisely the universalization of the
terrorist threat against the states of the
world that changes the war against global
terror into a challenge for Grand Politics,
in which new alliances are forged beyond
antagonistic camps, regional conflicts are
dammed up, and the map of global politics
is mixed up anew. Thus, until recently the
idea of a national missile defence system
dominated political thinking and action in
Washington. Now, nothing more is said
about it. Instead, the prevailing insight
seems to be that even the most perfect
missile defence system would fail to
hinder attacks like those of 11 September
2001, that the domestic security of the USA
cannot be guaranteed single-handedly,
but rather only through a global alliance.
In that alliance, relations between the
former opponents of the Cold War, Mos-
cow and Washington, assume a prominent
position. In the global risk society, US
unilateralism fails. National ambition and
pressure to cooperate can thus challenge
each other – a good situation for interna-
tional relations in the global risk society. It
is impossible for the USA to arrest bin
Laden in an isolated CIA and Pentagon
action against the rest of the world. The
Security Dialogue vol. 34, no. 3, September 2003
global risk society compels a multilateral-
ism in which Russia shifts from the role of
the petitioner to the role of the courted.
The decision of the Russian president in
the face of the challenge of global terror to
completely and unequivocally take the
side of civilized modernity under attack
opens up for him new chances for power
and for initiating activities as an important
partner in the multipolar power relations
of the global alliance. Within Europe too,
contradictions abound, and a realization is
growing that the future of democracy and
freedom can only be assured collectively:
Bad times for Euro-sceptics! A good time
for Great Britain to join the Euro-world!
We should, however, not fall prey to the
delusion that the war against terror can be
transformed and extended into a war
against Islam, a war that does not van-
quish terrorism but rather nourishes and
augments it. In such a war, important lib-
erties might be dismantled, protectionism
and nationalism renewed, and cultural
Others demonized.
In other words, the globality of per-
ceived dangers has a double face: it creates
new forms of political risk society and at
the same time regional inequalities for
those affected by the dangers. For exam-
ple, the fact that the collapse of the global
finance market or climatic changes in
certain regions have very diverse effects
does not change the fact that in principle
everyone can be touched – and coping
with such problems makes global political
efforts necessary. Thus, global environ-
mental problems such as global warming
can convey the global population’s (pres-
ent and future generations) perception of
itself as a ‘community of destiny’. This
does not take place in a conflict-free
manner, when, for example, one asks
to what extent industrial countries can
argue that developing countries should
protect important global resources like
rainforests while they at the same time
claim for themselves the lion’s share of
energy resources. Indeed, conflicts of this
kind already establish communities by
insisting that global solutions be found,
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Ulrich Beck The Silence of Words: On Terror and War
and not through war, but through negotia-
tions.
However, this is by no means saying
that there is only one answer to the chal-
lenges of the global risk society. The paths
into the global risk society are for
European and non-European states and
cultures just as different as the paths out of
the global risk society can and will be. In
this sense, it is already being suggested
that, in the future, several modernities will
exist side by side. Debates concerning an
Asian modernity or a Chinese, Russian,
South American or African modernity are
just beginning. Discourses of this kind
make it clear that in the global risk society
the European monopoly on modernity is
at last obliterated. Seen in this way, the
radical critique of modernity in the non-
European sphere emerges from ‘excessive
individualism’, the loss of ‘cultural iden-
tity and dignity’, in short from the
‘McDonaldsification of the world’, not as a
simple rejection of modernity, but rather
as an attempt to outline and test other
modernities, which selectively returns to
the model of Western modernity.
Thus, the everyday sphere of experience
of the ‘global risk society’ does not emerge
as a love relationship of everyone with
everyone. It emerges in and consists of
the perceived urgency in the global
consequences of civilizational actions,
regardless of whether these consequences
of globality are produced through infor-
mation-technological networks, financial
flows, natural crises, cultural symbols, the
threatening climatic disaster or the threat
of terrorism. It is thus the reflexivity of the
global risk society that, first, breaks
through the silence of words and makes
us painfully conscious of the globality in
our own life context, and that, second,
forms new lines of conflict and alliances.
What has been shown in the case of the
modern nation-state – that it is held
together by continuous communication
about the threats it faces – also seems to
prove true for the global risk society.
I thus arrive at my second question: how
do the meanings of the concepts ‘terror’
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and ‘war’ change against the backdrop of
the global risk society?
Terror and War
The concept ‘terrorist’ is in the end also
misleading with respect to the novelty of
the threat it represents, since it pretends
a familiarity with the motives of national
liberation movements that does not at
all hold true for the perpetrators of
suicide and mass murder attacks. In other
words, it is absolutely inconceivable for
the Western observer how a fanatic anti-
modernism/anti-globalization and modern
global thinking and action can be directly
fused together.
Hannah Arendt (1992) coined the ex-
pression ‘banality of evil’ in reference to
the fanatical mass murderer Adolf Eich-
mann. Accordingly, we can imagine
technocrats with family values as abso-
lutely evil, but not religious terrorists who
are married in the West, have German
engineering degrees and a taste for vodka,
and who for years silently and with tech-
nical perfection plan their group suicide
as mass murder and then carry it out in
cold blood. How are we to understand
this selflessness of evil, which is utterly
and completely rooted in modernity and
simultaneously archaic?
If the military gaze was previously fixed
upon others of its kind – that is, upon
other nation-state military organizations
and their defence – it is now transnational
threats of substate perpetrators and net-
works that challenge the collective world
of states. As we did before in the cultural
field, we are now experiencing in the
military field the death of distance, indeed
the end of the state monopoly on violence
in a civilized world, where ultimately any-
thing can become a rocket in the hands of
determined fanatics. The peaceful sym-
bols of civil society can be transformed
into the instruments of hell. This – in
principle – is nothing new, but as a key
experience it is now universally present.
With the horror images of New York,
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terror groups have with one blow estab-
lished themselves as new global actors in
competition with states, economies and
civil societies. The terror networks have
become ‘NGOs of violence’. They act
like nongovernmental organizations: de-
territorial and decentralized; thus, on the
one hand, local, on the other, trans-
national. While, for example, Greenpeace
has the lead in respect to the environ-
mental crisis and Amnesty International
in respect to the human rights crisis when
contrasted with states, the terrorist NGOs
repeal the monopoly on violence pre-
viously enjoyed by states. However, this
means, first, that this kind of transnational
terrorism is not limited to Islamic terror-
ism, but can associate itself with any pos-
sible aim, ideology or fundamentalism;
and, second, that one must differentiate
between the terror of national liberation
movements, which are territorially and
nationally bound, and the new, trans-
national terrorist networks, which are de-
territorial – that is, beyond borders – and
which as a result of their actions depre-
ciate with a single blow the national
grammar of the military and war.
Earlier terrorists tried to save their lives
after their actions. Suicide terrorists create
an enormously destructive force as a
result of the intentional renunciation of
their own lives. The suicide attacker is, so
to speak, the most radical counter-image
of the homo oeconomicus. He or she is eco-
nomically and morally completely free of
inhibitions and, to that extent, the bearer
of total cruelty. The deed and the suicide
attacker are in the strict sense singular.
Perpetrators can neither commit a suicide
attack twice, nor is there any need for state
officials to condemn them for their deeds.
This singularity is sealed by the simul-
taneity of deed, self-confession and self-
extinguishing.
Strictly speaking, states do not even
have to search for the terrorists in order to
condemn them for their actions: the per-
petrators both reveal and execute them-
selves in their deeds. The anti-terror
alliance therefore does not aim at captur-
Security Dialogue vol. 34, no. 3, September 2003
ing the perpetrators of the New York
and Washington attacks, for they have
already pulverized themselves. Rather,
the alliance seeks those who are thought
to be behind the attacks, the ‘string-
pullers’, state sponsors, etc. But where the
perpetrators have executed themselves,
causality also disappears, evaporates. It is
said that states are indispensable for
the building up of transnational terror
networks. But perhaps it is statelessness,
the inexistence of functioning state struc-
tures, that provides fertile ground for
terrorist activities? Perhaps the imputa-
tion of states and shadowy figures who
give orders still originates from military
thinking, and we are standing at the
threshold of an individualization of war, in
which states no longer wage ‘war’ against
states, but rather individuals wage war
against states?
The power of terrorist actions grows
together with a series of conditions: the
fragility of our civilization, the global
presence of the terrorist danger in the
mass media, the judgement of the US
president that ‘civilization’ is threatened
through these deeds and the willingness
of the perpetrators to extinguish them-
selves. In turn, the terrorist dangers we
face expand exponentially with technical
progress. With the technologies of the
future – gene technology, nanotechnology
and robotics – we are opening a new
Pandora’s Box. Gene manipulation, com-
munications technology and artificial
intelligence, which are still fused with one
another, are creeping into the state’s
monopoly on violence and, unless inter-
nationally barred in an effective way, in
the end make way for an individualization
of war.
In this way, a genetically produced
plague that threatens specific populations
and has a long incubation period to enable
it to spread without detection – a miniature
bomb based on genetic technology – could
be produced by someone without great
expense. And that is just one example of
many eventual possibilities. The difference
from atomic and biological weapons is
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Ulrich Beck The Silence of Words: On Terror and War
remarkable: newer technologies involve
knowledge-based technological develop-
ments that can easily be expanded and
that always revolutionize themselves, so
that the possibility of state control and
monopoly do not apply in the way they
did for atomic and biological weapons
through the need for certain materials and
resources (weapons-grade uranium, costly
laboratories, etc.). The empowerment of
individuals vis-à-vis the state would politi-
cally introduce a new era. It is not only
the walls that earlier stood between the
military and civil society that would be
torn down, but also the walls between the
innocent and the guilty, between the sus-
pected and the unsuspected. Until now,
law has generally distinguished between
these. However, when the individualiza-
tion of war threatens, then the citizen must
prove that he or she is not dangerous, for
under these conditions each individual
finally comes under the suspicion of being
a potential terrorist. Each person must
thereby put up with submitting to random
‘security’ controls. In this way, the indi-
vidualization of war eventually leads to
the death of democracy. Governments
must unite with other governments against
citizens (and the inverse, citizens against
governments!) in order to banish the
dangers with which their citizens (and
governments) threaten them.
Thought out to its limit, one value-
premise of the earlier dispute over terror-
ism becomes inapplicable, namely the
difference between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ ter-
rorists – nationalists, who are esteemed,
and fundamentalists, who are disdained.
If it was still possible to find justifications
for such valuations and distinctions in
the modern age of the nation-state, in the
terrorist global risk society – as in the face
of the possibilities of the individualization
of war – these become a moral and politi-
cal perversion.
Can one answer these challenges politi-
cally at all? One principle must be named,
that of justice. What in the national context
violates the sense of justice of the civilized
world is that the victims of the terrorist
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attacks simultaneously assume the role of
the accusers, the judges and the executive
power. This kind of ‘self justice’ must also
be overcome in international relations,
even if the relations between states have
not come so far as to base the global
alliance against terror on law. It follows
that an international convention against
terrorism must be worked out and rati-
fied, a convention that not only clarifies
the necessary concepts, but also places
the interstate pursuit of terrorists on a
legal basis and creates a unified, universal
legal sphere for addressing the problem.
This, among other things, presupposes
that the statute of the International Court
of Justice be ratified by all states, includ-
ing the USA (Garzón, 2001: 11). The
aim would be to make terrorism globally
punishable as a crime against humanity.
States that refused to ratify the convention
would have to expect potential collective
sanctions by the entire world. Couldn’t
Europe and Russia make this a matter of
concern against the background of their
history, in order to sharpen their political
profile in the global alliance and to help
achieve success in the war against terror-
ism in opposition to their military momen-
tum?
Thus I come to my third question: how
are the meanings of the concepts ‘eco-
nomic globalization’ and ‘neoliberalism’
displaced on the horizon of the global risk
society?
Economic Globalization and
Neoliberalism
Permit me to begin with an anecdote.
Whenever I hear the word globalization,
the following political cartoon immediate-
ly appears before my eyes. The Spanish
conquistadores set foot upon the surface of
the New World in the glitter of their
armour, with horses and weapons. ‘We
have come,’ says the speech bubble, ‘to
speak with you about God, Civilization
and Truth’. And a group of baffled, gazing
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262
inhabitants answers: ‘Certainly, what
would you like to know?’
The scene is easy to transpose to the
present. In post-Soviet Moscow, the eco-
nomic experts of the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, corporate
directors, lawyers and diplomats climb
out of an intercontinental airplane. A bal-
loon reads, ‘We have come to speak with
you about democracy, human rights and
the free market economy’. A welcoming
delegation answers: ‘Certainly, and how
do the Germans deal with open violence
against foreigners in their streets?’
Perhaps this caricature reproduces a
situation from yesterday that is no longer
valid. The terrorist attacks and the dan-
gers of anthrax pose questions that can no
longer be swept under the rug: Is the tri-
umph of economy already history? Is the
primacy of politics being rediscovered?
Has the apparently inexorable victory
parade of neoliberalism suddenly been
halted?
In fact, the outbreak of global terror
amounts to a Chernobyl of globalization.
If in the case of Chernobyl it was the bless-
ings of atomic energy that were carried to
the grave, in the case of the attacks of 11
September 2001 it was neoliberalism’s
promise of salvation that was laid to rest.
The suicide mass murderers not only
revealed the vulnerability of Western civi-
lization, but also and at the same time
gave a taste of the kind of conflicts eco-
nomic globalization can lead to. In a world
of global risks, the neoliberal maxim of
replacing politics and the state with eco-
nomics quickly loses persuasiveness.
Particularly symbolic of this is the priva-
tization of air safety in the USA. Until
now, no one has wanted to talk about this
issue, since the tragedy of 11 September
2001 was largely homemade. What’s
more, the vulnerability of the USA has
much to do with its political philosophy.
The USA is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal
nation, unwilling to pay the price of
public security. It was known for a long
time that the USA was a potential target
for terrorist attacks. But, in contrast to
Security Dialogue vol. 34, no. 3, September 2003
Europe, air safety was privatized in the
USA, that is, assured through the ‘miracle
work’ of highly flexible part-time employ-
ees, whose salaries are even lower than
those of fast-food workers, namely about
$6 per hour. These central surveillance
positions were held by individuals with
only a few hours of ‘education’ who had
been in their ‘fast-food security’ jobs for
an average of no more than six months.
Thus, before one pares down the funda-
mental rights of all citizens in the name
of protecting against terrorism, thereby
endangering the civil state and dem-
ocracy, more immediate things should be
done: air safety should be organized and
professionalized by the state. This is just
one example among many.
Another of the USA’s neoliberal appar-
ent truisms that condition the vulner-
ability of the USA to terror is the miser-
liness of the state, on the one hand, and
the trinity of deregulation, liberalization
and privatization, on the other. To the
extent that this knowledge asserts itself,
the hegemonic power of neoliberalism,
which in the past years has gained in
thought and action, will disintegrate. In
this sense, the horrific images from New
York contain an undeciphered message: a
state or a country can neoliberalize itself to
death!
The economic commentators of the large
daily newspapers all over the world have
noticed this and plead: What was true
before 11 September 2001 cannot be false
after 11 September 2001; the neoliberal
model will assert itself after the terror
attacks because there is no alternative to it.
This, however, is false. It expresses a lack
of alternatives in thinking. Neoliberalism
is in disrepute, and stands as a sunny-
weather philosophy that only functions as
long as explosive conflicts and crises do
not materialize. Indeed, the neoliberal
imperative is based on the notion that too
much state and politics and the regulating
hand of bureaucracy are the direct cause
of global problems like unemployment,
global poverty, and economic collapse.
The victory march of neoliberalism rests
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Ulrich Beck The Silence of Words: On Terror and War
upon the promise that the liberation of the
economy from the state and the globaliza-
tion of markets will solve the great prob-
lems of humanity, that by freeing egoism
one will battle inequality on the global
scale and provide for global justice. This
belief of capitalistic fundamentalism in
the redemptive force of the market has
now most recently revealed itself to be a
dangerous illusion.
In times of crisis, neoliberalism clearly
stands without any political answers. The
approach of merely radicalizing the dose
of bitter economic medicine in order to
correct the resultant problems of global-
ization when breakdown threatens or
actually takes place is an illusionary one,
and the chickens are coming home to
roost. On the contrary, the terrorist threat
renders elementary truths conscious
again, truths that have been repressed
by the neoliberal victory march: the
decoupling of economics from politics is
impossible; without the state and public
service, there is no security; without taxa-
tion, there is no state; without taxation,
there is no education, no affordable
healthcare and no social security; without
taxation, there is no democracy; without
the public sphere, democracy and civil
society, there is no legitimacy; without
legitimacy, there is, in turn, no security. It
follows that without forums and forms
for legally regulating the management of
(recognized, not violent) conflicts nation-
ally – and, above all, in the future globally
– there will ultimately be no global econ-
omy in any form at all.
So, what is the alternative to neoliberal-
ism? Clearly not national protectionism.
We need rather an expanded concept of
the political, one that is capable of appro-
priately regulating the potential for crisis
and conflict in the free global economy,
and we need an understanding of active
civil society and social movements, which
take this transformation into their own
hands. Where are the movements like
those in Russia and Eastern Europe in the
post-Soviet era that gave vision and wings
to change? Just as Europe, in the end,
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263
cannot be created from above, cosmopoli-
tan Russia cannot be created from above.
The Tobin tax on unchecked flows of
capital, demanded by more and more par-
ties in Europe and the rest of the world, is
a first programmatic step. Neoliberalism
has insisted that the economy break out of
its nation-state casing and set up trans-
national rules for itself. At the same time,
it has assumed that the state should con-
tinue to play its old game and retain its
national borders. After the terror attacks
on New York and Washington, states are
now discovering for themselves the possi-
bility and power of transnational coopera-
tion, though initially only in the domestic
security sector. Suddenly the antithesis of
neoliberalism is the principle of the neces-
sity of the state, again omnipresent, and
even in the oldest Hobbesian variant, as
the guarantee of security. What was un-
thinkable a short time ago – for example, a
European arrest warrant that sets aside
sacred national sovereignty in questions
of rights and the police – has clearly
moved closer. Perhaps we will soon expe-
rience a similar unification in the possible
crisis of the global economy. The economy
must be equipped with new rules and
frameworks. The days of ‘each according
to his or her ability’ are certainly over.
Terrorist resistance to globalization has
in this sense caused the precise opposite of
what it aimed at: it has introduced a new
era of globalization of politics and the
state – the transnational invention of
the political through networking and
cooperation. In this way, a strange regu-
larity, not even noticed in the public
sphere, has been confirmed, namely that
resistance to globalization voluntarily or
involuntarily accelerates globalization’s
motor. It is important to understand this
paradox. Globalization is the name for a
remarkable process that is driven forward
and realized along two opposed paths,
whether one is for it or against it. The
opponents of globalization and its sup-
porters share the same global communica-
tions media. Globalization’s opponents
operate, by the same token, on the basis
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264
of global rights, global markets, global
mobility and global networks. They also
think and act in global categories for
which, through their actions, they create a
global public sphere and global attention.
We should, for example, notice the pre-
cision with which the terrorists of 11
September 2001 staged their actions in
New York as made-for-television live
catastrophe, live mass murder. They were
able to count on the fact that the destruc-
tion of the second tower by the airliner
transformed into a rocket would be trans-
mitted live to the entire world through
mass media’s ubiquitous television cam-
eras.
Must globalization be considered the
cause of the terror attacks in New York
and Washington? Can the attacks be seen
as an understandable reaction to the
neoliberal steamroller that, according to
its critics, wants to flatten every corner of
the world? No, that is nonsense. No cause,
no abstract idea, no god can justify or
excuse such attacks. Globalization is an
ambivalent process that cannot be turned
back. And it is the world’s smaller and
weaker states that are giving up their
national autocratic policies and pushing to
take part in the global market. What was
the headline of a large daily newspaper in
the Ukraine on the occasion of a visit by
the German Chancellor? ‘We forgive
the crusaders and look forward to the
investors’. In fact, the only thing worse
than being overrun by foreign investors is
not being overrun by foreign investors.
However, it is necessary to connect eco-
nomic globalization with a policy of
cosmopolitan agreement. The dignity of
humans, their cultural identities and
the alterity of others must be taken more
seriously in the future. Moreover, would it
not make sense to erect a new column in
the alliance against terror, to build a cul-
tural bridge, as it were: dialogue between
cultures in domestic and international
relations between countries, especially
those with the Islamic world, but also with
countries of the so-called Third and
Fourth Worlds, which see themselves as
Security Dialogue vol. 34, no. 3, September 2003
victims of globalization? And, on the other
hand, couldn’t a culturally extroverted
Europe play a leading role in this (particu-
larly Germany, since it is less burdened by
a colonial past, although the Holocaust
nonetheless makes such an approach a
duty).
This raises the fourth and final question:
how and to what degree do the concepts
‘state’ and ‘sovereignty’ change in the age
of the global risk society?
State and Sovereignty
Let me say this at the outset: Terror attacks
strengthen the state, but nonetheless de-
value its central historical form, the nation-
state. National security in the age of
placeless risk – this is the great lesson of
the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 –
is no longer national security. Certainly,
there have always been alliances. How-
ever, the decisive difference is that today
global alliances are not only necessary for
external security, but also for inner secur-
ity. Previously, it was said that foreign
policy was a question of choice, not
necessity. Today, by comparison, a novel
both–and dominates: foreign and domes-
tic policy, national security and inter-
national cooperation are immediately
dovetailed. The only path in the face of the
threat posed to national security by global
terror (as well as financial risks, climatic
catastrophe, organized crime, etc.) is
transnational cooperation. The following
paradoxical axiom is thus valid: Out of
national interest, states must be denation-
alized and transnationalized – that is, part
of their autonomy must be given up in
order to master national problems in the
globalized world. The conquest of new
spaces of action and sovereignty for gov-
ernance – that is, the expansion of political
sovereignty and steering – is remunerated
through active self-denationalization. The
dismantling of national autonomy and
the growth of national sovereignty in no
way logically exclude each other, but
rather can even reciprocally strengthen
01_Security Dialogue 34/3 20/8/03 3:36 pm
Ulrich Beck The Silence of Words: On Terror and War
and accelerate one another. The logic of
the zero-sum game that was valid for
empires, superpowers, colonialism, eco-
nomic and cultural imperialism, inde-
pendent nation-states and military blocs
loses its explanatory force.
For this reason, it is crucial to introduce
a distinction between sovereignty and
autonomy. The nation-state rests upon the
equivalence of sovereignty and autonomy.
In this regard, economic independence,
cultural diversification, and military, legal
and technological cooperation between
states automatically lead to a loss of
autonomy, and thereby to a loss of sover-
eignty. But if sovereignty is measured as
formal political power – that is, judged
according to the degree to which a state is
capable of gaining profile and influence
on the stage of world politics and aug-
menting the security and welfare of its
citizens – then the increasing intercon-
nection and cooperation – the loss of
autonomy – results in a gain of sovereign-
ty. In other words, the global validity of a
state like Russia is no longer – as during
the Cold War – based on its confronta-
tional potential, but rather on its coopera-
tive potential, on its position in the
networked world of states and the global
market, as well as its presence in supra-
national organizations. Thus, divided and
bundled sovereignty does not reduce this
validity. On the contrary, it empowers
individual state sovereignty. Not only the
global terrorist threat, but also, and to a
greater degree, the global risk society in
general, opens up a new era of trans-
national and multilateral cooperation and
sovereignty – opportunities that states
may historically have overlooked and
gambled away under a false understand-
ing of their national interests.
As is well known, the disintegration of
the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czecho-
slovakia has led to a multiplicity of nation-
ally defined successor states in which con-
flictual ethnic, national and civic belong-
ings partially overlap, partially exclude
one another. This newly awakened and
rekindled ethnicity in the countries and
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265
states of Central and Eastern Europe,
which seeks to transform the nation-state
back to a particularistic ‘ethnic state’,
seems at first glance to stand in contra-
diction to the discovery and unfolding of
cooperative transnational states in face of
the challenges of the global risk society.
The opposite is true. The challenges that
this development represents can con-
tribute to taming the transborder national
and ethnic tensions of the post-Soviet
world of states. If, correspondingly, these
countries define their situations in such a
way that they are confronted with their
common historical missions, it will be
possible and necessary to invent political
frameworks and coordinates in order to
harmonize national solutions and claims
to sovereignty with the conditions of
transnational cooperation. This is now
being seen and spelled out in the geopolit-
ical deliberations on the transborder
‘inner security’ of overlapping ethnic and
national states. It can, however, be applied
to regional global economic cooperation,
the curbing of global finance risks, the
threatening climatic catastrophe and envi-
ronmental risks, poverty and, not least,
human rights. In other words, among the
known and recognized threats of the
future, there is perhaps a key to coopera-
tively alleviating the historical experiences
of violence and the preparations for
violence of state-organized ethnicity, not
merely in the post-Soviet sphere of influ-
ence, but also in the countries of the ‘Third
World’ and elsewhere.
Two ideal-types of transnational state
cooperation can be sketched, in which
national autonomy is dismantled in order
to renew and enlarge national sovereignty
in the global risk society: surveillance states
and cosmopolitan states. With new coopera-
tive powers, surveillance states threaten to
expand to fortress states in which security
and the military are writ large, and free-
dom and democracy count for little. The
rumour is already in circulation. Western
societies accustomed to peace and welfare
lack the necessary degree of clear friend–
foe thinking and the readiness to sacrifice
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266
the privilege previously held by the
marvel of human rights to the measures of
resistance now necessary. This attempt
to construct a Western fortress against
cultural others is ubiquitous, and will
certainly increase in the coming years. A
politics of (ethnic) state authoritarianism
could be forged from it, one that conducts
itself externally with respect to the global
market in an adaptive manner, and inter-
nally in an authoritarian manner. For
globalization’s winners neoliberalism is
respectable; for those who lose out from
globalization, terrorism and fear of for-
eigners is stirred up, and the poison of
racism is administered in measured doses.
This amounts to victory for the terrorists,
because the countries of modernity auto-
matically rob themselves of that which
makes them attractive and superior: free-
dom and democracy.
In the light of this, the future will essen-
tially depend upon asking the question:
What are you striving for, or what are we
striving for when we battle transnational
terrorism? It is a cosmopolitan state sys-
tem that rests upon the recognition of the
otherness of others that holds the answer.
Nation-states, which are waning both
externally and internally, will in the
end have a hard time handling the explo-
sive force of overlapping and self-
exclusive ethnic and national identities.
Cosmopolitan states, on the other hand,
emphasize the necessity of connecting
national self-determination with responsi-
bility for others, foreigners both inside
and outside the national borders. It is not
a matter of negating or even curbing self-
determination. Cosmopolitan states not
only battle terrorism, but also the causes of
terror in the world. They gain and renew
the political forces of initiative and per-
suasion by solving global problems that
impassion people and that seem to be
insoluble in national isolation.
Cosmopolitan states are based on the
principle of the indifference of nation-
states. In a manner similar to the way in
which the Westphalian peace ended the
confessionally charged civil wars of the
Security Dialogue vol. 34, no. 3, September 2003
16th century through the separation of
state and religion, the global (civil) war
of the 20th century and the beginning of
the 21st century – this is the thesis – is
answered by a separation of state and
nation. In a manner similar to the way in
which the areligious state makes possible
the exercise of differing religions, the
cosmopolitan state must preserve the
border-surpassing juxtaposition of ethnic,
national and religious identities through
the principle of constitutional tolerance.
One could and should rethink the
experiment of political Europe in this
sense as an experiment in cosmopolitan
state formation. A cosmopolitan Europe
of self-conscious nations that creates its
political force from the cosmopolitan
fight against terrorism – this could be or
become a completely realistic utopia.
Outlook: Prospects for the Global
Risk Society
It is nearly superfluous to say that this
author is hopelessly rooted in the tradi-
tion of the Enlightenment, even if this
tradition is self-critically applied. In this
spirit, he has attempted, to a large degree
inadequately and provisionally, to sketch
how a grammar of the political, appar-
ently designed for eternity, dissolves
and is transformed on the horizon of the
global risk society. Perhaps, just like
me, you were surprised that the horror of
the dangers that render us lame distorts
our view of the far-reaching political per-
spectives that are also opening. I have
referred to three of these only apparently
paradoxical prospects for the global risk
society.
First, it seems possible and necessary
for the alliance against terror to create an
international legal basis, an anti-terror
regime, that regulates not only questions
of tax evasion but also questions of extra-
dition of perpetrators, the empowerment
of troops, the jurisdiction of the courts, etc.
Only along this path can the long-term
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Ulrich Beck The Silence of Words: On Terror and War 267

challenge truly be met in changing histori- the decisionmaking structure of NATO –

cal and political contexts.
Second, it would be necessary to keep
the alliance’s promise of not only building
upon military means through a credible
politics of dialogue, first and foremost with
respect to the Islamic world, but also with
respect to other cultures whose dignity is
threatened by globalization. Only in this
way can we avoid what military action
provokes, namely that terrorists succeed
in linking themselves to Islamic popula-
tions the world over. Perhaps Europe –
dialogical in terms of culture and foreign
policy – is more capable of this than the
introverted USA?
Third, the dangers of the global risk soci-
ety could be transformed into prospects
for creating regional structures of co-
operation between cosmopolitan multi-
nation-states. The inclusion of Moscow in
though without any formal membership –
is at present the most recent example.
Otherwise, the dangers of the global risk
society are also a source of globally and
locally acting social movements, which
can set in motion the necessary social
transformations.
Permit this intellectual the pleasure of
thinking that these goals might lend wings
to the collaboration between the country
whose language I speak – Germany – and
the country that has honoured me by
inviting me to give this lecture – Russia.
Let me therefore conclude with a quote
from Immanuel Kant (1963: 609): ‘The
thought of oneself as a member of the
cosmopolitan society, bound by civil
rights, is the highest idea man can form of
his end, and it cannot be contemplated
without joy.’

* Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at the University of Munich. He is the author of

numerous books and articles, among them Ecological Politics in the Age of Risk (1994),
Ecological Enlightenment (1992) and Risk Society (1986). This article is a re-edited version of
an address given to the Moscow City Duma, November 2001. First published as Das
Schweigen der Wörter. Über Terror und Krieg. (The Silence of Words: On Terror and War).
Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002. Translated by J. Peter Burgess. Published with per-
mission from Suhrkamp Verlag.

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