PO LITICS: 2003 VO L 23(3), 200–206

Liberalism, Terrorism and the Politics

of Fear
Chris Sparks
London Metropolitan University

This article considers the impact of terror and fear on the political health of liberal democratic
societies. It examines the strategic use of terror to produce a politics of fear through an exploration
of current Western reactions to terrorism. The argument is developed through a presentation of a
three-part map of the politics of fear constituted by the instigation of fear, the (attempted) eradi-
cation of fear and the management of fear. Central to this presentation is an analysis of the desta-
bilising effects the introduction of terror has on civil society and government, and of the effective
ways of responding to it. Running through the presentation is an analysis of the constitution of
terror and fear, their relationship to each other and to the general insecurities which beset liberal
democracies.

This article discusses ways in which we might understand the use of terror to per-
petrate societal fear. It also signposts how a clear understanding can inform coher-
ent governmental responses to the fearfulness which characterises these present
times. The argument develops through a series of clarifications, firstly, clarifying
the term ‘politics of fear’, by identifying the constitution of the condition of fear
and highlighting its centrality to political life. Application of this definition to the
current situation highlights the relationship of fear to the activity of governance,
to the condition of terror and the role of each as a factor in the production of the
politics of fear.

The politics of fear

Politics is society reflexively engaged with its own order and purpose. Politics
expresses internal restlessness and is conflict-ridden for, while it depends on
degrees of consensus for it to function, it is driven by struggles between established,
aspiring and disenchanted social members to maintain, modify or destroy the cul-
tural, political and economic conditions of their existence. Politics also addresses
external threats to the society’s secure existence. Governmentally, it is the ordered
management of the social conditions of people’s existence. Psychologically, it is an
activity that deals with the deep-rooted existential concern with the uncertain con-
dition of their being. Viewed this way, politics is reflexive engagement with the
fear-ridden struggle for existence. Government, as an element of the political, is
the strategic pursuit of enduring security in the face of the social condition of fear-
fulness in general and hostile agents within and without in particular. Terrorism is
the opposite of governance. It is the strategic production of terror to undermine a

© Political Studies Association, 2003.

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LIBERALISM, TERRORISM AND THE POLITICS OF FEAR 201

society’s capacity to endure the uncertainties of existence – to make society

insecure through the production of a social condition of fear.

Seen in this light, the current situation presents three broad categories of the
politics of fear: an anti-governmental politics which instigates and maintains fear,
and two governmental responses: the first a politics focused on the eradication of
fear; the second a politics aimed at managing fear. Brief consideration of each of
these elements of the politics of fear indicates how entrenched are the difficulties
in escaping from it. It also provides the first sight of what type of governance is
best suited to the current scenario.

(1) Instigators: Instigators seek to establish favourable power relations, through

the use of violence to produce an incapacitating fear in their enemies. Fear-making
destabilises opponents by undermining the solidity of their world, violently
rupturing normality, surreally re-ordering the relationship of objects and activities.
This politics, which makes a virtue out of secrecy and cannot stand the exposure
produced by any kind of transparency, is anti-democratic and destroys the secure
order required to establish civil society, but it can be used as a dangerous tool for
democratic ends by those unable by other means to establish any power over the
order of their lives. (Sometimes it has been both simultaneously; exposing un-
certainties within the philosophies and aims of the organisations which use it and
producing internal factions within them.)

(2) Eradicators: Eradicators are driven by ‘a gut-level fear’ of uncertainty and seek
to eradicate the causes of uncertainty ‘entirely with little regard to cost’ (Stern,
1999, pp. 34–35). Fear drives the desire to hunt out and destroy agents of danger
without and within. Where there is cultural heterogeneity, this fear-driven quest
for safety can become twisted into a drive for the security of sameness. The poten-
tial cost of such activity is the loss of civil society itself. Overly fearful governments
can lurch into panoptic governance, undermining the world they seek to preserve.
In such situations, citizens come to be seen as actual or potential enemies within,
vigilantes prosper, civility withers and, ironically, the uncertainties and dangers that
lurk within the society become its defining and potentially terminating features.

(3) Managers: This approach recognises the integral uncertainties of the political
condition and is fundamental to liberal theory and practice. Liberalism – born out
of the fires of religious conflict and social upheaval – reveals its fundamental cause
and approach when dealing with radical political uncertainty. Issues of the scope
of liberty and the rightful distribution of power and resources – so often subsumed
in appraisals of a secured and plentiful Western world – resume their fundamen-
tal significance in the context of radically uncertain political scenarios where all
can be ‘up for grabs’. So do the complex constitutional arrangements and social
practices which liberals have constructed to manage the inherently conflict-ridden
social condition.

Paradoxically, the strength of the managerial approach is also its weakness, as can
be seen in Northern Ireland, South Africa and deconstructed Yugoslavia, where
situations of radical social uncertainty have been managed through the institution
of complex consociational constitutions, including formally arranged and protected

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202 CHRIS SPARKS

arenas for public debate between diverse and mutually suspicious parties. In each
of these cases, the enshrining of differences in a necessarily complicated constitu-
tional balance has ensured that constitutional failure is always moments away from
the political present. This fact alone nudges up levels of social insecurity, promotes
instability and levels of uncertainty which threaten to overwhelm the frail balance
of constitutional machinery and factional power. At such times, many who have
benefited from managerial liberalism in times of relative security reject it in favour
of eradicators. This is a grave mistake, for while the management of fear is prone
to failures and requires great mental strength, its practice involves the clarification
of the sources of the fear, enabling people to deal with it strategically. Eradication,
in contrast, falls into a trap set by terrorism by intensifying and prolonging a general
state of fearfulness. The details of this argument are set out in the following
sections on the current state of fearfulness, and the creation of fearfulness by
terrorism.

The current sources of fearfulness

The current fearfulness of the Western world results from a mix of factors. The first
is the apparent emergence of mass terrorism as conducted by al-Qa’eda, which
attacks societies wholesale, making no distinction between the civilian populations
and the political order of the societies they attack, and may be willing to use
nuclear, biological or other ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (Gurr and Cole, 2000,
pp. 29–33; Wilkinson, 2000, pp. 50–51). This threat is exacerbated by the growth
of an ‘illicit traffic in nuclear materials’, following the collapse of state defence and
policing programmes in the former Soviet Union (Gilinsky, 2002, pp. 1–24;
Hoffman and Claridge, 1999, pp. 10–12), creating ‘easy access to intruders and to
insiders interested in smuggling nuclear materials’(Gurr and Cole, 2000, p. 57).
Furthermore, opening up international barriers to the movement of goods and
money in pursuit of free trade has created difficulties in policing the movement of
people, money and weapons within Western territories in general and Europe in
particular (Nogala, 2001). These conditions make it possible for anti-Western
groups to buy, build and move WMDs into Western territories.
These are the facts, but in the formation of scenarios of fear, facts do not speak for
themselves; they require the insertion of significant elements of creative interpre-
tation. Fear ‘is a subjective reaction to actually existing objective circumstances’
(Keane, 2001, p. 13), but the relationship between objective circumstance and sub-
jective experience hinges on the subject’s creative interpretation of the objective
situation. The process of identifying and evaluating things around us is loaded with
the subject’s ideas, and the dimensions of a world so shaped – including its fearful
dimensions – are in part shaped by those ideas.
Fear particularly colours our perceptions of what is going on. It drags our interest
away from the clear definitions of rational considerations of our objective situation
and the likely outcomes of our involvement in it, causing us to dwell instead upon
the most unlikely possibilities (this plane may crash, the stranger in a car park may
be a killer etc) creating a sense of the dangerous strangeness which appears to make
itself present as the light and shade of phenomena (Freud, 1985).
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LIBERALISM, TERRORISM AND THE POLITICS OF FEAR 203

The interpretative non-rational elements involved in understanding our world

colour the issue of the likelihood of its endangerment by anti-Western terrorists.
So, though the features of the situation to be considered are relatively clear (it is
clearly possible, though not certain, that new terrorist groups can get and use
WMDs (Davidson Smith, 1993, pp. 123–130) and it is also possible that ‘rogue’
states might work with terrorist organisations to supply, build or move such
weapons), disputes as to whether the possibilities are remote or likely outcomes
will arise from people’s differing capacities to imagine the reasons for criminal
organisations, non-Western states and Islamic movements to act together to
produce immediate threats to the West.
Common sense in Western society, fuelled with imagery of disasters, combined
with threadbare knowledge about the availability of WMDs, the presence of anti-
Western terrorist groups and orientalist imaginings of Islamic culture as violently
unstable, has a ready capacity to imagine the most dangerous scenarios for the near
future. As a result, people scare themselves into non-rational panic-driven activ-
ity. In the US, this is exemplified by the reduction of numbers travelling abroad
and the frailty of stock markets. In Western Europe, fearfulness has been expressed
in a right-wing backlash against the ethnic and cultural diversity commonplace in
European nations, as the issue of terrorism has become confused with issues of
immigration. In May 2002 the anti-immigration/Islam Front National (France) and
List Pim Fortuyn ( Holland) made significant electoral gains.
Having access to the mundane facts – the complex strategies and technical prob-
lems involved in obtaining parts (Davidson Smith, 1993) and making weapons
(Gurr and Cole, 2000, pp. 56–75), and the realpolitic orientations of Islamic nation
states, and loosely defined terrorist organisations such as the PLO – governments
might be expected to be less likely than the general populace to suspect immedi-
ate holocaustic danger, and to ensure that rational language and action dominates
discussion. However, uncritical expression of the common sense of danger provides
easy popularity which is useful to any political group seeking power, and is par-
ticularly tempting to governments seeking to eradicate uncertainties from social
life.
The desire to be in tune with the citizenry can warp the language of politicians
towards populist vulgarity, and the use of such language corrupts the technical for-
mulations of political scenarios. In current times, political exploitation of mass fear-
fulness was initiated by President Bush’s ‘State of the Nation’ address of 30 January
2002, which introduced a permanent ‘war on terror’. The corruption of govern-
mental judgement, expressed most recently in the president’s description of Iraqi
nuclear scientists as ‘nuclear holy warriors’ (The Guardian, 7 October 2002), was
first manifested in the Patriot Act of 25 October 2002. This act attempts to eradi-
cate ‘the enemy within’ by reducing civil liberties in areas of communication,
movement and judicial process, on the basis of ‘breathtakingly vague definition of
terrorism’ (Dworkin, 2002).
In Europe also, eradication politics has come to the fore. The UK government has
restricted civil liberties with the Anti-terrorism Security and Crime Act 2001. In
Germany and Holland, mainstream parties respond to the eradication politics of
the far right by espousing eradication themselves. The German general election of
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204 CHRIS SPARKS

2002 saw a pledge by the Christian Democrats’ leader to expel ‘4000 Islamic
fundamentalists’ from the country (Hooper, 2002).

Eradication politics and chronic fearfulness

This shift towards eradication politics is futile. An ongoing war against the causes
of fear creates a condition of chronic fear. Unlike acute fear, which is expressed
intensely and is over as quickly as the intense threat it responds to, chronic fear is
a response to an enduring and persistent or growing threat to the subject. It encour-
ages gnawing reflective worries to creep in, grinding away at the fearful one’s
integrity. Thus, the ongoing general condition of fearfulness produced by long-term
war against the causes of fear eventually wears down the fear-ridden society, a
process which is exacerbated by the fact that, while it endures, the fear-ridden
society provides a fertile location for terrorist activity.
Grant Wardlaw points out that the aim of terrorism is to destabilise social life by
stimulating a ‘continuous high level of anxiety’ (Wardlaw, 1989, p. 35) which will
produce fearful and anti-civil modes of behaviour. Chronic fearfulness entrenches
fearful behaviour into the patterns of everyday living so they become altered,
undermining by degrees the normal functions of society. Thus the aim of terrorist
activity is also the end result of eradication politics. The futility of eradication
politics and the need for a managerial response to terrorism becomes clearer upon
examination of the relationship of terrorism to the condition of fear.

Terrorism and fear

In common discussion, fear and terror are treated as if they are of a kind. This is
not so; while fear is produced in response to objective threats, it is a response to
the uncertain elements of those certain threats. Terror, on the other hand, is pro-
duced by realisation of the certainty of life’s destruction. For example, someone
becomes afraid when they know they have cancer. They are not sure what will
happen, or how to act, but once they know the cancer is definitely killing them,
and they start to experience it, so there is no doubt; then they are terrorised. A
politics that involves the creation of terror requires acts that are deliberately
destructive to the people being terrorised. It is a politics that deploys violence, but,
as Hannah Arendt pointed out, power cannot be gained by the use of terrorising
violence alone (Arendt, 1970). When terrorising situations are produced by acts of
violence, they barely last longer than the terrorising act of violence itself. For this
reason, terror produced by acts of violence cannot last for very long and, in terms
of power, has little effect after it is finished. Terrorism only has political value as a
method of producing uncertainty when it is a servant of the politics of fear (Jenkins,
1975, p. 1).
This point is exemplified by the activities of the Provisional IRA: IRA bombs were
by and large used to terrorise those relatively few people who were in the blast
range when they went off, but the warnings which attended the bombs instilled
fear into far more people – often to the level of panic – and this fear, felt by the
many, lasts a lot longer than the terror felt by the few. One of the IRA’s most effec-
tive tactics was the use of one bomb to stimulate fear, which was intensified and
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spread by a series of false bomb warnings in the following days. What they knew
was that the root of the fear was not the certainty that Belfast, London or some
other city would be bombed, but the uncertainty produced by knowledge that it
might be. Such fear leads to systemic breakdown in social and economic order –
shops close, roads close, planes go empty, the economy suffers and the state, in its
search for the shadowy enemy, lurches towards panoptic governance. All of this,
of course, was the aim of the IRA. They aimed to produce a fearful and self-
damaging response by the British state and so increase their power relative to it.
This discussion shows how terrorism can have strategic purpose but always has
limited political use. For this reason, ‘the use of pure terrorism is the exception
rather than the rule. In the vast majority of cases ... terrorism is used as part of a
much broader repertoire of violent means’ (Wilkinson, 2000, p. 13). The IRA’s
tactics typify how terror has been commonly and effectively used by politically and
economically weaker groups to get leverage in societal power struggles. Signifi-
cantly, those who have achieved this end, such as the ANC, the IRA and the
Sandinistas, have moved away from terrorism as opportunities to modify and access
the formal political process have arisen. Indeed, Wilkinson’s ‘repertoire of means’
typically deployed by such groups alongside terrorism can be extended to include
non-violent diplomatic and party political activities.
A further implicit point here is that terrorism, as an attempt to gain leverage in
societal power struggles, is an expression of the fundamental uncertainty of politi-
cal life. Terrorism is the artful use of the dimensions of this uncertainty, usually
conducted by those who know it well through the condition of their daily lives
(fearful uncertainty is the quality of existence common to both despotic dictators
and peasant insurgents). Terrorists are not the cause of uncertainty, nor of the con-
dition of fear it generates, but living in fear, and working with it, they become its
agents.
This understanding helps to demystify the activities and aims of groups like the
PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Chechens. Their most urgent need is not to destroy
the modern world, but rather to modify and access the formal order of power
shaping their societies. While they are currently locked into anti-democratic
modi operandi common to instigators of fear, elements of these groups can be
manipulated towards democratic ends and separated from despotic tendencies
(as represented by al-Qa’eda) through the careful diplomacy central to mana-
gerial liberalism.
This discussion also shows that the greatest terrorism-related fear in the Western
world – the fear of groups which use mass terror purely for the purpose of a
society’s destruction – is disproportionate to the objective status of the threat such
groups pose. As we have seen, terrorism as an end in itself is not a feature of politi-
cal life, nor can it be a part of political life. The likelihood of ‘pure terror’ groups
functioning effectively for any length of time occupies the far reaches of possibil-
ity, because the use of terror as an end in itself is singular in impact, totally destruc-
tive in effect, lacks strategic purpose and is therefore useless as a means of altering
scenarios of power. Pure terrorist groups have to annihilate their opponents com-
pletely to succeed. The fact that powerful national governments who have used
terror as a simple mode of governance have eventually fallen to their opponents
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206 CHRIS SPARKS

shows that such an outcome is hardly possible. This fact will gradually impose itself
on the fantasies of those who attack Western civilisation wholesale.

Notes
I should like to express my gratitude to Kate Duke, John Keane and Kelvin Knight for their advice and
help in the preparation of this article.

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© Political Studies Association, 2003.