On the Illegitimate Use of Force: The Neo-Jacobins of Europe

Abstract

While in Western discourse terrorism first referred to the “Reign of Terror” imposed by the Jacobin state in France (1793–94), in recent decades it has become increasingly associated with non-state actors. Studies on the undertheorized concept of “state terrorism” have by and large neglected its role in liberal democratic states. In this essay I attempt to re-establish the link between the state and terror by challenging the Weberian definition of the state as holding “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” In 1990, the European Parliament called upon each of its member states to dismantle the formations popularly known as “Gladio,” the clandestine organizations stationed in NATO countries during the 1950s to counter potential Soviet invasions. Investigations ranging from Italy’s Operation Gladio in 1990 to the recent Ergenekon Affair in Turkey (2008–13) reveal that many terrorist activities were perpetrated by those intrastate clandestine military networks. The aim of the essay is thus to bring the agentival state back into terrorism studies through an analysis of Gladio operations in Cold War Europe.

Notes

1. Hans Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969),78; italics in original.

2. Christian Davenport, “State Repression and Political Order,” Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 1.

3. Ruth Blakaley, “Bringing the State Back into Terrorism Studies,” European Political Science 6.3 (2007): 228–35.

4. Richard Jackson, Eamon Murphy, and Scott Poynting, eds., Contemporary State Terrorism: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2010), 3.

5. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 167.

6. Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 101.

7. Loykie Loic Lominé, “The Reign of Terror,” in Encyclopedia of the Age of Political Revolutions and New Ideologies, 1760–1815, vol. 2, ed. Gregory Fremont-Barnes (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 618.

8. Lomine, “The Reign of Terror,” 617–20.

9. Audrey K. Cronin, “Behind the Curve: Globalization and International Terrorism,” International Security 27.3 (2002): 58.

10. Alison M. Jaggar, “What Is Terrorism, Why Is It Wrong, and Could It Ever Be Morally Permissible?” Journal of Social Philosophy 36.2 (2005): 203.

11. Michael Stohl, “Old Myths, New Fantasies and the Enduring Realities of Terrorism,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1.1 (2008): 5.

12. For a detailed analysis on the objections to the use of the term “state terrorism,” see Jackson, Murphy, and Poynting, Contemporary State Terrorism, 3–6.

13. Colin Wight, “Theorising Terrorism: The State, Structure and History,” International Relations 23.1 (2009): 101.

14. Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century (London: Continuum, 2003), 237.

15. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 186.

16. Neil Livingstone and Arnold Terrell, eds., Fighting Back (Lexington, MA: Heath, 1986), 1–10.

17. “Text of President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address,” The Washington Post, 29 January 2002.

18. Richard Jackson, “Conclusion, Contemporary State Terrorism: Towards a New Research Agenda,” in Jackson, Murphy, and Poynting, Contemporary State Terrorism, 233.

19. For their manifesto, see Richard Jackson, “The Core Commitments of Critical Terrorism Studies,” European Political Science 6 (2007): 244–51.

20. Bradley McAllister and Alex P. Schimd, “Theories of Terrorism,” in The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (London: Routledge, 2011), 203.

21. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2d ed. (Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing, 1958), 464.

22. This stay-behind network first caused a public scandal in Germany in 1952, when the German police found out that the CIA was working with a fascist youth group led by former Nazi officers, which blacklisted some people as unreliable in case of a Soviet invasion. Similarly, Olav Riste mentions several disclosures of the Norwegian stay-behind since 1978. Yet these scandals did not result in the revelation of the whole international stay-behind program. See Jonathan Kwitny, “An Internation Story: The CIA’s Secret Armies in Europe,” The Nation, 6 April 1992, 446; Olav Riste, “With an Eye to History: The Origins and Development of ‘Stay-Behind’ in Norway,” Journal of Strategic Studies 30.6 (2007): 1023.

23. European Parliament Resolution on Gladio (1990), Joint resolution replacing B3–2021, 2058, 2068, 2078, and 2087/90; at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/European_Parliament_resolution_on_Gladio.

24. Alan P. Dobson and Steve Marsh, US Foreign Policy since 1945, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006), 25.

25. Charles Cogan, “‘Stay-Behind’ in France: Much Ado About Nothing?” Journal of Strategic Studies 30.6 (2007): 942–45.

26. The codename “Gladio” for a joint US-Italy organization first appeared in a meeting between American and Italian intelligence officers on October 18, 1956. The agreement, finalized on November 26, 1956, detailed the conduct of stay-behind activities should any portion of Italian territory face a threat of enemy invasion or insurgency. Leopoldo Nuti, “The Italian ‘Stay-Behind’ Network: The Origins of Operation ‘Gladio’,” Journal of StrategicStudies 30.6 (2007): 966.

27. For an comprehensive overview, see Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005).

28. The American influence on Cold War Italy was not a new phenomenon. Since the early 1970s, some Italian historians such as Ennio Di Nolfo and Elena Aga Rossi conducted considerable research in American and British archives and elaborated on this connection. Subsequent studies have also pointed to the U.S. covert operations in Italy and saw the influence of the American containment policy in the power of the center-right Christian Democrats and the difficulties faced by the Italian Communist Party in coming to power. When Franco de Felice introduced the concept of “double state” in Italy in his “Doppia lealtà e doppio stato” in 1989, just a year before the revelation of the operation Gladio, he followed the same line and pointed to Italian ruling elites’ conflicting loyalties toward Italy and the United States. For a comprehensive literature review, see Antonio Varsori, “Cold War History in Italy,” Cold War History 8.2 (2008): 157–87.

29. Mario Del Pero, “The United States and ‘Psychological Warfare’ in Italy, 1948–1955,” Journal of American History 87 (March 2001): 1313.

30. Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 5.

31. Ola Tunander, “Democratic State vs. Deep State: Approaching the Dual State of the West,” in Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty, ed. Eric Wilson (London: Pluto, 2009), 58.

32. Philip Willan, “US ‘Supported Anti-left Terror in Italy’,” The Guardian, 24 June 2000.

33. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, Part 1 (London: Zed Books, 2003),106.

34. Tunander, “Democratic State vs. Deep State,” 58.

35. Tunander, “Democratic State vs. Deep State,” 67. There are basically two opposite approaches whether or not Moro’s murder was masterminded by obscure forces like Gladio. See Richard Drake’s review essay, “The Aldo Moro Murder Case in Retrospect,” Journal of Cold War Studies 8.2 (2006): 114–25.

36. Nuti, “The Italian ‘Stay-Behind’ Network,” 977.

37. Cogan, “‘Stay-Behind’ in France,” 937.

38. Kwitny, “An Internation Story: The CIA’s Secret Armies in Europe,” 448.

39. Philip Davies, review of Daniele Ganser, Nato’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Journal of Strategic Studies 28.6 (2005): 1067.

40. After the Gladio scandal in Italy, General Doğu Beyazıt, Chief of the Operations Department, and General Kemal Yılmaz, Chief of the Special Forces, issued a press release on 3 December 1990 acknowledging the existence of a similar secret NATO unit directed under the auspices of the Special Warfare Department to organize resistance in the case of a communist occupation. Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 241.

41. Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 224.

42. H. Akın Ünver, “Turkey’s ‘Deep State’ and the Ergenekon Conundrum,” The Middle East Institute Policy Brief 23 (2009): 7.

43. Frank Bovenberk and Yücel Yeşilgöz, “The Turkish Mafia and the State,” in Organised Crime in Europe: Concepts, Patterns and Control Policies in the European Union and Beyond, ed. Cyrille Fijnaut and Letizia Paoli (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 595.

44. Barış Altıntaş, “A Beginner’s Guide to Ergenekon, Trial of the Century,” Today’s Zaman, 4 January 2009.

45. Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 237.

46. Bovenberk and Yeşilgöz, “The Turkish Mafia and the State,” 585.

47. Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993), 176.

48. Alex Schmid, ed., Introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (London: Routledge, 2011), 9.