Terror and Consent
by Philip Bobbitt (Allen Lane, £25)
As the Bush administration nears its end, there is growing excitement in Europe about the chance for a fresh start in transatlantic relations. Despite the best efforts of both sides to smooth over differences in the last few years, the parting of ways between the American government and mainstream European political opinion, which began in 2001, has never fully been reversed.
Nowhere is this more true than in the overlapping areas of security and international law. One of the most compelling aspects of Terror and Consent, Philip Bobbitt’s ambitious new book on the “wars for the twenty-first century,” is that it explicitly presents itself as a blueprint for a new strategic vision around which the US and Europe can unite. US and European responses to terrorism have tended to fall on opposite sides of a series of conceptual divides (for instance, over whether terrorist attacks should be seen as acts of war or crimes, or whether strategy or international law should guide military intervention). Bobbitt’s book seeks to reframe the confrontation with al Qaeda in such a radical way that the significance of these conventional arguments falls away. Terror and Consent proposes a redefinition not only of the “war on terror,” but of global politics generally. Some sense of its aspirations may be gained from Bobbitt’s comment that Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington failed with their big ideas (the “end of history” and “clash of civilisations” respectively) because “they were in fact not big enough.”
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