Empires and Barbarians by Jakub Grygiel

Much has been said over the past few years about the novelty of the security challenges now facing the United States. In what is still the most popular version of events, history started on 9/11, when “everything changed.” The global jihadist movement is an unexpected offshoot of the encounter between Western-driven modernization processes, now of global scale in the 21st century, and an Islamic world still struggling with the legacy of the 20th. One result of this encounter is a decentralized web of mobile, marauding Islamist terrorist organizations capable of complex attacks, highly adaptable in structure, often indistinguishable from the broader Muslim communities that succor or tolerate them, and reasonably skilled at public relations (at least with regard to those communities). In the worst scenario, al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates may use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies, marking the only time since Westphalia that a substate actor can credibly threaten the vital interests of not only a state, but of the strongest state in the international system. If that’s not novelty, nothing is.

That there is something new about this threat is undeniable. Substate actors with global reach and the technical skill of modern apocalyptical terrorists bear almost no resemblance to the main challenges to international security during the past several centuries, which were characterized by more or less rule-based competition among well-defined states. Another difference stands out, too: The modern state system enforced a separation of church and state on the international level with its doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio. Its 17th-century founders learned the lessons of the Thirty Years War and determined not to let the passions of religious disagreement inflame the necessities of political order. Today’s salafi warriors mean to destroy that separation utterly, a separation that even the Ottoman Empire, the seat of the Caliphate, came to accept in practice over time.

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