Abstract
Martin A. Miller, The Foundations of Modern Terrorism: State, Society and the Dynamics of Political Violence, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York, 2012; 306 pp.; 9781107621084, £19.99 (pbk)
Karrin Hanshew, Terror and Democracy in West Germany, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York, 2012; 282 pp., 9 illus.; 9781107017375, £64.99 (hbk); 9781107429451, £19.99 (pbk)
Christoph Cornelißen, Brunello Mantelli and Petra Terhoeven, eds, Il decennio rosso: Contestazione sociale e conflitto politico in Germania e in Italia negli anni Sessanta e Settanta, Il Mulino: Bologna, 2012; 336 pp.; 9788815237903, €25.00 (pbk)
The three books under review here concern the theory and practice of that form of politically motivated violence usually called ‘terrorism’. Martin Miller’s is the broadest and most accessible, a general history designed for an educated public interested in the topic or for students (and marketed by its publisher on its website as a textbook). It has an ambitious chronological reach, from antiquity to the present. Miller’s stated purpose is to explain how terrorism arises, what goals its proponents have sought, and how it became an apparently permanent fixture in our world. He does not restrict his concept of political violence to non-governmental actors; instead, throughout his book he shows how those in power also used terror as a means toward an end. He seeks to demonstrate that insurgents and governments alike have always used violence against each other, and need each other to help justify their respective existence. This outlook underlies the entire book and represents its unique contribution to the historiography.
Miller’s experience and expertise prior to this volume lay in Russian intellectual history, and his strengths here are obvious in his chapter showing the links between the violence (or terror) perpetrated in Russia by tsars and revolutionaries alike in the nineteenth century. He demonstrates here, as throughout his book, that ‘contested political legitimacy’ (58) is a key both to the inception of violence from below and the response with violence from above. Alexander I established a state terror apparatus in the Committee of General Security; it was followed by the more famous Third Section of Nicholas I. Both were agencies of what Alexander Herzen in the 1860s would call a ‘white terror’ (65). The revolutionaries who struck at the tsars were hoping that their violence would lead the peasants of Russia to rise with them in rebellion, a megalomaniacal dream shared by many of those cited throughout the book who engaged in political violence. Their repeated failure to create anything more than ‘a huge list of causalities’ (94) is a common refrain in Miller’s book – terror is a beloved tactic in spite of its infrequent success, and not because it actually works.
Miller’s chapter on the United States, ‘Terrorism in a Democracy’, is most instructive about his approach. Under the misapprehension that terror is a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States, the uninitiated might come to his book expecting to hear about al-Qaeda, Timothy McVeigh, or the Unabomber. Yet Miller spends most of his time on violence from above. He concludes that historically ‘the American judicial process justified acts of terror at both the national and local levels’. The targets included Native Americans (e.g., deportation of the Cherokee) and blacks (lynching). In this lengthy chapter, Miller recounts the systematic and repeated use of state-sanctioned, state-ordered, or state-tolerated violence to achieve political aims against these groups. Meanwhile, McVeigh, responsible for the second largest death toll from a non-governmental terrorist act in US history, earns one mention in a catch-all section on radical violence in the US. Moreover, Miller misstates McVeigh’s death toll at 185, when in fact it was 168. Al-Qaeda, which killed nearly 3,000 people of various nationalities on 11 September 2001, is discussed in a single paragraph, with no mention at all of the attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia that day. Al-Qaeda serves in Miller’s analysis to demonstrate briefly how the United States’ policies worldwide provoked counter-violence rather than as a subject in its own right (242).
Although the book’s most obvious selling point is its appeal as a general history, Miller explicitly denies his intention of writing any such work. ‘There are many other instances of terrorism that deserve to be included’ (8), he tells us early on. That might free the author from his understandable worries about criticism for omitting important things such as al-Qaeda’s rise, but it does not relieve a reviewer of the obligation to point out what might be missing. For example, the Pulitzer-prize-winning account of the background to 9/11, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, is not listed in the bibliography. Because of such omissions, Miller’s book will not be as helpful as many might suppose when first reading his title, ‘The Foundations of Modern Terrorism’.
In a work of this scope, it is perhaps inevitable that details might suffer. Sometimes, however, the mistakes go too far. Consider this tale of the end of Aldo Moro, the former Italian prime minister kidnapped and then murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978: ‘The tense situation came to an end when [Red Brigades member Mario] Moretti had Moro shot and then dumped his corpse in front of Rome’s Trevi Fountain’ (234). In fact, as best we can tell, it was Moretti himself who shot Moro, but far from being left at one of Rome’s most visited tourist attractions, Moro's body was instead famously found on a side street, the via Caetani, in the back of the automobile in which he had been shot. A photo of his body was on the front pages of world newspapers by the next day. The location was a half a mile from the Trevi Fountain, as anonymous and obscure as the Trevi Fountain is famous and open. While it may at first seem overzealous to focus on this one incident, the need to add such colorful detail calls into question the author’s accuracy at other points where the reviewer was less likely to catch factual missteps. Indeed, in an effort to see if his sources might have led him astray about the circumstances of Moro’s murder, I examined those works cited in the only footnote in the paragraph about the killing, which referred to two secondary sources. Not only did neither source mention the Moro murder on the pages indicated, but neither had anything directly to do with the events mentioned in Miller’s paragraph on Moro. One of the citations referred to page numbers belonging to a chapter in a collected volume written by a different author altogether from the one Miller named in his note. I am left to wonder about the care with which all the other notes I did not check were written. In sum, this book is good for its thought-provoking approach and broad scope, but it may be that specifics should be verified elsewhere.
Where Miller is synthetic and argumentative, Karrin Henshew is empirical and careful. Her book quickly hooks its readers with a gripping account of the most infamous event of the ‘German Autumn’ of political violence in 1977: the kidnapping and murder of businessman Hanns Martin Schleyer. She then uses that event to introduce us to the stakes of her work: it is to be an examination of the belief that ‘terrorism was seen as a litmus test for German democracy, where the responses of the state and populace were taken as evidence of the lessons West Germans had or had not learned about the past’ (4). She dives deeply into the details of 1960s and 1970s politics and protests in West Germany, while also showing herself conversant with many larger issues in the history of terrorism, twentieth-century Germany, and general European politics and society.
Hanshew industriously visited and mined the archives of government agencies and political parties, many of which had only recently made their collections for this period accessible. She is thus able to pay special attention to the state’s actions and responses. This focus on the state perhaps slightly imbalances her work, but this is inevitable since leftist groups, most famously the RAF, did not leave archives behind. She explains at length how West Germans emerged from World War II determined to make some form of democracy work. That meant defending their idea of it vehemently, even ‘militantly’, to use Hanshew’s word. Meanwhile, to many on the other side, this democracy (or ‘democracy’, as they might have put it) created by the West German Basic Law of 1949 and put into everyday practice in the 1950s was not congenial or even acceptable. These West Germans believed they understood perfectly what all Germans needed and bitterly resented their inability to gain power and enact their preferred policies. Some (as Miller repeatedly catalogs throughout history in his book as well) believed they could make a decisive difference by using violence against property, or people, or both. ‘Militant democracy’ responded, and decades of conflict ensued.
There is no way to write about this subject without betraying or at least hinting at one’s sympathies or prejudices. This review, for example, largely avoids ‘terrorism’ in favor of ‘political violence’, yet there are plenty of scholars and politicians who would view this choice as an act of cowardice or sympathy rather than one of attempted objectivity. Hanshew uses the word ‘terrorism’ frequently, which might mark her as sympathetic to the claims of the German state that it was the victim in these events, yet she also uses ‘fascism’ instead of ‘Nazism’, seemingly revealing that she agrees with those perpetrating the violence from below that an ideology that prefigured Nazism might well have endured beyond its formal end in 1945.
Ultimately, Hanshew does battle with those who refuse to see the German Autumn as a ‘transformative event’ (8). Her book is an extended argument that ‘key elements of West German political culture’ were modified or created by the actors of the day. She argues that ‘the German Autumn contributed to the breakdown and reconfiguration of commitments and social networks that had defined politics since 1945’ (8). The strength of her work is not in proving this assertion, which could hardly be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction, but rather in documenting scrupulously how it might have been possible for a series of events such as the German Autumn to have served as a frame of reference for both left and right in contemporary Germany.
The editors of the final volume in question, Il decennio rosso (The Red Decade) are attempting that most delicate of tasks, declaring that the time has come for the study of a topic to move from journalistic and speculative realms squarely into that of history based on the widest possible consideration of sources, and free of excessive personal attachment to or revulsion at the actors and their deeds. In this volume of essays by German and Italian scholars, the reflexive hero-making and demonization of both leftists and state actors has indeed become more nuanced and differentiated. As the 30th and 40th anniversaries of 1968 and 1977–78 led to symposia such as the one that produced this volume, greater access to official records and to the testimony of some of key actors, who were willing by now to be more frank and forthcoming, meant that writing true history might at last be possible.
After a wide-ranging introduction by Petra Terhoeven, 12 discrete essays follow, exploring aspects of political violence in Italy, in Germany, or in both considered comparatively or as part of the same phenomena. Diego Giachetti shows that the drift to violence by some in the Italian youth movements was most likely created by various governments signaling tacitly or otherwise to police that violence against protesters was acceptable, which in turn radicalized the youth into counter-violence. Franco Milanesi traces the development of student protest in Italy through several identifiable stages, from outrage in the early 1960s at an education system that had not been reformed in decades, through an increasing awareness of violence used against outsiders by governments throughout the world in the mid-1960s, and finally to the widespread acceptance of the need for a real and perhaps violent revolution by the late 1960s. Christoph Cornelißen makes innovative use of student publications and other records to demonstrate how regional German universities were frequently as involved in protest as the more prominent centers of unrest, but also that these regional loci of protest were less likely to move beyond demonstrations into sustained opposition.
Marco Grispigni explains how political violence in 1970s Italy was ‘a good deal more complex that would appear from the phrase “years of lead”’ (anni di piombo, a commonly employed phrase denoting the ‘red decade’ that is the subject of the book) (145). There were, for instance, by a margin of over ten to one, far more neo-fascist acts of violence and attacks on persons than those coming from actors on the far left. Marco Scavino critically examines the two ‘hot years’ of Italian labor relations, 1968–1969, and argues that the failure to resolve worker dissatisfaction was a major contributor to the atmosphere of political crisis in the 1970s that could, and did, beget widespread violence. Alfons Kenkmann contributes one of only three essays in the volume that consider Italy and West Germany jointly. He homes in tightly on the year 1968 and the protests in both countries. Like several of the other contributors to the volume, he stresses the crisis in education in both countries and the lack of appropriate reforms. Fabrizio Fiume points out that of the two new Italian radical organizations, Lotta Continua and Potere Operaio, the former enjoyed greater success and longevity because it did not cling to the ‘rigidly militaristic’ (197) approach of the latter, which caused Potere Operaio to wither and die in the early 1970s. Wolfgang Kraushaar, Germany’s leading expert on 1968 in Germany and the origins of terrorism that followed quick on its heels, ponders the precise links between the protests of that year and the origins of organized political violence in the RAF, the 2 June Movement, and the Tupamaros. He finds clear theoretical ties between the protest movements and the violent groups, but no such obvious links in the leadership.
Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann’s chapter argues that we must not only pay attention to those branded ‘terrorists’ when trying to determine the group dynamics, motivations, and context in which leftist political violence developed, but also to police, prosecutors, courts, and the media. She believes trial records and transcripts form a key source for historians attempting to clarify these questions. She uses these records to make the case that the state massively overreacted to a threat that was far from existential. Aldo Giannuli stresses a unique feature of political violence in Italy compared to that elsewhere in Europe: two different and opposed ideologies – far left and far right – struggled simultaneously and violently. Giannuli concludes that the political effects of the era were devastating for the political parties most closely associated with the struggle (the Italian Communist Party, PCI, on the far left, and the Italian Social Movement, MSI, on the far right), although the PCI’s constitutional orientation served the cause of the Italian left well in the long run. Marica Tolomelli compares opinion on political violence in West Germany and Italy. In both countries there was a clear-cut distinction between a public opinion and a non-public one. But in the Italian context, this non-public opinion, as expressed in alternative newspapers and student publications, was taken far more fully into account in the formulation of public opinion than in West Germany. Finally, Petra Terhoeven demonstrates how the Italian left was in communication with leftists elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, and she shows how the joint suicides in prison of three RAF leaders at the end of the German Autumn in 1977 moved the Italian left to scathing denunciation of the West German state. She thereby demonstrates that the phenomenon of leftist political violence, or terrorism, was one of transnational significance then, as now, and one that must be studied as such, as this volume does so splendidly.