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19th Asialink Lecture

Global Governance and the War Against Terror

Lord Professor Meghnad Desai
Director, Centre for the Study of Global Governance
London School of Economics

Sidney Myer Asia Centre, Monday 9 December 2002

The topic is not just urgent but is of special significance for Australia following the tragic events in Bali of the 12th of October. Important and emotive as that event was, we really have to understand the nature of terrorism and the problems that it raises for local governments in as dispassionate a manner as possible. What I propose to do is take you through the nature of global terrorism and the problems that it poses for us in terms of global governance.

Globalisation and the Rise of Global Terrorism

Terrorism has been around for a long time. It is a special form of violence in that it is generally directed against people who are not necessarily connected with the cause that the terrorist wants to pursue. This is very important. When Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1914, it was as a Serbian Nationalist. He was doing something he believed would directly help the Serbian cause, and he was assassinating someone who he thought was involved in denying the Serbs their nationhood. The people who murdered Tsar Alexander II in Russia in 1881 - the Narodnik - were also practicing directed violence.

The difference with today's terrorism is that it is not directed against even the proximate cause of the problem the terrorist wants to solve. It is undirected, general violence. We are affected by it because of its suddenness and its callousness. Terrorist do not care whether they murder children, the elderly, or women, and they do not care whether the people they kill are at all involved with or relevant to the problem they want to highlight or want to solve. Therefore, it is not so much the number of people who die, although that is important, it is the suddenness and the senselessness of the act that shocks us all.

Of course, for the terrorists this makes a lot of sense. Terrorism is not an irrational act, although we may find it hard to understand. The terrorists are actually doing something that they view necessary to achieve their objectives. Their objectives may be either to highlight a particular grievance they have or to move the enemy nearer to their own position, and thus help to solve the problem they want to solve.

The terrorism that we are more familiar with during the twentieth century has been territorially specific. They have been national liberation movements. Nearly all anti-colonial struggles displayed episodes of terrorism, such as today's ETA in Spain, the IRA in Ireland and others. But the important thing about the ETA or the IRA or the Sendero Luminoso (Shinning Path) in Peru, is that all these movements are confined to a single territory. They are essentially national liberation struggles. Whatever we may think of these people who go around killing innocent victims, when we set that aside, we can recognise that they have very territorially specific program. The IRA has a program, Sendero Luminoso has a program and so on. What is also evident is that given a certain continuation of circumstances, the IRA or the ETA may be able to choose objectives, and then one can see what perimeters they are confining themselves to.

What is peculiar about this new form of global terrorism is that it is not territory specific. An analogy would be the kind of terrorism we used to have in the 1960s and the 1970s, when there were anti-capitalist terrorists like the Red Brigade, the Angry Brigade, the Weathermen and other people who were basically opposed to the global capitalist system and wanted to destroy it. Yet for them - it should be pointed out - unlike the current form of terrorism, the destruction of property was more important than the destruction of people. They were in a struggle which one could not see a simple end to, but their vision was still national. They were out to kill their own capitalist predators, their own establishment. They were not, generally speaking, spreading their struggle beyond the confines of their own national borders.

What's interesting here about al-Qaeda and the terrorist problem that we have faced in the 1990s, is that it has arrived simultaneously with globalisation. There is no time to go into globalisation in any great detail, but one has to recognise that the late twentieth century globalisation is fundamentally different from the globalisation of the nineteenth century. Some have argued that the first phase of globalisation ended with the First World War, and the second phase of globalisation began sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s. However, it doesn't really matter when it began. A colleague of mine John Gray contends that the current phase of globalisation began with the launch of the first communication satellite in the late 1960s. This made possible rapid international telecommunications, and later on the information technology revolution, and then the transport revolution. These things are absolutely basic to globalisation. I would add to that list the deregulation of capital movements which first began in the United States and then later in the UK during the 1970s, and now is so widespread that we are used to relatively free flows of capital. We are used to stock markets across the world, and to people investing across different stock markets, not just in equities but also in new financial institutions. So there has been an increase in transport, telecommunications, information technology and the transfer of money.

One of the ways that people describe globalisation is that it annihilates space. In the nineteenth century, they thought they were annihilating time by the fact that they could lay an underground cable and then send messages via the telegraph very quickly. People in London could send cables directly to people in Calcutta when the British were ruling India and everyone thought it was revolutionary. Yet, today we can communicate literally instantaneously with people half way around the world by using a telecommunications satellite and other forms of IT. In fact, you could direct a factory in China while sitting here in Melbourne or communicate instantaneously with any part of the world.

This annihilation of space, that is the ability to act instantaneously across different locations, is very much at the heart of the capacity of this new global terrorism. This new form of terrorism is very much a part of the dialectics of globalisation. When we talk about the positive aspects of globalisation, we often highlight the increased capacity to communicate (the so-called "IT revolution"), increased global trade, new global wealth, the movement of peoples, the economy of knowledge, and so forth. Yet, it is precisely in all of these revolutions that this new terrorism has been born, and its capacity to have a global reach is very much an outcome of this very process of globalisation. Without globalisation and its new technologies, you could not possibly imagine this new form of terrorism. So between the end of the first world war and the 1980s, as the world was slowly globalising, there were numerous national/territorial problems (economic, political, and social movements) that were largely confined to a single nation or territory. Now, as we begin this new century, we suddenly have a truly globalised world, one that crosses national boundaries and has generated a global economy - and its dialectic - global terrorism.

We are going to talk later on about the possibility of global governance as another important dialectic of global terrorism. Another way to think of it is when the modern European state arose for the first time in the sixteenth century, it had to conquer the warlords and rebel barons - people who were causing trouble, people who were threatening the property and security of the King's subjects. The absolutist King and absolutist State of sixteenth century Europe arose by overcoming the "feudal terrorism" of the days, when horseback riders were terrorising the King's subjects and stealing Robin Hood-style whatever they could lay their hands on.

From this perspective we might say - and I want to go over this point later on - that we are fast approaching a threshold where a truly global state may have to rise for the very same reason. One of the primary reasons for global governance - that is for a world state - may be the need to overcome things like global terrorism. It will not come for idealistic reasons - such as humanity is one and we all love each other - but rather because if we do not stop people killing other people indiscriminately we may actually loose the very freedoms we charish. Thus, it is important to think of this new phase of globalised terrorism as part and parcel of the phenomena of globalisation. I do not want to imply by this that global terrorism will necessary last as long as globalisation. This is not my purpose; yet, at the same time, we need to understand it as a part of globalisation.

One more thing that has also been extremely important to the growth of global terrorism has been the technological revolution in the arms industry over the last twenty-five years, which has made war increasingly cheap. War has become very cheap in deed. Once upon a time, and even through much of the twentieth century, it was thought that only the modern states with all their physical and financial power could launch and sustain a war. Wars that were sustained during most of the twentieth century were big affairs between armies of individual countries. In the last twenty years - certainly since the fall of the Berlin Wall - we have what my colleague Mary Kaldor calls "new wars." These are struggles which are often civil wars. They often begin within state boundaries before spilling over into other nations. They are run by what I call "non-state actors," some of whom are nationalists, others terrorists, and still others drug runners and arms merchants. These struggles have become possible because of the fact that it is very cheap to equip an army nowadays.

In many countries the price of a rifle is very small compared with the price of bread. Therefore to be able to equip your own private army is no longer as prohibitive as it was a while ago. In a sense what it really has done, which is evident from the way the nuclear arms race has gone, is change the situation from when nuclear weapons were first invented and you had to be a great power to have an atom bomb or later on a hydrogen bomb. Some years ago, The Economist published an article on how to assemble an atom bomb in your own garage. The technology needed to make a nuclear weapon has become standard, and now the only difficult thing is getting the material. The rest of it is chicken feed. I am serious. This is the usual process of technological change. What technological change does is make things cheaper. It does not care whether things are constructive or destructive, it simply makes them cheaper, which is why we have this proliferation of the nuclear arms problem. There is no reason why a non-state actor, like a terrorist organisation, cannot acquire and use nuclear weapons. This is something that we have to truly contemplate. It is not impossible that al-Qaeda may already have nuclear arms. Thus, very much a part of the cornucopia of globalisation is the rise of this new form of global terrorism.

Al-Qaeda and the Roots of Islamic Extremism

I would like to focus a bit this evening on al-Qaeda and the terrorism that it represents. Obviously, the roots of its terrorism goes back historically to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, in particular, the effects of the first world war on the empire. To some extent we are still sorting through the problems caused by the breakup of the Habsburg Empire (that is the Austro-Hungarian Empire), the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. The break up of these three big landed empires of Europe following the First World War left behind quite a few problems that we are still trying to sort out.

One of these problems, that we are particularly concerned with right now, is the Middle East or the Palestinian problem. Globally speaking, the defeat of the Ottoman Empire was perceived as a major defeat for Islamic culture. Up until this point, it was possible to view Islamic civilization as a truly advanced and global culture, which had been incredibly dynamic between the seventh and say the fifteenth centuries in terms of both its military might and its scientific and technological discoveries. From the fifteenth century onwards, this global Islamic civilisation began to recede, with the Ottoman Empire standing as the last major achievement of Islamic society. Its decline and defeat was perceived as a very serious event. However, this fact is hardly mentioned in accounts of the First World War, which are mainly Eurocentric and focused almost exclusively on Germany, Britain and France. Little notice is given to the fact that an entire empire out towards the East disappeared virtually over night. The breakdown of this empire, which had developed in south-eastern Europe as well as the Middle East, unleashed a number of forces, one of which was this antagonism between the world's three main monotheistic religions: Islam, Christianity and Judaism. This also resulted in the perception that somehow Islam had kind of lost out, that it was no longer capable of any major, global achievements. This may be a fallacy, but fallacies are very powerful things.

The subsequent unwinding of the Ottoman Empire, especially the way it happened in the Middle East, only made matters worst. What we have today is a hangover from the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the League of Nation's British Mandate leading to all the problems we have today with Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and so on. Second, there were the effects of the Cold War on the region. What happened during the Cold War? Two things in particular: first, it increased the importance of oil. And, as a result, Britain created a number of kingdoms in the Middle East, and its chief ally the United States sustained them at all costs in order to guarantee its oil supply.

The rise in oil prices in 1973 was an interaction between the Israel/Palestine problem and the Cold War problem. But once the price of oil quadrupled, what happened was quite remarkable: a number of heretofore developing Muslim kingdoms became immensely rich, of which Saudi Arabia is one of the most notable. It just happened that Saudi Arabia had been founded on an extreme and puritanical brand of Islam known as Wahhibism, which - not in the 1970s but long before that - was one of the schools of Islam that was fundamentalist in nature. It wanted to go back to the old religious texts and tried to resist any innovation or reform in the interpretation of the Koran and in the modernisation of Islamic society.

There was a very vibrant modernisation movement in Islam in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in places like Egypt, Lebanon and so on. Yet, these movements suffered a double defeat during the 1970s and 80s. On the one hand, due to the Cold War struggle, the Western powers marginalised and then defeated modernist Islamic movements partly because they were socially progressive and viewed as natural communist allies. The secular parties in the Middle East - Nasser's Egypt and the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria - were all sidelined and resisted while, on the other hand, Saudi Arabia - with the tacit support of the United States and England - used much of its wealth to reverse all efforts to modernising Islam. It not only funded quite a few madrassas, or Islamic religious schools, it also funded a certain kind of interpretation of the Islam's holy book, the Koran. To begin with nobody really thought much of this because - I should say now that I am an atheist so I don't actually take much joy from reading holy books - they did not think they were doing anybody any harm; after all, they were only reading one of the world's great holy books.

The revival of this particular interpretation of Islam occurred largely do to the pouring of massive amounts of money into the process of educating and propagating this particular philosophy combine with the forces of globalisation and the persistence of the Isreal/Palestine issue into the 1990s. The roots of al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists can be found in the fact that the Saudi Kingdom was seen to have derived its power from American support, which was viewed as the central infidel power in certain Islamic interpretations. Had the Saudi Arabian Kingdom been true to its purposes, it may have been as anti-American as anybody else, but it was not. Thus, the crisis of Islamic societies was accelerated - hastened and somewhat distorted - the sudden influx of money into some of the most medieval parts of the Middle East due to the fact that it had oil.

The way in which Islamic fundamentalism behaved initially was aimed at undermining modern Islamic societies. For a long time, Islam did not present a problem for anybody else. The fundamentalists tried to undermine Egypt and they tried to undermine Algeria. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was the most successful example of an orthodox Islamist movement which was able to undermine a modern Islamic state. Although I am unsure how deeply the Shah of Iran was committed to Islam, it was part of the Middle East, a non-Arab state with a predominately Muslim population. The undermining of Iran was a very good example for other movements. Luckily, so far, they have not succeeded in subverting a single Islamic kingdom. Shortly thereafter, however, the fundamentalist movement was diverted away from attacking modern Islamic states into attacking America which became a surrogate for attacking the Saudi and other Islamic kingdoms. The original quarrel Osama Bin Laden had was with the Saudi Kingdom and the fact that American troops were on the Holy Land, which was then diverted into a direct attack on America.

My own view regarding where we go from here - for what it is worth and many people may disagree with me - is that the events of the 11th of September represented an overreach on the behalf of al-Qaeda. They had been happily bombing and terrorising the world on a small scale for about ten years before September 11th. They tried to destroy the World Trade Centre once before, they drove explosives into the USS Cole; and bombed the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. All these acts occurred at largely a local level: the acts, the arrests, the trails and so forth. In fact, people's recognition of the terrorist threat, generally speaking, was at a rather low level. Yet, the tragic events of 9-11 made it impossible - in my view - for the Western world to ignore terrorism or treat it as a minor ill. I am unsure as to how much of this was intended, and I doubt that even the planners of the attack expected such a big effect.

9-11 made terrorism a truly global problem though its overreach. The dramatic and tragic death of 3000 innocent civilians was seen by nearly the entire world as millions of people watched the events unfold live on television - especially the collapse of the second tower. Thus, due to the global media - again a component of globalisation - 9-11 became a uniquely iconic event owing to global satellite television. Most people who viewed the event were horrified by the suddenness and callousness of this event - transforming terrorism into a truly global problem. A number of people supported the choice of classifying this event as the beginning of a "War Against Terror"; yet, I would argue that it should have been called a "crime against humanity" - a technical international law term from which something may have been able to proceed. Regardless, it is quite clear that the events of 9-11 transformed Islamic terrorism into a fully global problem.

Global Governance as a Response to Global Terrorism

Once terrorism became a global problem, it inspired an effort in global governance that was not previously possible. An interesting point about global governance is that the structures that were established after the Second World War, the UN, World Bank and so on, were all established on the principle of the "big powers." The five big powers - United States, Great Britain, France, Russia and China - became members of the UN Security Council, with responsibility for looking after the world community, and the rest of the ordinary nations of the world who became members of the UN General Assembly. The principle of national sovereignty was enshrined in the UN charter and everybody thought that a great power condominium could look after the world. However that's not the way the world turned out to be at all. Throughout the Cold War the UN could not solve anything as long as one of the permanent members vetoed a resolution. It was only after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union that the UN again became usable and active. Thus, much of what we call global governance developed only beginning in the 1990s. For a long time people thought one ought to indeed act through one of the multilateral channels. The idealism that was attached to the United Nations in the 1940s could no longer be translated.

The United Nations was created largely to prevent one thing: the arbitrary aggression that was characteristic of the old world. Yet, until recently, the Cold War prevented this type of action. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United Nations was able to act quickly for only the second time in its history, as there was what is called a "Chapter Seven Resolution." A Chapter Seven Resolution ensures that action will be taken against whomever the resolution is passed against. In the case of Iraq, a Chapter Seven Resolution was passed calling for its withdrawal from Kuwait. If Iraq refused to withdraw, then it authorised a ground invasion to forcefully remove the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Although it was not a unanimous resolution, the majority of the assembly - with no permanent member voting against it - passed the resolution, making it possible for the UN to form a global coalition against Iraq. In addition to preventing any further bloodshed, the objectives of the resolution were not exceeded. What has happened since 1991 has not, however, been so good. The United Nations has failed to do anything in Rwanda. In Kosovo, it failed to pass a Chapter Seven Resolution, and therefore the problem of Milosevic was tackled outside the realm of the United Nations. In relation to Kosovo, the UN acted in accordance with a principle it had previously tried in Somalia: if there is a massive violation of human rights, the world community should and will intervene. If possible, this should be done with United Nations approval, but if not, somebody within the international community will do something about it regardless. Kosovo is a very interesting example to consider as its exploits are quite clear: it was a successful human rights intervention, Milosevic is on trail, and the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo has been stopped.

When 9-11 took place, the United Nations did not, interestingly, pass a Chapter Seven Resolution. Two resolutions were released after the event: one on the 12th of September and another one on the 28th of September, which basically said that 9-11 was a terrible crime. Nevertheless, it did not invite action by either the UN or anyone else in the international community. Thus, there is currently a certain void regarding who is going to act against al-Qaeda and the terrorism it represents. The United Nations has not said that it will act against international terrorism as an international governing body. Perhaps it was that nobody pushed for such a resolution and it was never clear who was going to do so. Perhaps the 28th of September was too soon to arrive at such a resolution. As a result, the Afghan War, which arose from 9-11, was not fought as a result of a UN resolution. Although UN resolutions had been passed, they was no Chapter Seven Resolution. We have therefore a problem in that the so-called "War Against Terror" is being conducted outside the auspices of the UN, in the case of Afghanistan, by an ad-hoc coalition lead by the United States and its various allies.

The United States is an interesting case in this respect. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States became the only remaining superpower in the world. And after 9-11, the United States has became a fearful giant -something that I have found people outside America find hard to grasp. It is a giant capable of immense military power, but for the first time, it is insecure and fearful. This is clearly evident in the way America has behaved since 9-11, especially with regard to the civil liberties of its own citizens. In a nation where there is a very strong civil libertarian tradition, it is quite surprising to what extent the Executive Branch in the United States has been able to restrict the civil liberties of its people. This has occurred with popular approval due to fear and confusion in America about how it was going to respond to this rather nebulous and overarching threat that global terrorism presents. I think what happened in the case of Afghanistan partially vindicated - as did the case of Kosovo - the argument that you cannot wait until the United Nations gets its act together and passes an appropriate resolution before taking action. In Afghanistan, the Taliban was quickly removed from power, if not destroyed, and the main threat of al-Qaeda was very seriously damaged.

What has happened since 9-11 and the Afghan War is that the theatre of terror has moved away from developed countries. It has now moved to developing countries where it has begun to threaten so-called "soft targets." Despite numerous threats - many dire warnings and multiple alarms - the developed world has not seen an attack on its own soil since 9-11. What has happened is that acts of terror have been committed against citizens of the developed world traveling outside their own countries or against citizens of developing countries who have been caught in the web at the time of the attack. This may be significant in that - in my view and again people may disagree with me - this is a considerable defeat for al-Qaeda when you look at its aspirations in relation to 9-11. Soon afterwards, there were a number of statements by Osama Bin Laden calling for the entire Muslim world to rise up against the United States. He made a special appeal after the first attack on Afghanistan for everyone to rise up against Western imperialism and so forth. Yet, no such reaction took place and people did not rise up against America. Bin Laden again made a couple of statements before he went silent. Al-Qaeda appears to have thought that as soon as 9-11 happened and the United States had been humiliated, a fantastic anti-American uprising would occur across the Muslim world. They believed that Muslims would get together and destroy other American embassies and that this would relate to a major change in global power. In the past, they had witnessed the Americans leave Lebanon after they encountered resistance; they had seen the Americans defeated in Somalia, and therefore, they thought that once again the Americans would be defeated. Yet, despite a few casualties suffered in Afghanistan, the United States is stronger than ever.

Thus, there has been a displacement - a displacement of the terrorist platform of operation. This, again, raises one of the more difficult problems with the new treat of global terrorism. Many of the debates about globalisation, which are focused away from the problem of terrorism, are concerned with the equitable distribution of the fruits of globalisation. I have some views on this issue but I don't have the time tonight to go into this issue. However, quite a few people feel that globalisation is a process from which the developing world is getting a raw deal - I don't agree with this but that is beside the point. Suddenly, with global terrorism, the developing world is faced with yet another negative side effect of globalisation due to this change in the theatre of operation. The only way that al-Qaeda can attack America is by attacking American, British or Australian citizens and their interests outside their respective countries. And, as we have seen, the result is that Bali or some other place in the developing world is targeted as part of this slightly vicious side of the dialectic of globalisation. Therefore, I would argue that one of the principle reasons why there has to be a global attack on terrorism is because it is no longer purely an American problem. Just as the Islamic fundamentalist system tries to destroy moderate Islamic states, al-Qaeda is trying to undermine those countries in the developing world with large Muslim populations in order to recruit more followers and enable it to wage a war against the people of that society.

Iraq as a Test Case for Global Governance

Consequently, we will have a global action against terrorism. What has taken place in the case of Iraq is very interesting for the following reason: for only the third time in its history, the United Nations has issued a Chapter Seven Resolution. Moreover, this Resolution was passed unanimously for the first time in the history of the United Nations. Initially, the UN requested that its member states cooperate with the disarming process, and if Iraq does not cooperate it has threatened consequences. This has never happened before. During the Korean War, which resulted in the first Chapter Seven Resolution, the Soviets abstained because they were boycotting the Security Council at the time and China was still represented by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party, enabling the Americans to push the Resolution through the Security Council. The 1991 Gulf War Resolution was also not unanimous but at least no major power voted against it. The current Resolution against Iraq is the first time there has been a unanimous Chapter Seven Resolution with all the major powers voting in favour and none of the other Security Council members abstaining. Thus, to some extent, this is a real test case for the United Nations.

A substantial amount of the pressure that has been created over Iraq has not been entirely driven by America and their desire to go to war with Iraq. They adopted a bargaining tactic and by continuing this tactic America got the resolution it wanted. Furthermore, if Iraq abides by the resolution - as they seem to be doing with the roughly 11,000 pages of evidence they have provided on their weapon's program - the effectiveness of the United Nations may yet be proven. A war may yet occur, but if it does, it will only happen after a discussion has occurred in the United Nations regarding the question of whether Iraq is in "material breach" of UN Resolution 1441, which is the resolution under which the inspectors have been allowed to reenter Iraq.

Presently, it is still too early to determine which way the current structures of global governance are heading. Will the War Against Terror proceed through the structures of the United Nations structures or some ad-hoc multilateral coalition, as was the case with the Kosovo crisis?

Concluding Remarks

Let me make three final points and then I shall finish. First of all, when al-Qaeda is defeated will there be other forms of global terrorism? The answer is yes. There is a strong possibility of a form of "anti-globalisation terrorism," like the anti-capitalism terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s. It is quite possible that a group of people will attempt to use terrorism to undermine the global capitalist system - it won't succeed but I can see it happening. It would not involve any religious texts, but rather would be a straightforward secular movement.

Second, many people believe that the only answer to terrorism is to tackle mass poverty. My answer to that: regardless of whether there is terrorism or not, one has to tackle poverty. One should not support such a trivial idea that poverty ought to be tackled simply because, if it is not, the poor will become terrorists. This argument regarding terrorism mirrors some of the past arguments about the need to fight communism - only that in order to fight communism we did not have to fight poverty. No one said anything about poverty back then. Certainly a lot has to be done in relation to human development, not just in the Middle East but also throughout the rest of the world, however, not for the trivial reason that the poor will become terrorists. This is a far too cynical an approach to tackling the serious problem of mass poverty. The poor ought to be better done by than that. I quite honestly believe that if globalisation precedes the growth in trade and capital movement, and hopefully the movement of labour, will make a significant dent in global poverty.

Finally, I will end by saying this, I think the current phase of terrorism, the terrorism represented by al-Qaeda, is part and parcel of the globalisation process. It poses a real challenge to global governance - a challenge unlike any other it has faced since 1945. Hopefully, we may be able to tackle it through the United Nations, and afterwards put some permanent structures in place so that the United Nations can act swiftly in response to terrorism. If not, it will be tackled by other means, as was the case with the Kosovo crisis, which was quite effective. These types of responses will not necessarily be illegal, but rather that they will occur outside the UN system. The structure of the United Nations may have to be rethought, not in order to make a preemptive attack legitimate as your Prime Minister has said (actually preemption is allowed yet nobody seems to have said that), but I won't go into that either, but because the United Nations structures are too slow moving and ineffective when it comes to action. The problem of crime cannot be solved by a police force that is required to sit in a committee meeting each time a crime is reported. A much more effective and responsive organisation is required. Hopefully the UN system will response to this challenge but, if it is to become an effective tool for global governance, not only the developed world but also the developing world will have to take terrorism seriously. One of the things that may happen with respect to Bali and other recent terrorist attacks would be that terrorism is taken seriously by the developing world as its own problem and seen not only as a problem of the rich countries.