One man's terrorist . . .

Current Affairs: Robert Cooper says the EU should follow the US lead of pre-emptive attacks in the face of terrorism - while…

Current Affairs: Robert Cooper says the EU should follow the US lead of pre-emptive attacks in the face of terrorism - while Noam Chomsky sees public opinion as the 'second superpower', writes Bill McSweeney.

For a respected scholar and diplomat to be mentioned on The Rory Bremner Show says much about his celebrity. It was not a flattering testimonial, of course, but it highlighted a controversial policy recommendation in Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century, a challenging and intelligent survey of the international order after September 11th.

We live in a world divided between premodern, modern and postmodern states, according to Cooper, a former special adviser to Tony Blair and currently a senior diplomat in the EU. The first of these worlds is a zone of chaos, located mostly in Africa and Asia - Somalia, Afghanistan and Liberia are cited as examples - and defined by the incapacity of the state to monopolise violence and enforce the rule of law. It is in this primitive world that we find the source of modern terrorism, the enemy without name or country which deploys the open laneways of globalisation to achieve its ends.

Second is the modern state with its traditional emphasis on national interest, on national security, and on force as the means of protecting them. This world was created by the European powers two centuries ago, and is now inhabited by China, India and, by its supreme exemplar, the US.

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The third and most privileged zone is the postmodern one, occupied by the EU, allowing it the luxury of abhorring war and shunning the use of force as a primary instrument of policy. In such a paradise, writes Cooper, "it has been easy to forget that force matters". Unfortunately, he continues, "it matters more than anything else".

This postmodern system, by which the EU enjoys its zone of perpetual peace and its freedom to criticise the militarism of the US, is in fact America's gift to Europe, according to Cooper. "It would not be too much to say that America invented it." While he does not wholly exempt the Bush administration from criticism, Cooper makes a strong case in support of the doctrine of military pre-emption which has aroused worldwide condemnation since its formal declaration in September, 2002. If every state adopted such a policy, he concedes, "the world could degenerate into chaos". In the hands of a benign imperium enjoying a monopoly of global power, however, there is reason to be confident that international terrorism can be confronted and checked.

While the US alone has the material ability to pre-empt where it will, its capacity to rebuild the failed states which harbour terrorism requires our cooperation in the EU - in particular our readiness to dirty our hands with the demands of military force. And here we come to the nub of the Rory Bremner moment. What does Tony Blair's famous adviser recommend to his boss? He tells us on page 61: " . . . the postmodern state needs to get used to the idea of double standards". Among themselves, EU member-states can afford openness and transparency. But when it comes to the rough trade of international relations - the "premoderns", in Cooper's term - "Europeans need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary . . ."

Cooper's frankness is refreshing, though it is not clear how his double standards might differ from those which have always been the tacit stock-in-trade of nation states. The move from covert duplicity to the formal declaration of double standards as a principle, in the manner of the Bush doctrine, is not just frankness. It is mindless.

Cooper's overall argument for a realistic reappraisal of a world threatened by terrorism complements the best-selling American thesis of Robert Kagan, Paradise and Power. But at the point where it extends and departs from Kagan - on the merits of a common European defence policy - this is one of the weakest arguments I have read.

There is mention only in passing of the EU's extraordinary record of transforming zones of conflict and repressive government by non-military means, offering economic and political incentives to Greece, Spain, and Portugal in the 1980s, and to Turkey and Cyprus in the current process of negotiations. The weight of Cooper's argument portrays an EU enjoying the fat of its relationship with the US while refusing to pay the cost of its own defence. But no mention of the fact that the strongest resistance to a common defence policy has historically come, not from the EU, but from the benign imperium of the US, which has always had its own national interest in preventing an EU challenge to its monopoly of military security in Europe.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance comes from a different kind of scholar, who sees a different world, organised and structured according to quite different principles from those which Cooper brings to bear on international affairs. Like Cooper, Noam Chomsky sees the events of September 11th as a defining point in relations between states. Similarly, he views terrorism as a major threat to peace and stability. But Chomsky judges terrorism by its actions, not by its provenance. "We should ask why the concept of terror should be considered particularly obscure", he writes. "If we abide by the official US definition of 'terrorism' then the US is a leading terrorist state."

Vintage Chomsky or left-wing cant? For three decades Chomsky, now approaching his 80s, has plied his trade as uncompromising critic of his native America and attracted acclaim and disdain in similar measure.

One of the most cited academics on earth, he is ostracised by the mainstream media in his own country. His relentless hostility to the foreign policy of both Democrats and Republicans over the period is backed by the extraordinary range of evidence which he brings to bear on his argument and which makes him a formidable opponent of conservative thinkers such as Kagan and Cooper. But even his admirers, indebted to his scholarship, must tire of the sarcasm which clothes, and at times obscures it, a style unrelieved by the humour of a Michael Moore, too close for comfort to the fulminations of a John Pilger.

The book is welcome in being Chomsky's first full-length discussion of contemporary international politics not collected from earlier essays or from his lectures. Unlike Cooper, he vests no hope in the possibility that the EU can tame the imperial designs of the Bush administration. In fact, the EU scarcely merits a couple of passing comments. This is par for Chomsky, given his dogmatic rejection of the idea that state institutions can be a force for good in the world.

The only counterweight to the first superpower which he can envisage is what he calls "the second superpower" - world public opinion. It is here that the author permits himself a measure of optimism. "It would be a great error to conclude that the prospects are uniformly bleak," he writes, referring to the human rights culture and the Central American solidarity movements which developed in mainstream America in the 1980s. He rightly identifies the opposition to the US-UK attempts to hijack the UN Security Council in the dramatic days and months before the Iraq war as a victory of global public opinion rather than the shambles of the Security Council, as it is so often portrayed.

Chomsky enthusiasts will welcome this book, not so much for new insights into his perspective on world politics - in that sense it is vintage Chomsky - but for its provocative application to the dramatic events of the past two years.

Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College, Dublin

The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century.

By Robert Cooper, Atlantic Books, 180pp. £14.99.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. By Noam Chomsky, Hamish Hamilton, 278pp. £16.99