Internal Terrorism and the Liberal State

Abstract

The obscenities and stones hurled against liberal democratic institutions at the height of the student revolt in the late 1960s by the spoiled children of Western affluence and privilege dramatically shattered the illusion that the sole forces remaining to challenge liberal democracy in the West were fascism and communism. By the mid-1960s fascism appeared a totally discredited and defeated movement within Western liberal states, while communism was viewed rather more seriously, as an external threat in the shape of the Warsaw Pact and expanding Soviet military power. Liberal observers of the politics of France and Italy, which both have traditionally large communist votes, noted the extent to which indigenous communist parties and trade union movements could be tamed by the discrete pressures of embourgeoisement and privatisation of workers, and by the parliamentarisation of parties. But the street and campus battles of the student revolt disclosed the fanaticism of new, small, but strident minority movements fundamentally hostile to liberal values and politics. A veritable zoo of conflicting sects and factions covering the whole spectrum of neo-Marxists and Third World revolutionism and anarchism sprang up in the heart of Western Academia.

‘The framing of a future, in some indeterminate time, may, when it is done in a certain way, be very effective … this happens when the anticipations of the future take the form of those myths, which enclose with them, all the strongest inclinations of a people, of a party or of a class, inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of the instincts … and which give an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which … men can reform their desires, passions and mental activity … what the myths contain in the way of details which will actually form part of the history of the future is of small importance: it is even possible that nothing which they contain will ever come to pass.’

Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence

‘Representative institutions necessarily depend for permanence upon the readiness of the people to fight for them in case of their being endangered. If too little valued for this, they seldom obtain a footing at all, and if they do, are almost sure to be overthrown, as soon as the head of the government, or any party leader who can muster force for a coup de main, is willing to run some small risk for absolute power.’

John Stuart Mill, Representative Government