By the time this issue is published, it will be exactly ten years since the September 11 attacks. This summer’s tragic events have cast a certain light on the long-term damage that these terrorist attacks have caused the Western world, while at the same time showing the strength of the open, democratic society.

Ten years after the attack on New York, we note that bin Laden has succeeded in achieving one of his goals: to bring the United States to its knees. George W. Bush’s war on terror was much more drawn out and costly than predicted. According to research from Brown University in late June of this year, the economic cost of the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far is an astronomical 25 trillion dollars. According to the same study, the interest payments on the loans that have financed these wars so far come to one trillion dollars. Although the U.S. financial crisis, of course, has much more complex, structural causes than wars, the fact remains that war has cost the same amount that Standard & Poor’s recently said that the U.S. budget deficit must be reduced by over the next ten years.

A lot of leftist intellectuals naturally rejoice when the American empire falters, but the question is what American capitalism’s critics hope will replace the U.S. as a superpower. How does one imagine it would be to live in a world with China in America’s current position?

Without exaggerating the risk that the U.S. financial crisis is deepening, or that the open, democratic social ideal is being replaced by a more effective capitalist system, which is not dependent on short-term opinion and populist initiatives, the war on terror attention highlights the insidious effects of terrorism, and its diabolical ability to hollow out the social body that it attacks.

In this particular respect, Osama bin Laden had, as a terrorism-theorist, learned from the German Red Army Faction’s (RAF) successes and failures. It was predicted that West Germany’s struggle against the enemies of the open society in the RAF could not be achieved with anything less than the emergence of a police state, which would make an open society repressive and totalitarian; and that this, in turn, would enhance the revolutionary preparedness of ‘the people’. That time, society, for its part, resisted this and still today it is suffering from the likes of those who in Sweden put up pictures of Jan Carl Raspe on their refrigerator doors without reprisalsDouble-check this. Not sure I’ve completely understood the intention here.Double-check this. Not sure I’ve completely understood the intention here.. Quite the opposite. This showed the strength of the open society, and its ability to heal itself. In the case of the West German terrorists, the state’s response was in many ways exemplary. It fought hard against the armed nucleus, paralysed the main force, but overlooked the ideological support from the sympathetic ‘red wine revolutionaries’.

But even the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik seems to have learned from the RAF and al-Qaeda. Like the September 11 attacks, his deeds were directed at the heart of the Norwegian state: the Social Democratic Party, which in countries like Norway and Sweden have the same formative role on social development as globalised capitalism has had on New York and the USA. The goal was apparently to sharpen the contradictions within society to such a point where civil war erupted between the two main groups that, in many respects, are mirror images of each other: extremist Muslims who advocate the freedom-based, liberal thinking of pure Islamism and extremist nationalists who advocate the freedom-based, liberal thinking of pure nationalism. According to Breivik, these groups should live without contact with each other.

Like Osama bin Laden and the RAF, Breivik is apparently diabolically cunning enough to assume that his terrorist attack would result in demands for censorship and restrictions on free speech, which would suit his purposes in that such measures both reduce the transparency and attractiveness of the society he hates, as well as exacerbate the contradictions and clan formations, which he hopes will stir up a revolutionary war.

One should of course not exaggerate the appeal of groups such as reactionary nationalists and reactionary Islamists to the rootless Western man. But neither do I think it should be underestimated. In a liberal world, where self-realisation is the all-important life goal and value-nihilism its ideological superstructure, there is reason to wonder how one, within the context of the open society, can offer alternatives to the instant gratification of modern existence, as well as the sterile consumerism and empty detachment from society.

Perhaps the Social Democrats can, just at a time of tightening contradictions, increasing tribalism and the rise of extremism, once again play the unifying role that the party had in the early 1900s. This could be done by offering democratic and civic-minded alternatives for those people who, by being marginalised, risk being sucked up by extremist movements and populist protest parties. This – among many other things – is discussed in the new current affairs section, Dossier, which makes its debut appearance in this issue of Axess, where we also look more closely at the essence of terrorism.