An International History of Terrorism

Western and Non-Western Experiences

Jussi M. Hanhimäki, Bernhard Blumenau

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136202797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The aim of this book is to provide readers with the tools to understand the historical evolution of terrorism and counterterrorism over the past 150 years.

In order to appreciate the contemporary challenges posed by terrorism it is necessary to look at its evolution, at the different phases it has gone through, and the transformations it has experienced. The same applies to the solutions that states have come up with to combat terrorism: the nature of terrorism changes but still it is possible to learn from past experiences even though they are not directly applicable to the present.

This book provides a fresh look at the history of terrorism by providing in-depth analysis of several important terrorist crises and the reactions to them in the West and beyond. The general framework is laid out in four parts: terrorism prior to the Cold War, the Western experience with terrorism, non-Western experiences with terrorism, and contemporary terrorism and anti-terrorism. The issues covered offer a broad range of historical and current themes, many of which have been neglected in existing scholarship; it also features a chapter on the waves phenomenon of terrorism against its international background.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, political violence, international history, security studies and IR.

Part I

Terrorism Prior to the Cold War

1 The First Global Wave of Terrorism and International Counter-Terrorism, 1905–14

Richard Bach Jensen

Arguably, history’s first global wave of terrorism took place between about 1905 and 1914. This chapter will focus on the causes, contours of, and government responses to this largely anarchist- and nihilist-identified era of terrorism. Because of the wave’s worldwide reach and astounding number of victims, particularly in Russia, I will suggest that this wave be considered as important as the more famous era of anarchist terrorism during the 1890s. Stepped up policing efforts, both nationally and internationally, paralleled and followed in the wake of anarchist and nihilist acts of violence, but the results of these efforts were decidedly mixed.

David Rapoport, whose four-wave conception of the history of modern terrorism is at present the most convincing overarching analysis of the historical evolution of modern terrorism, speaks of an ‘anarchist wave’ of terrorism between the 1880s and the 1920s. This was ‘the first global or truly international terrorist experience in history’.¹I would propose that several distinct currents or phases developed within this larger wave. Between 1878 and 1901, anarchist terrorism primarily affected Europe, although three notable violent episodes stunned the United States (US) and a few incidents took place in the Ottoman Empire and India. After the assassination of American President McKinley in September 1901 – and in some countries a few years before the assassination, in other words, around the turn of the century – a pause occurred in anarchist bombings and assassinations on both sides of the Atlantic. The pause was often attributed to a combination of the effects of a popular backlash against the terrorists, police repression, a reviving economy after the great depression of the nineteenth century, and increasing anarchist involvement in the labour movement through anarcho-syndicalism.²In several countries, for example in Italy, France, and the US, the emergence of strong, progressive governments that were politically more inclusive of dissenters and friendlier to the actions of labour was also a factor in the decline of anarchist violence. After about 1905, however, a new wave of mostly anarchist- and nihilist-identified violence began, but this time with global, not just north Atlantic, dimensions. The new wave severely affected countries and colonies on five continents: Europe, North and South America, and Asia; even Africa was involved.

The causes of this new outbreak of terrorism were multiple. It took place against the background of the first great period of economic globalization between 1890 and 1914 when the ‘greatest international migration of people in history’ took place, not equalled even in our present time.³This development was especially pronounced after 1900.⁴Most of the relevant migration was from Europe to the rest of the world, but occasionally it went the other way. Chinese, particularly Chinese students, who had journeyed to Paris (and also to Tokyo) began the transfer of anarchist ideas back to China, where anarchists began plotting assassinations around 1905. Young Indians travelled to Paris where they learned bomb making from émigré Russian revolutionists and brought the information back to India for deadly use.⁵While Paris was a significant transmission point, at the heart of the post–1905 wave of terrorism were Russia and Spain, two of the most politically backward and dysfunctional states in Europe. The actions of radicalized Russian and Spanish migrants and the activities and fate of Francesco Ferrer y Guardia, the Spanish educator and revolutionist, were two of the most important factors, either directly or indirectly, in spurring on global terrorism.

The mass media contributed to the sense of an international terrorist wave by identifying many assassinations and other violent deeds as ‘anarchist’ even if committed by non-anarchists. The police and government authorities were just as liable to such mislabelling. Even some of the anarchists and revolutionaries were confused and prone to misidentification. For example, in China and Japan aspiring anarchists tended to treat Russian ‘nihilism’, that is, the actions, and especially the terrorist acts, of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, as synonymous with the deeds of Western European anarchists.⁶

The media, the police, and the authorities usually dressed the terrorist wolf in anarchist clothing, not only because of the powerful impression left on the mentality of the age by the experience of anarchist terrorism during the 1890s, but also because violent anarchist acts were considered as non-political, as crimes against humanity and the law of nations. While Russian revolutionaries or rebelling nationalists might earn international sympathy and protection as political dissidents, violent anarchists could rarely hope for either sympathy or asylum.

A series of assassinations just before and after the onset of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the revolution itself were especially important in prompting a new global wave of terrorism. Before the revolution, anarchists were considered unimportant inside Russia, where the populists or ‘nihilists’, and later, the Socialist Revolutionaries engineered most of the terrorist incidents. Unlike the anarchists, the Socialist Revolutionaries exercised tight, central control over terrorist acts, and beginning in 1901, targeted hated Tsarist officials, such as Interior Minister Plehve, assassinated in July 1904, and Grand Duke Sergei, murdered in February 1905. These killings helped unleash a decade of ‘assassinationism’ throughout the world. While the careful organization and conspiratorial method of these terrorist acts (that is, the so-called ‘Russian method’) greatly impressed revolutionaries and potential terrorists, it also needs to be pointed out that the latter continued to be inspired by the ‘anarchist mystique’: the myth of the powerful individual assassin striking down tyrants, and also by local traditions of political violence.⁷

The 1905 Revolution transformed Russian terrorism in a diffuse and unpredictable manner. Anarchist groups, in the words of a contemporary, ‘sprang up like mushrooms after a rain’.⁸Many became deeply involved in a vicious, criminal, and ‘motiveless’ mass terrorism that lacked any ideological and ethical constraints. During 1906–07, the anarchists and the Socialist Revolutionaries killed 4,000 people.⁹According to Anna Geifman, anarchists were responsible for the majority of the 17,000 Russian casualties from terrorism between 1901 and 1916.¹⁰While these statistics are open to dispute, it is probably true to say that during this period in Russia more people were killed by anarchists or those identified as anarchists than throughout the rest of the world during the entire forty-year period from 1880 to 1920.

Russians fleeing Tsarist repression after the collapse of the 1905 Revolution brought terrorism, in a few scattered cases, to France and Switzerland, to the US, to Britain, and, perhaps most spectacularly, to Argentina. Many Russian revolutionaries went to Paris, where, around 1907, the French police reported, although presumably they exaggerated, that nearly 1,500 Russian ‘terrorists’ were living in the city. There they collaborated with Spanish anarchists and gave bomb-making lessons and manuals to Indians fighting British domination of the subcontinent.¹¹Paris became a ‘grand headquarters’ – or at least a refuge and networking centre – for violent revolutionaries and terrorists from many lands.¹²There they were closely (although not closely enough!) monitored by both the French security forces and the Russian overseas police. More generally, the 1905 Russian Revolution excited and energized anarchists and socialists throughout the world since they believed it might be a model or inspiration for revolutions in their own countries.¹³

This was certainly true of the US, where, in 1908, a dozen violent incidents led to a major anarchist scare and, in the words of the New York Times, a declaration by the US government of ‘open war on Anarchists’.¹⁴In April 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that ‘compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance’. The outbreak of violence was due not only to the direct or indirect impact of the 1905 Revolution and Tsarist repression, but also to a severe economic crisis and unemployment during the winter of 1907–08. Newspapers and police officials linked together the unrelated violent deeds of an Italian anarchist in Denver (who had recently arrived from Argentina) and Russian immigrants in Chicago and New York City and made them into a vast anarchist plot.¹⁵

In Britain, the connection between Tsarist repression, the Revolution of 1905, and an outbreak of violence was even more direct. Latvian revolutionists who had escaped from the Russian Empire carried out a series of crimes, beginning with two robberies attended by several deaths (at Tottenham on 23 January 1909 and at Houndsditch on 16 December 1910) and climaxing in London’s spectacular and bloody Sidney Street siege in January 1911. Although at the time these Baltic extremists were often identified as ‘anarchists’, they were mostly members of the Latvian Social Democratic Party. Their actions reflected the extremist, quasi-criminal or criminal attitudes of many opponents of the Tsarist regime as unleashed by the 1905 Revolution.¹⁶

Several incidents took place in France and Switzerland. In 1906, a young Russian woman killed a man in Interlaken, mistaking him for a former Russian interior minister.¹⁷On May Day 1907, a Russian anarchist with American citizenship fired at some French cuirassiers in Paris, wounding a police agent.¹⁸More serious was an incident on 18 September 1907, when Russians attempted to rob a branch of the Montreux bank in Veytaux, Switzerland, killing a bank clerk and a bystander and wounding several others. Intriguingly, the Russian initially identified themselves as Spanish.¹⁹ Russian ‘anarchists’ also tried to extort money from wealthy compatriots residing in Switzerland.²⁰

The second great source of global terrorism in the early twentieth century was Spain – especially the city of Barcelona – and the controversial Francisco Ferrer. In 1903, after a five-year pause, anarchist assassinations and bombs resumed in Spain. Between 1903 and 1909, over eighty bombs exploded in Barcelona, killing at least eleven people and injuring over seventy. In terms of casualties, these numbers far exceeded the more famous French terror of the mid-1890s. Panic gripped the population of the great port, which came to be referred to as the ‘city of bombs’.²¹While Ferrer’s connections to this bombing campaign are obscure or non-existent, he and his close associates have been linked to two of the era’s most famous assassination attempts.

In some ways, Ferrer could be compared to Osama Bin Laden since for several years he bankrolled anarchist revolution and assisted would-be terrorists determined to overthrow the Spanish monarchy. His wealth made him very unusual among the anarchists, who generally had little or no money. Juan Avilés Farré’s recent definitive biography of Ferrer demonstrates that he was fundamentally a revolutionary. This is in sharp contrast with earlier historiography that has portrayed Ferrer as essentially an idealistic educational reformer who founded fifty ‘Modern Schools’ in Spain and was the innocent victim of a reactionary, priest-ridden Spanish government eager to find a scapegoat for the country’s social problems and rampant terrorism.

The first of the assassination attempts in which Ferrer was alleged to be involved occurred in Paris in May 1905, when an attempt was made on King Alfonso XIII’s life while he was riding in a carriage together with the French President. A much more significant attack occurred on 31 May 1906. Shortly after Alfonso’s wedding, the king and his new bride proceeded down the Calle Mayor in Madrid when a powerful bomb was thrown at the royal procession, injuring about one hundred and thirty people: twenty-three to thirty-three killed and over one hundred wounded.²²Once again, the young Spanish king (as well as his consort) escaped unharmed. In terms of the total number of casualties, this was the b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Terrorism Prior to the Cold War
• Part II Western Experiences with Terrorism
• Part III Non-Western Experiences with Terrorism
• Part IV Contemporary Terrorism and anti-Terrorism
• Part V Concluding Essay
• Index