The threat to internal order

As chapter 5 of this study showed, many Third World governments have always experienced great difficulty in taking violence out of the hands of people and organizations and monopolizing it in their own.

Perhaps the best way to approach the problem is this. From the middle of the seventeenth century until 1914, the armed forces of ‘‘civilized’’ governments - primarily those of Europe, but later joined by North American and Japanese ones as well - proved themselves more than a match for whatever opposition could be put up against them by other political entities and their societies. Over time, this advantage tended to grow: at Omdurman in 1896, a handful of Maxim Guns enabled those forces to wipe out entire columns of dervishes as if by magic. Their victories permitted them to expand until they controlled almost the entire world, and only three or four non-white countries escaped the domina­tion which was often imposed on them by very small parties of foreigners from across the sea.

During the years 1918-39, the difficulties of holding on to the various colonial empires increased appreciably. In many places the imperialists were compelled to forge alliances with local elites, which were coopted into the lower echelons of government; more and more often, they hid behind a variety of treaties that conceded the appearance of power while preserving the reality. While the direction of change was thus quite clear, its extent should not be exaggerated. At the time when World War II broke out not a single Asian or African country had yet succeeded in ridding itself of its real masters, i.e., troops that were either white or organized by whites and run by them.

Over the last half-century, the change that has taken place is momen­tous. From France to the United States, there has scarcely been one ‘‘advanced” government in Europe and North America whose armed forces have not suffered defeat at the hands of underequipped, ill-trained, ill-organized, often even ill-clad, underfed, and illiterate freedom fighters or guerrillas or terrorists; briefly, by men - and, often, women - who were short on everything except high courage and the determination to endure and persist in the face of police operations, counterinsurgency operations, peacekeeping operations, and whatever other types of operations that were dreamt up by their masters.

In the event, perhaps the first to find out that the nature of war had begun to change were the Germans. Although as imperialists they were latecomers, before 1914 they had waged colonial warfare with the best. Both in Tanzania and in Namibia massive uprisings took place around the turn of the century, and in both countries they were suppressed with the utmost brutality. Either the natives, mounting frontal attacks in the belief that by being sprinkled with water they had been rendered bullet­proof, were mown down with the fire of modern weapons; or else, attempting to wage guerrilla warfare, they were fenced out and driven off into the desert where entire tribes were left to die of thirst.

The early years of World War II once again provided German adminis­trators and German soldiers with huge, comparatively underdeveloped territories in which to display their prowess. It was an opportunity which many of them, accustomed to years of racial propaganda and acting under Hitler's own explicit orders,¹³¹ eagerly seized. Beginning already in 1941, and growing steadily worse thereafter, the German occupation of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in particular was so ruthless as to resemble, in many cases, genocide, with thousands upon thousands of ¹³¹ See Hitler's own remarks on the subject as recorded in F. Halder, Kriegstabeguch (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962), vol. II, pp. 335-7, entry for 30 March 1941. villages burnt and their inhabitants killed, whether as part of ‘‘anti­bandit” operations or for no reason at all. Yet the ferocity of the methods used by the Germans and their allies did not lead to peace and quiet; on the contrary, the greater the atrocities committed the fiercer, by and large, the resistance encountered. Though some countries were slower off the mark then others, subsequently that resistance spread to virtually every other country that was occupied by the Germans until, by the second half of 1944, much of Europe was ablaze.

Whether the operations of freedom fighters everywhere could have led to Europe's liberation from under the Nazi heel even in the absence of the various Allied armed forces will never be known. Suppose Germany to have ‘‘won'' the war by concluding a peace treaty in the West and knocking out the Soviet Union, if only in the sense that large-scale operations against it would no longer be needed (as Hitler himself expec­ted to happen).^[463] In that case the Wehrmacht, reduced by demobiliz­ation to, say, 1.5 million men (twice as many as served in the active forces in 1939), would have been faced with the task of indefinitely keeping down Lebensraum, a ‘‘living space,'' consisting of several million square kilometers and populated by several hundred million people.

Faced with armed resistance on the part of the occupied populations, the Germans soon discovered that it was precisely the most modern components of their armed forces which were the most useless. Hitherto their tanks and artillery and fighters and bombers had experienced little difficulty in tearing the rest of the world's most advanced armies - including those of the three world powers with combined forces con­siderably larger than their own - to pieces;^[465] but, confronted with small groups of guerrillas who did not constitute armies, did not wear uniforms, did not fight in the open, and tended to melt away either into the countryside or into the surrounding population, they found themselves almost entirely at a loss. Like other conquerors after them the Germans learnt that, for counterinsurgency purposes, almost the only forces that mattered were those that were lightly armed: namely, police, infantry, mountain forces, special forces, signals, and, above all, intelligence of every kind. All had to operate on foot or else travel in light vehicles, preferably those that also possessed a crosscountry capability. Outside the towns they could be reinforced by reconnaissance aircraft, and, on such comparatively rare occasions as the opposition allowed itself to be caught in any strength, by a handful of artillery barrels and tanks.

The discovery made by the Germans - and, to a lesser but still sig­nificant extent, their Japanese counterparts - during World War II has since been shared by virtually every other major armed force on earth. Among the first to encounter guerrilla warfare during the immediate post-war years were the French and the British. In point of ruthlessness their operations were very far from matching those of the Germans; still, particularly in the case of the French in Indochina and Algeria, they were ruthless enough. In both countries, the French attempt, supported by every modern weapon which they were capable of bringing to bear, to regain control of their colonies led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the destruction by fire and sword of entire villages, even districts. While the British did not go as far as this - the largest number of native victims in any of their colonial campaigns, i.e., the one which they waged in Kenya, seems to have stood at 10,000^[466] - they too made routine use of capital punishment, torture, and the uprooting of entire villages whose inhabitants were moved into concentration camps.^[467] Like the Germans, too, the British and the French armed forces discovered that it was precisely the most powerful weapons and weapons systems which were the most useless, being either too expensive, too fast, too indiscriminate, too big, too inaccurate, or all of these. As to the most powerful weapons of all, i.e., nuclear ones, against an enemy who was so dispersed and so elusive that he could barely be found, they were simply irrelevant.

Whether simultaneously or later on, the experience of the French and the British during the years 1945-60 has been shared by virtually every other modern armed force that tried its hand at the counterinsurgency game.

From Afghanistan (where the Soviet army was broken after eight years of fighting) through Cambodia (where the Vietnamese were forced to retreat) and Sri Lanka (which the Indian army failed to reduce to order) to Namibia (granted its independence by South Africa after a long and bitter struggle) to Eritrea (which won its independence against everything that the Ethiopians, supported by the USSR, could do) to Somalia (evacuated by most UN forces after their failure to deal with the local warlords), the story is always the same. Each time modern (more or less), heavily armed, regular, state-owned forces tried their hand at the so- called counterinsurgency game, and each time they were defeated.

Perhaps one of the most interesting cases was the one of Israel in Lebanon. The Israeli-Lebanese border, which during the first twenty years after 1948 used to be the most peaceful of all, first became a source of trouble in 1968 when guerrillas belonging to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) started making their attacks. Four massive Israeli operations (1978, 1982, 1994, and 1996), as well as countless minor ones, failed to deal with the problem; though the guerrillas changed their names from PLO to Amal to Hizbullah, neither the ambushes directed against Israeli troops operating inside Lebanese territory nor the firing of rockets across the border into Galilee could be brought to an end.

R. H. Spector, Advice andSupport: TheEarly Yearsofthe USArmyin Vietnam, 1941-1960 (New York: Free Press, 1985).

Particularly in April 1996, the Israeli Air Force and artillery - since the disintegration of the Soviet Union perhaps the second or third most powerful anywhere - rained down thousands of shells and missiles on a very small area in southern Lebanon. Guided by the most sophisticated electronic gear ever used in war, the response to the guerrillas’ attacks was near-instantaneous and so accurate that virtually every round hit its target; the ability of Israeli helicopters to send missiles flying through preselected windows of high-rise buildings, even some that were surroun­ded by others in the middle of Beirut, was particularly impressive. Not for the first time, much of the area affected was turned into smoldering ruins. But when the smoke cleared, it was found that the number of Hizbullah guerrillas killed only amounted to 30 (out of a total butcher’s bill of about 200 dead). The organization’s ability to go on fighting was virtually unimpaired, and what damage it had suffered was quickly repaired.

The above examples could easily be reinforced by many others. They show that, from 1945 on, the vast majority of the larger guerrilla and terrorist campaigns in particular were waged in Third World countries; in other words, places where people were either trying to form states of their own or, on the contrary, where existing states had failed to assert their own monopoly over violence. Still it would not be true to say that the developed countries have remained immune to terrorism or that, in them, the problem does not exist. From Germany through France and Italy to Spain and Britain all the way to Japan - where Tokyo in 1995 witnessed two deadly poison-gas attacks - many of them have witnessed at least some terrorist acts take place on their national territories. Not seldom the attacks were deadly as dozens and even hundreds were killed or wounded; e.g., the number of those killed by, or in operations against, the IRA stood at 3,000 in early 1996, that is before the organization showed what it could do by wounding 200 in a single explosion (in Manchester) during May of that year. In these and other countries, the list of people and targets attacked includes prime ministers, prominent politicians, railway sta­tions, railway tracks, buses, hospitals, shopping centers, office blocks, hotels, beer gardens, airports, aircraft in mid-flight, ships, and of course foreign embassies and diplomatic personnel.

Some of the attacks in question represented spillovers from struggles that were taking place in other countries, such as when Kurds fought Turks on German and Swiss territory; or else when Palestinian guerrillas and Israeli secret agents chased each other in places as far from each other as northern Norway and Latin America. In others the terrorists, though probably not without their foreign connections, are native-born or at least native-bred. Good examples are the late unmourned German and Italian Red Army Factions, which maintained ties with each other; the Irish Republican Army, with its links to the United States and Libya; ETA (representing the Basques) in Spain and France; and the various Muslim organizations which have been operating in France and which, in early 1996, made the latter's capital look like an armed fortress. Often they are rooted in the ethnic and religious minorities which, whether legally or not, have entered the countries in question - in France, Germany, and Britain together, there are now approximately 10 million persons whose faith is Islam.

If only because they have to make a living, often terrorist organizations engage in ancillary criminal activities such as drug smuggling, arms trading, and, from the early 1990s on, dealing in radioactive materials such as uranium and plutonium. Repeatedly they have proved that they are capable of commanding fierce loyalties; in the Middle East and Turkey, even people willing to commit suicide (and go to heaven as their reward) have not been too difficult to find. The attacks by foreign-bred terrorists on the World Trade Center in New York, in 1992, and by native ones on the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, showed that not even the two largest oceans on earth can protect a country against terrorists' activities. The result was that, at the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996, security officers outnumbered athletes two to one.^[468]

How, in the face of these attacks, have the armed forces at the disposal of the state fared? That the most powerful weapons available to them, including specifically the heavy ones which account for the bulk of their budgets, are entirely useless against these and similar movements scarcely requires pointing out. What is needed are police forces, both in and out of uniform.^[469] And in fact, since the onset of modern terrorism during the late 1960s and early 1970s, there is scarcely any advanced country which has not attempted to strengthen the ‘‘forces of order.'' Among the most common measures are the expansion of intelligence organizations and their coordination with each other; the establishment of special anti­terrorist squads trained in hostage-rescue operations and the like; the development and acquisition of a vast array of improved radio com­munications, ‘‘foolproof'' identity cards, closed-circuit television cameras, metal detectors, X-ray machines, night vision devices, listening devices, automatic bomb-disposal devices, and, most recently, machines for detecting radioactive, chemical, and biological materials,^[470] all backed up by computers in which data from these and other sources is stored, collated, processed, and sent to wherever it is needed, instan­taneously and often across borders as states try to coordinate their res­ponses to the threat. The technology necessary for implanting electronic chips in human bodies, which would enable each of us to be instantly identified and our movements constantly tracked, is available and in use for the purpose of raising farm animals. Should the security forces in certain countries have their way, then it is only a question of time before the technology is applied to humans, first perhaps among criminals and children and old people (if they suffer from loss of memory) and then among wider population groups.^[471]

As various groups concerned with the preservation of privacy are telling us, these developments are certainly disturbing. Perhaps even more dis­turbing, in face of the potential dangers - including, besides the ordinary bomb or guerrilla attack, chemical terrorism, biological terrorism, and nuclear terrorism - is the apparent inability of the various police forces to maintain the monopoly over violence in the hands of the state. Even in developed countries, the most that the majority of them can boast of is to have kept terrorism within ‘‘acceptable” boundaries. However, as people get used to watching terrorist actions unfold on television the definition of what constitutes ‘‘acceptable” seems to be stretched year by year. To some extent the change has been recognized by formal international law. In 1977 the Fourth Geneva Convention was signed, affording some protection to combatants who are not recognizable from a distance and do not wear uniforms while participating in military operations.^[472]

Meanwhile, from Washington’s White House to London's Downing Street, the change that has taken place is obvious even to the casual tourist. Entire city blocks in which presidents and prime ministers live and work, and which until not so long ago were open to pedestrian and vehicular traffic, are being sealed off and turned into fortresses; if only because nobody is willing to assume the responsibility, it is unlikely that, once closed, they will ever open again. Their protection is entrusted to uniformed - and, especially, nonuniformed - personnel with every im­aginable technological device ready to hand. From Sweden to Israel, leaders who used to walk the streets freely and without an escort have long ceased doing so. They are now seen by the public, if at all, only when they are whisked from one place to another in their curtained, heavily armored cars; to mislead potential terrorists, there are not seldom several identical cars in a convoy or even several convoys moving in different directions. The places in which they are expected to make scheduled appearances are routinely sealed off and searched, sometimes for days or weeks before the event, as are the surrounding areas. It is the kind of security such as a Cesare Borgia, constantly assassinating others and constantly fearing assassination himself, might have been proud of, and which, a generation or two ago, was only considered necessary to protect some of the world's worst dictators such as Hitler and Stalin.

In some ways, the rise of international terrorism merely represents the mirror image of everything we have been discussing so far. The weapons deployed by regular armed forces are often enormously expensive and require extensive logistic infrastructures as well as large crews - not so many of the devices which are used by the security forces in their attempts to combat terrorism, which are relatively cheap and therefore readily available to their opponents as well. Computers can be, and not seldom have been, broken into by hackers and crackers. Identification documents issued by the government, even high-tech ones, can usually be forged. Personal arms, listening devices, infrared night-vision devices, and simi­lar equipment used by the police are easily available off the shelf; and indeed the manufacturers are usually happy enough to sell them to whomever they can. If the police use sophisticated frequency-hopping radio apparatus to coordinate their work, then criminals and terrorists (as well as the journalists who chase them both) can do the same; they listen in to the network in order to evade their pursuers or, not uncommonly, send them on wild-goose chases. Similarly the transportation networks that make international communication and trade possible can be, and sometimes are, used by terrorists to run circles around states, their borders, and their sovereign territory.

But perhaps the most important factor involved in the rise of modern terrorism is the sheer multiplicity of states. At present there are almost 200 sovereign political entities, and additional ones are springing up almost daily. Among them, some are interested in stirring up trouble for their neighbors. Others seek to promote a variety of ideological and religious causes, while others still are ruled by people who are greedy for money and not too scrupulous about the ways of getting it. Thus it is virtually certain that, at any one time, at least several can be found which are ready to assist terrorists, if not against everybody, then at least against some.¹⁴³ Such assistance may take the form of bases, training, funding, documents, communications (by way of the diplomatic mail network),

143

See e.g. P. Williams and S. Black, ‘‘Transnational Threats: Drug Trafficking and

Weapons Proliferation,” Contemporary Security Policy, 15, 1, April 1994, pp. 127-51. transportation, arms, refuge, or all of these. A number of cases are even known when their embassies abroad have themselves turned into terrorist bases. They harbored personnel, smuggled arms, provided logistical sup­port, and engaged in kidnapping operations.

If only because security is one of the most manpower-intensive fields of human endeavor - for example, in the early 1990s as many as 40 percent of the employees of American airlines in Europe consisted of security personnel - providing it can be extremely expensive. To secure a military base or turn a block of government buildings into a fortress is one thing; to offer the same kind of protection to an entire country is another. Even supposing it could be made affordable and effective, it would render ordinary life next to impossible by leading to an intolerable slowing down of the most ordinary activities. For these and other reasons - including, not least, the likelihood of being criticized in case of failure - many states are reluctant to engage their own forces in the task. At best they will train anti-terrorist units and keep them in reserve in case they are called upon to deal with high-profile emergencies such as bombings, kidnappings, and the like, whereas the financial and organizational burden represented by day-to-day security is something which, as experience shows, they are quite ready to shift to private industry and individuals.

Whether because the government has ordered them to - as in the case of civil aviation in many countries - or because they simply do not trust the state to provide them with reasonable security, individuals and private industry have, in fact, been looking after themselves to a growing extent and on a constantly increasing scale. Depending on the nature of the perceived threat, the citizens of many countries have become accustomed to having their belongings checked, and/or their persons searched, each time they enter a department store, movie house, football stadium, rock concert, or similar places where crowds gather and where a terrorist act is therefore both more probable and, should it in fact take place, likely to result in heavy casualties. From South Africa to Italy, some states now require that every bank be protected by metal detectors and double doors that will open only if and when the visitor's innocence (i.e., the fact that he or she does not carry arms) is verified. Individuals, neighborhoods, and corporations have tried to protect themselves against terrorism and crime by hiring private guards, erecting security fences, installing alarm systems and closed-circuit television, demanding proof of identity when entering buildings and installations (whether legally or not, the respon­sible personnel often insist on retaining the documents in question until the visitor leaves), requiring badges to be worn, and much more.

While not all countries are affected to the same extent, so far those measures seem to have done little to eliminate the problem. What they have done is to turn private security into a growth industry par excellence worldwide.¹⁴⁴ Thus, in Germany, the years from 1984 to 1996 saw the number of private security firms more than double (from 620 to 1,400) while employment in them increased by no less than 300 percent.¹⁴⁵ In Britain, not normally considered a particularly violent country, the num­ber of employees in the field rose from 10,000 in 1950 to 250,000 in 1976;¹⁴⁶ as growth has continued since then, the point where there are more private guards then the state has uniformed active troops (whose number stood at 237,000 in 1995) must have been passed some years ago. Similarly in the United States, already by 1972 the private security industry had almost twice as many employees, and 1.5 times the budget, of all local, state, and federal police forces combined.¹⁴⁷ By 1995 the industry’s turnover stood at $52 billion a year and was expected to reach twice that figure by the end of the century.¹⁴⁸ If present trends persist, then the day is in sight when American citizens pay more for private security than for their country’s armed forces; the ratio between the two, which as of 1972 stood at 1:7, has since declined to 1:5 and is still going down. The number of those who are employed in the field, estimated at 1,600,000, already exceeds that of troops on active service. As of the early 1990s the American aviation industry alone was spending about a billion dollars annually to secure airports, install security devices, and screen passengers and their baggage; new devices, such as those needed to check on the transportation of radioactive materials, are being added almost daily. Some companies preferred to operate in-house, others hired out­siders, the reason being that, since the salaries paid by contractors are usually worse and there are fewer fringe benefits, doing so represents a way of cutting costs even at the expense of high personnel turnover and, often enough, bad security.¹⁴⁹

Like so many others, the security industry is heavily centralized at the top. Some of the leading firms in the field are presently in command of private armies numbering in the thousands and more. In the developing

¹⁴⁴ See, for Germany, B. Jean d’Heur, ‘‘Von der Gefahrenabwehr als staatlicher Angelegen­heit zum Einsatz privater Sicherheitskrafte - einige Rechtpolitische und Verfassun­gsrechtliche Anmerkungen,” Archiv des offentlichen Rechts, 119, 1, March 1994, pp. 107-36; for France, F. Coqeteau, ‘‘L’etat face au commerce de la securite,’’ L'Annee Sociologique, 40, 1990, pp. 97-124; and, for Italy, A. M. Ogliati-Vittorio, ‘‘La defesa armata privata in Italia,’’ Sociologia del Diritto, 15, 3, 1988, pp. 47-71.

¹⁴⁵ Der Spiegel, No. 46, 1996, p. 37.

¹⁴⁶ N. South, Policing for Profit: The Private Security Sector (London: Sage, 1989).

¹⁴⁷ J. S. Kakalikand S. Wildhorn, The Private Police: Security and Danger (NewYork: Crane Russak, 1977), p. 18, table 2.1.

¹⁴⁸ Figures from B. Jenkins, ‘‘Thoroughly Modern Sabotage,’’ World Link, March-April 1995, p. 16.

¹⁴⁹ For the working of the modern aviation security industry, see D. Phipps, The Management of Aviation Security (London: Pitman, 1991). world, notably New Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, mercenaries have already been used to stage coups and countercoups. While mercenaries do not yet threaten the political stability of developed countries, the range of services they offer is astonishing. They include research and develop­ment, both of weapons and of scenarios; recruiting, training, and testing personnel of every sort, from simple guards to the kind who specialize in fortifying entire compounds and conducting sophisticated investigations; selling, renting, or leasing equipment that ranges from ten-cent plastic badges and crowd-control equipment all the way to million-dollar ex­plosive detectors; vetting personnel, detecting fraud, conducting poly­graph tests, and wiretapping; planning, building, and operating security systems of every kind; probing those defenses, also by means of specially designated ‘‘red’’ teams; not to mention so-called cowboy types of ac­tivity such as collecting debts, evicting trespassers, helping corporations deal with strikers, and obtaining evidence on everything from corruption to marital infidelity.

Security firms count among their clients not just private individuals, neighborhoods, and corporations but, in some cases, the government itself. The latter may turn to them either in quest of expertise which it does not have; as a method for cutting costs; or by way of circumventing its own personnel who, in some cases, are themselves the target of the investigation. In some developed countries, it is private security officers, working under contract with the state, who man border controls and check passports. In others, private guards have been granted powers of detaining suspects and escorting them to their designated prisons - to say nothing of the fact that the latter are themselves being privatized as fast as possible. While the United States alone has no fewer than 150 firms that specialize in making delinquent fathers pay up, even in a country as civilized as New Zealand a serious debate has taken place whether per­sonnel working for private security should be allowed to participate in police roadblocks so as to catch debtors.¹⁵⁰ It is as if policy makers in many places are determined to bring the ‘‘police century’’ (1830-1945) to an end. Against the background of evidence that public faith in the police is declining,¹⁵¹ the task of fighting criminals may revert back to the ‘‘thiefcatchers’’ in whose hands, in most countries, it had been until the time of the French Revolution and beyond.

From the men in the boardroom to the guards at the gate, the personnel employed by the private security industry are often ex-military, intel­ligence, and police in search of greener pastures. Sometimes prior service

¹⁵⁰ Herald, 27 June 1997, p. 1.

¹⁵¹ See R. Robert, ‘‘Policing in a Postmodern World,’’ Modern Law Review, 55, 6, November 1992, pp. 761-81. in one of those bodies is a condition for being taken on by the industry in question. In other cases it is the policemen themselves who moonlight during their free time; they offer their services to everybody from the owners of sports teams to shopkeepers.^[473] Their training, which is equivalent to that given to the members of the state's own security apparatus, is thus put at the disposal of purely private objectives. Provided the money is good - and some terrorist organizations, relying on protection money, drug trafficking, or the smuggling of nuclear materials, are said to own assets measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars^[474] - it is not impossible that some of these people themselves will turn into terrorists at some stage in their careers. Either they will do so in their own countries or abroad; the latter is perhaps the more likely, and in fact the reemergence of mercenaries - soldiers of fortune, as they prefer to call themselves - in the service of both governments and their opponents is one of the outstanding developments of the last quarter of the twentieth century.^[475] To put it in a different way, terrorists, members of the security industry, and the state's security establishment appear to be growing interchangeable in theory and, in at least some cases, in practice as well.

Clearly the impact of these developments differs sharply from one place to another, and some places remain much safer than others. Still, globally speaking, it is scant wonder that the struggle against terrorism does not appear to be making much headway. Should present trends continue, then the outcome is in sight, and indeed already now it is the subject of much science fiction^[476] as well as the kind of games played on a personal computer. The provision of security - which since at least Thomas Hobbes has been recognized as the most important function of the cor­poration known as the state - will again be shared out among other entities.^[477] Some will be territorial but not sovereign, i.e., communities larger than states; others, perhaps more numerous, neither sovereign nor territorial. Some will operate in the name of political, ideological, relig­ious, or ethnic objectives, others with an eye purely to private gain. Whatever their goals, all will need money to survive. They will get it by contracting with states to do their dirty business for them, or by selling their services to other organizations, or by blackmailing the popula­tion;^[478] for example, during the PLO's uprising against Israel all three methods were used, whether by different factions or simultaneously by the same ones. Conversely, and as is already the case in some places, it is likely that states will adopt the principle of ‘‘user pays.” They will start charging fees for at least some kinds of security, such as providing assistance in case of a burglary, which used to be provided - to the extent that they were provided - free.

Thus the likelihood grows that the state will lose its monopoly over those forms of organized violence which still remain viable in the nuclear age, becoming one actor among many. Spreading from the bottom up, the conduct of that violence may revert to what it was as late as the first half of the seventeenth century: namely a capitalist enterprise little dif­ferent from, and intimately linked with, so many others. Where princes and other military entrepreneurs used to contract with each other in order to make a profit - an Amsterdam capitalist, Louis de Geer, once provided the Swedish government with a complete navy, sailors, and commanders up to the vice-admiral included - in the future various public, semi­public, and private corporations will do the same. With some of them, security will form their main line of business, whereas with others it will be ancillary. Some will be legal, others criminal; although as time goes on and the various organizations and people interact with each other - if only in order to learn how to provide security better - the differences between them are likely to diminish.

In many so-called developing countries the situation just described already exists and has, indeed, never ceased to exist. Whether acting on their own - mounting private guards, even setting up entire armies - or by forming agreements with local insurgents, people and corporations are trying to safeguard their property and their operations, a situation often known as neocolonialism.^[479] It is true that most citizens of most advan­ced countries are still able to sleep safely in their beds, albeit that more of those beds are coming to be protected by weapons and surrounded by walls. Thus, in Britain alone there are probably some 2 million illegal firearms.^[480] As of 1997 the United States was dotted by 30,000 gated communities, a number which is expected to double in a few years; not surprisingly, there is some evidence concerning their residents’ growing disinterest in, and disengagement from, public affairs.^[481] Both for them and for their less fortunate countrymen, future life will likely become less secure, or at any rate more obsessed with security, than the one which was provided by the most powerful states of the past.

On the positive side, those same states are much less likely to engage each other in major hostilities - let alone in warfare on a global scale - than was the case until 1945. The devil’s bargain that was struck in the seventeenth century, and in which the state offered its citizens much improved day-to-day security in return for their willingness to sacrifice themselves on its behalf if called upon, may be coming to an end. Nor, considering that the number of those who died during the six years of World War II stood at approximately 30,000 people per day, is its demise necessarily to be lamented.