After 9/11, the administration of US President George W Bush initiated the era of the global war on terror. For many, this was a misguided response to terror attacks. But before the decade was over, US forces invaded two countries and are now fighting shadow wars in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, while an air war continues in Libya. Pentagon commands cover the entire planet, and US military assistance programmes are active in almost every country.

 Wars reorder politics and values. They remake that which is taken to be true and right. They render the world unrecognisable from what it was when the balloon went up. That is why epochs of world history are so often marked off by the dates of wars. How should we understand the era of 9/11? In what historical timeline does it belong?

It is useful to begin by recalling some of what seemed true on September 10, 2001. The US enjoyed the unquestioned global supremacy of the "unipolar moment". The "end of history" beckoned, in which liberal democracy and free markets promised peace and prosperity everywhere for all time. The West and its international organisations managed the world, ultimately for the general good. Globalisation was bringing people closer together.

Today, each of these verities lies broken. The failure to understand the 1990s and the significance of the end of the Cold War has left us unable to understand what has been happening in the decade since 9/11.

Renewed global military commitments have hastened an inevitable US decline. The unrestrained power of finance capital is wrecking economies and societies across the Western world. Europe lies prostrate, bereft of anything approaching serious leadership, mired in the divisive politics of austerity and racist, anti-immigrant populism. The great international institutions have sat on the sidelines of the crises roiling the world. The communications technologies that were supposed to lead to mutual understanding instead assist revolts and terrorism, rioters and financial speculators, when they are not being used by states to spy on their own citizens, or by corporations to increase the number of consumer products people desire.

How is it that the received wisdom about the nature of world politics was so badly wrong? What did we fail to see and why?

The great conceit that blinds us is the idea that the powerful make history just as they please. We are particularly prone to this error when thinking about international politics. Assisted by opinion columnists and think tank gurus, we tend to view the world from the perspective of decision makers in the great powers. What should the West do about Libya? How should the US respond to state failure in Yemen or the Iranian bomb? What should the G-20 do about the debt crisis?

'Like cowboys at the rodeo'

In the domestic politics of our own countries, it is easy for us to see that politicians are like cowboys at the rodeo: hanging on for dear life before a force of nature tramples them underfoot. The "bull" that throws them could be a long-simmering social crisis, a downturn of the business cycle, or some series of events over which no one exercises control. The skill of the politician determines how long they can hang on, but we are left in little doubt as to where the real power lies.

We are forced to confront the underlying social structures, historical legacies, and economic relations that determine our fates. Human agency, too, has its say, but it is not only that of the great leaders that matter. Ordinary people and the social and political movements they create can drive events and force the "policymakers" to respond. But fate usually works against human purposes. Rarely do either the powerful or those who resist them achieve quite what they intended.

A wonderful example of the impoverished vocabulary with which we think about international politics is the idea that "Reagan won the Cold War". The vast apparatus that is a modern state is reduced to its leader - "Thatcher", "Gorbachev". Agency, the power to shape events, rests firmly in the hands of this leader, who is located in the global North. A range of violent struggles, fought almost entirely in the global South, are subsumed under one term which denies there was even a war at all. Most of all, a tidy end - 1989 - is imagined in which, needless to say, the good guys won.

Epoch-defining dates like 1989 or 9/11 invoke various imagined histories and geographies. But too often the dates with which we order world politics are curiously Eurocentric. It is European exploration, the French revolution, a Congress in Vienna, and German invasions, for example, which mark out the globe's historical eras: 1492, 1789, 1815, 1914, 1939.

We are thus singularly unable to grasp the global histories and social relations that delivered us to 9/11. Within the conventional terms of analysis of international relations, it is almost impossible to see the great social, political and economic struggles between the global North and South that have driven modern world politics. European imperialism and the prodigious efforts to incorporate ever more peoples and places, ever more domains of life, into the capitalist world system lie at the origins of these global histories.

It is crucial to underscore that imperialism, capitalism and the modern world they together did not simply emanate from Europe. They were joint productions with the non-European world, albeit amid unequal power relations. Imperialism requires collaborators, while capital needs labour. The first factories were not built in England, but in the Caribbean, producing sugar with African slaves.

The World Wars gutted European imperial power and unleashed struggles for independence across the global South, led almost everywhere by the anti-imperialist left. For over forty years revolutionaries and insurgents, death squads and soldiers, carried on a deadly combat.

The fall of the left

The global significance of 1989, broadly speaking, was the defeat in both the North and the South of the political left, of those political movements that sought to replace, contain, or redirect the expansive energies of capital in accordance with humane values.

During the Cold War, Western powers had to maintain social welfare systems at home lest communism begin to look attractive. The Soviets, meanwhile, tried and failed to demonstrate that they too could produce washing machines, refrigerators and other consumer items. With the collapse of the USSR, neoliberalism was unleashed and could begin in earnest to do away with welfare states in the West. "Shock therapy" was delivered to the former Soviet bloc countries, while the debt crisis was used to control many economies in the global South. No longer did the West have to secure Third World allies with lavish aid.

The defeat of the left produced two outcomes which have defined the last twenty years and will continue to make history over the next twenty.

The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of the dire social consequences of unrestrained capitalism. The grievances, the injustices, the poverty, the anger, the continued reduction of everything human to the bottom line, to something that can be bought or sold, all this remained, even intensified. But now it was not the left that would make political lemonade out of these lemons, but the right; not communists, but religious fundamentalists, both Christian and Islamic. This is where the Tea Party belongs, feeding on the misdirected resentments of those devastated by unregulated capitalism.

The second outcome of 1989 is a dramatic increase in the political power of capital. Across the Western world, but most especially in the US, politicians are in hock to Big Money, while corporate media fundamentally shapes political debate.

Blinkered worldview

The problem with this, as Karl Marx would have told us, is that while capitalists know what is in the interest of their specific business, they are unable to cooperate for the good of the system as a whole. To maintain a capitalist society of a kind anyone would want to live in requires tremendous public investment and infrastructure; a neutral, professional and active civil service; and a strong framework of effective, lawful regulation.

Few capitalists want to pay taxes for all this, or subject their industries to significant regulation. Give capitalists as a class too much political power, and they will enfeeble government with their special interests, lobbyists, and kept politicians. The consequence is the drama currently on display: the self-destruction of the West and its economies. It is plainly obvious that Western societies are in dire need of modernisation, investment, and strategies for growth and employment. But the political forces that might fight for these have long since been vanquished. Anguished experts like Paul Krugman are left accurately to foretell a doom that the political systems of the West willfully do nothing to avoid.

It is this self-inflicted crisis that drives the timing of the scale-down of the global war on terror currently underway. After all, nation-building at home or abroad requires taxes. Rather than occupying countries in a "forward strategy for freedom", as Bush termed the invasion of Iraq, the war on terror will transform into the police, spy and special operations war Western liberals had originally called for in 2001.

Unifying the eras of the Cold War, the 1990s, and the decade following 9/11, are reinvigorated efforts to control the politics, economies and populations of the global South in the wake of the collapse of formal empire in 1945. Wars of tremendous folly and human cost have marked this entire period, in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Mozambique, and across Central and Latin America, among others. Bush's travesties in Iraq and Afghanistan will likely bring this series to an historical close. The tentative approach to Libya is a transition to a future of reduced Western ambition in the global South.

The retreat of the West from extensive and effective political and military efforts to control the global South - a history which began in the 16th century - rings the death knell of Western world power. The decade since 9/11 is the penultimate chapter in this history.

Tarak Barkawi is a senior lecturer in War Studies at the Centre of International Studies in the University of Cambridge. He also authored the book Globalization and War (Rowman and Littlefield). He has held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University; the Department of War Studies, King’s College London; the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University; and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University. 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. 

Multiculturalism does not pose a significant danger to Western values - but neoliberalism does.

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The paranoid style in politics often imagines unlikely alliances that coalesce into an overwhelming threat that must be countered by all necessary means.

In Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington conjured an amalgamated East - an alliance between "Confucian" and "Islamic" powers - that would challenge the West for world dominance. Many jihadis fear the Crusader alliance between Jews and Christians. They forget that until recently, historically speaking, populations professing the latter were the chief persecutors of the former.

Now Anders Breivik has invoked the improbable axis of Marxism, multiculturalism and Islamism, together colonising Europe. As he sees multiculturalism as essentially a Jewish plot, Breivik has managed to wrap up the new and old fascist bogies in one conspiracy: communists, Jews and Muslims.

Like his terrorist counterparts who kill in the name of various Islamic sects, Breivik is willing to slaughter people for an invented purity. Modern Norway is a latecomer to the world of nations, becoming sovereign only in 1905. Vikings, Arctic explorers and international humanitarians all went into imagining the place.

Given how readily jihadi texts are dismissed as ravings, it is notable how much attention has already been paid to Breivik's wacky ideological brew. This is a worrying portent of the line of analysis that says that the "root causes" of Breivik's madness - immigration and cultural difference - must be addressed. Otherwise, European societies will lose their social cohesion, to choose one current euphemism for the Volk.

To the extent such a view takes hold, the far right may be forgiven for concluding that terrorism works. As for the rest of us, now facing terrorist re-imaginings from both sides of obscure battles in a mythic past, we may long for the leftist and anti-colonial insurgents of bygone days. They at least could offer plausible accounts of what they were up to. 

To be sure, tactically speaking, Breivik thought through his operation. Unlike many jihadis, however, he lacked the courage to face men armed like him, and to offer his own life for his beliefs as well as the lives of others. Nonetheless he wanted at his court appearance to strut about in some kind of military uniform.

Smartly tailored uniforms, an abhorrence of cultural difference, and a desire for racial purity are all of a piece with fascist mysticism. As with jihadi ideology, it is precisely the non-rational elements of fascism that give it emotive, and hence political, power. For what Breivik and others see as under threat in the West is the vital source ofmeaning, of ultimate values, which they associate with the communion of a purified people.

Since the West faces no obvious threat of such existential scale and significance, one must be fabricated. It is here that the unlikely alliance of left wing parties and Islam plays its role, purportedly importing on a mass scale Muslims to colonise Europe. In Norway, Muslims account for less than three per cent of the population; in the UK, less than five per cent. Even so, the fantastical fear of the "loss" of Europe to Islam animates many on the right. It is part of mainstream electoral politics in Europe, and has long been an element of right wing discourse in the US.

In this vision of danger, multiculturalism plays a key role. Many will have noted Breivik's odd invocation of "cultural Marxists", folks I have only spotted in small numbers in university departments and cafes frequented by graduate students. Breivik's reference is in part to the Frankfurt School, a group of German Jewish scholars who fled Hitler for the Western cosmopolis of New York.

The idea is that "Jews" have encouraged cultural mixing in the West, fatally compromising its purity and thus its values, while Muslims and Jews retain their cultural strength and identity. Europe must therefore declare "independence" and fight the Muslim-Jewish-Marxist hordes, apparently starting by killing their children.

We can only assume that Breivik has confused the computer fantasy games he played - using a busty blonde avatar named "conservatism" - with political analysis. What is truly frightening, however, is that the core of this vision of multiculturalism as a threat to the West is shared by leading political parties in the France, the UK, Germany and Italy, among others. This is why there is every chance that Breivik's murderous and cowardly rampage will achieve some of its aims. Immigration, it will be argued, has unbalanced "our" people. It is already being curtailed in all the leading Western powers.

Shut up, obey, and collaborate

The irony is that the West brought us empire on a global scale and drew its cultural, economic, and political strength from interconnections with all parts of the world. The cosmopolis of New York, London and Paris - a "brown" not a "white" West - are more appropriate beacons of a West flush with power and confidence in its values than the imaginary purification achieved through concentration camps and closed borders.

But just what might be corroding values in the West?

This was one of the questions that animated the Frankfurt School and those who influenced it. They focused on the interaction between capitalism and culture. They noted the ways in which capitalism progressively turned everything into something that could be bought or sold, measuring value only by the bottom line. Slowly but surely such measures came to apply to the cultural values at the core of society. Even time, as Benjamin Franklin told us, is money, a doctrine which horrified Max Weber in his searing indictment of the capitalist mentality as an "iron cage" without "spirit".

Note for example the ways in which the great professional vocations of the West - lawyers, journalists, academics, doctors - have been co-opted and corrupted by bottom line thinking. Money and "efficiency" are the values by which we stand, not law, truth or health. Students are imagined as "customers", citizens as "stakeholders". Professional associations worry about the risk to their bottom line rather than furthering the values they exist to represent. Graduates of elite Western universities, imbued with the learning of our great thinkers, are sent off to corporations like News International. There they learn to shut up, obey, and collaborate in the dark work of exploitation for profit, for which they will be well rewarded, at least financially speaking.

Thanks in part to the grip of corporate power on the media and on political parties, few today in the West can imagine any other politics than those of big money. In the US, and increasingly even in Europe, the income differential between the poor and the wealthy already resembles that of banana republics. The downtrodden are asked to bear the burden of a financial crisis created by bankers. America's wealthy fly their children to summer camp in tax-free private jets amid a real rate of unemployment of over fifteen per cent.

Neoliberalism has only accelerated these processes at the heart of capitalist society. Here is a far more convincing threat to Western values and "social cohesion" than the lunatic fears of fascists. Notably, this is a threat that emanates from within, not without. It is precisely social democratic parties like Norway's Labour Party - Breivik's target - which have sought to contain the corrosive effects of capitalism and ensure the survival of the West's most humane values.

Tarak Barkawi is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

First paragraph of the article:

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there has been considerable debate with respect to the utility and the consequences of the global campaign against terrorist financing. While some analysts have downplayed the potential efficacy of trying to dry up terrorist funds as a method of curbing further operations, in the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration stepped up action on the second front of the war on terrorism. The USA PATRIOT Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act ("IEEPA") provided federal officials with new legislative powers to freeze assets of entities and individuals identified as financing terrorist organizations. Launched on October 25, 2001 Operation Green Quest froze more than ten billion dollars in global assets in the United States linked to alleged terrorist organizations and individuals. In addition, according to the Department of the Treasury's Terrorist Assets Report, of the $1.6 billion in assets of state sponsors of terrorism located in the United States, $1.5 billion were frozen by US economic sanctions. At the time about 142 nations came on board and blocked seventy million dollars worth of assets within their borders, and most continue to express open support for the American led effort aimed at "starving the terrorists of funding."