Balancing Security and Liberty:
Deutscher Herbst Revisited
By Dr. Jackson Janes

Looking Back at the Red Army Faction
Thirty years apart to the day, two events in Germany illustrate the evolution of terrorism and the struggle of a democracy to respond.

September 5, 1977, saw the abduction of a leading German corporate figure, Hanns Martin Schleyer, by the Red Army Faction (RAF) guerilla group, which murdered Schleyer six weeks later. When (West) Germans think about the autumn of 1977 - the Deutscher Herbst - it represents a time when there was for the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 a wave of armed attacks on the state, resulting in the death of civilians and government officials, justified by its perpetrators as a strike against what they perceived to be the successor to the Nazis.

During that tense time the debate was about the balance between protecting the state from real attack while sustaining the protection of law, democracy, and justice. It was about maintaining security as well as liberty.

For the most part, the young Federal Republic acquitted itself well in this test of its institutions and values. The RAF was destroyed and its ability to destabilize German society defeated.  The terrorists of 1977 were drawn from the ranks of German society, the middle class, homegrown terrorists willing to declare war on their own country. The enemy was the state itself. Their cause was to bring it down and create another with a new political and economic order, whatever the content would be. They seemed to know more what they were against than what they were for.

Yet here was a small group of individuals bent on wreaking havoc and capable of scaring an entire society towards being afraid of itself. But the end result of that struggle was to affirm that the Federal Republic of Germany was a Rechtsstaat, ruled by laws and the stable, not mobs.

Terrorism Returns Thirty Years Later
What happened thirty years ago is very much part of today's debate about the same issues. There remains a fascination with both what was accomplished but also what went wrong. At the core of the discussions is the equation of liberty and security, how they are both defined and secured against misuse. On the one hand, the use of legal adaptations constraining the rights of suspected terrorists, their lawyers, and the expansion of surveillance sparked a passionate debate throughout German society about preserving freedom in Germany. This debate continues today with regard to protecting individual rights. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the terrorist threats facing us today are far more comprehensive and indeed more invasive. Larger in scope and without boundaries, they pose tremendous challenges to our societies.

September 5, 2007, saw the arrest of three people, two of which were German nationals, preparing to blow up American military bases, night clubs, and infrastructure in Germany on the orders of Jihadists in Pakistan. The foiled bloodbath could have been bigger than the London or the Madrid attacks, German authorities claim. That the attackers were thwarted was a significant victory over a terrorist plot. However, it reminded again that the dangers of terrorism continue to spread, albeit in a new phase with a new mission.

The call for terrorism in Europe by Islamic fanatics is designed not to bring down a state and rebuild another based on Marxist principles, as the RAF supporters would have wanted. This call is a demand to replace the state and its laws with those of Islamic law and Islamic fundamentalism. Nothing short of that will do; no compromises are possible, and all means are justified. It is this challenge to liberal democracies which requires the same commitment to maintaining protection of the state and sustaining the foundations of liberal democracy at the same time.

As former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who had to face the terrorism three decades ago, has said, there should be no trade-off between the two: "The rule of law does not have to win or lose. It must exist." The state monopoly of the use of force in defending society is a central pillar of security in a democracy. Yet it cannot serve the goal without upholding the laws in doing so.

There is an inherent disadvantage facing a liberal democracy in this struggle, be it Germany, England, Spain, or the U.S. The demand for indivisible freedom, tolerance, liberty, and justice requires that the state be wary of measures that undermine those values while at the same time try to prevent them from being undermined by those who do not believe in them. How do we integrate those who desire to be part of that community while dealing with others who don't or worse, wish to destroy the system?

The Enemy Within?
Up until the arrests of these terrorists on September 5, most Germans felt that they were less threatened by the dangers that had attacked in England or Spain. Germany has more than three million Muslims living within its border along with six million other non-German residents. Approximately half of those Muslims are Turks. In the recent past, the assumption has been that the Muslims in Germany have a stake in maintaining the system which has welcomed them with opportunities to work and live with their families. And for the vast majority, that is the case.

Yet the appearance of terrorists, German and non-German alike, who seek ways of carrying out threats on both American and German targets represents a challenge which requires a new response. The Underground attacks in London carried out by those who had essentially grown up in the very place they wanted to destroy  reminds us that there is a serious gap in understanding how some following Islam relate to the country in which they live.

But a new wrinkle for Germany is that the Germans involved were converts to Islam and obviously to its most radical version. The terrorists in England were British subjects but they had emerged from a strong ethnic background in their neighborhoods. Whether outfitted with British passports or not, they had clearly lost a stake in Britain and their future in it. If the arrested Germans had such a stake in Germany earlier, they had decided to trade it for a new one. In both cases we are seeing a new danger of homegrown terrorism. It's the enemy from within which makes it so difficult to identify and fight against and at the same time plants a general feeling of insecurity and suspicion in a society.

We must remind ourselves that it is not always a matter of religion generating these tensions. The long decades of killing in Great Britain during the stand-off with the Irish Republican Army are evidence that people can turn on each other within national communities for other reasons. Indeed, the Civil War in the United States led to the greatest loss of American life in any conflict it has been involved with.

More to Come?
The troubling dimension of the arrest of these terrorists in Germany last week is the fact that there are more people likely to be following the footsteps of those arrested. Germany is as much a part of the stage on which the threats of terrorism are being hatched and planned as any other country in Europe. The fact that the preparations for September 11, 2001, were made in part in Germany is matched again by these individuals plotting to hit American installations in Germany.

That they are being trained at and steered from an al Qaeda center somewhere on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan may not be news to the intelligence services that were able to track them. But it may be news to the German public which might have believed that Germany would be less likely to harbor such cells, particularly those made up of Germans.

To date many Americans may believe that the threats they face will not come from Americans, Islamic or not, but rather from those outside the country penetrating the borders. This is a logical conclusion to draw because those in al Qaeda camps are threatening to do exactly that. And yet the same inner turmoil that drove Germans to side with al Qaeda against their home country can also take hold anywhere, including in the U.S. Even without Islam, the bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995 was something Timothy McVeigh went to his grave with as a proud accomplishment.

September 5, 2007, was an uncomfortable reminder to Germans that the dangers they face are no different from those facing all of their neighbors, some of whom have already experienced the deadly force of terrorism. The fact that arrests were made in close cooperation with the U.S. intelligence forces may also be uncomfortable given the enormous animosity felt toward President Bush.

But both sides of this action stressed that it was this cooperation that thwarted the plot when it was close to being implemented. And if there are more out there, that same cooperation will be needed for a much longer period, regardless of who sits in the White House.

The Balance Between Security and Liberty
Germans and Americans are both caught up in vehement debates about the balance between security and liberty. It is not a new debate but one that is shaped as those in the past by the perception and reality of vulnerability within our societies.

In the U.S., criticism of the Bush administration is broad, from Guantanamo to unauthorized wire-taps of citizens to the Patriot Act and its uses and misuses over the past few years. The balance between security and liberty, it is argued, has been seriously upset in the wake of September 11. That debate will accompany the foreseeable future, heated up increasingly by the race for the White House in 2008. But even without that dimension, there is a very necessary debate we need to be having to ensure that the balance of security and liberty is maintained.

Germany's debate, also not new, is no less intense, in part due to its recent history with a Nazi dictatorship but also in part because of that same fundamental concern for the values of liberty and freedom and the rule of law. That was also true thirty years ago.

The impact of September 11 in the U.S. was in part reflected in a rush to rethink and repair the holes in our security which allowed that attack to occur. There were efforts to respond which also generate a range of mistakes in the justice system and the intelligence agencies in the name of national security. Many are now being addressed for correction; many remain contested.

Germany is going through that process as well, without of course having gone through the pain of an attack like September 11. Hopefully it will not have to suffer through such an experience. Yet it did have experience with threats three decades ago. They may be different in kind today, but they raise the same questions, then and now.

Old or new, terrorist threats are a shared challenge among democracies; how we confront them can build bridges of trust and confidence. Yet they can also divide us, within our societies as well as between them. We have seen both cases in German-American relations in recent years.

That there will be more threats is not a question. How we will cope together is.

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This essay appeared in the September 14, 2007, AICGS Advisor.