Symposium on Terrorism, Globalization and the Rule of Law: an Introduction

As globalization becomes more pervasive, the legal regimes of constitutional democracies throughout the world become ever more interdependent. This is so for at least two principal reasons: First, the citizens of one country find themselves affected to an ever greater extent by the laws of other nations. What happens elsewhere affects us here. Second, a growing similarity of legal regimes—a growing determination, for example, to maintain democratic societies that protect basic human rights—means that both judges and policy makers in one country find that other nations face problems similar to their own. These circumstances do not mean domestic law that changes to reflect the values held by those in foreign nations. These circumstances do mean that, in shaping our own domestic legal responses to common problems, we can learn from the experience of others. The value of looking to common experience is most dramatically illustrated by the challenges posed by the recent wave of global terrorism and by the multiple and often vexing legal issues that emerge in the course waging the war on terror. As recent terrorist attacks, such as those against the United States on 9/11, 2001, in Madrid in March 2004, or in London in July 2005, have demonstrated, not only is contemporary terrorism global in its ambitions and scope, but it also recruits and trains its agents, obtains and manages its financing, and selects targets for its attacks on a veritable worldwide basis. This, in turn, calls for cooperation among democracies engaged in the fight against terrorism and for sharing the fruits of experience in combating and preventing terrorism with a view to developing approaches that will maximize efficiency in the war on terror. This symposium seeks to take a constructive step in that direction. The articles included in the present symposium were first presented at the conference on “Terrorism, Globalization and the Rule of Law” held at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy on July 18-22, 2005. The Bellagio conference’s participants came from several countries spanning four continents and included judges, legal academics, and government officials responsible for combating terrorism as well as specialists in philosophy, political theory and psychology. One of the principal aims of the conference was to gain a better understanding of global terrorism, to assess the similarities and differences between the latter and older types of nation-state based terrorism, such as that of ETA in Spain or of the IRA in Northern