With contemporary developments in the media, terrorism has become not just a new weapon but a communications tool designed to create psychological shock, to gain political advantage. Spreading terror serves to deprive the State of its legitimate monopoly on the use of force, to diminish its credibility, to challenge the exercise of democracy, even contribute to its distortion by exposing it to ridicule in order to destabilise it, and to derive maximum advantage from the considerable impact of the media on public opinion.

Political warfare makes use of indirect strategy, and so, of course, terrorism can only win in a political sense. The aims and the resources of anti-terrorist strategies (like anti-crime strategies) have quickly revealed their limitations, since the psychological effects of terrorism are out of all proportion to those of violence alone. Modern man, isolated in a new, pluralistic form of society, deprived of the old community relationships that once gave him some guarantee of his identity and his freedom, has suddenly become a hostage, as have the news media grappling with terrorist demands. In ‘police states’ it is a fact that, for lack of resonance and an informed public opinion, terrorism has made little headway, but the leaders of democratic states have a duty to regulate media behaviour, particularly that of the radio and television, in times of terrorist-inspired crises: should programmes be interrupted, or should the risk of trivialising information be accepted, in situations where zero-tolerance should apply?

In this new environment of terror where the citizen feels extremely vulnerable, foreigners are, in many instances, regarded as potential terrorists, at a time when their presence in Europe, particularly those from culturally and ethnically foreign communities, ought to be regarded as an opportunity for Europeans. The latter should be seizing the occasion to redefine everyone’s identity in a consensus, of necessity pluralistic, excluding those notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people that surface all too often, whether in internal politics or on the international scene.