ARTIKEL /ARTICLES Containing Entropy, Rebuilding the State: Challenges to International Order in the Age of Globalisation HANNS W.MAULL 6 he attacks of September 11 have widely – and rightly – been interpreted as attacks on the present international order. The targets clearly were selected in part because of their symbolic importance: the World Trade Center as the epitomy of America’s economic supremacy, the Pentagon as the brain of America’s global military reach. Yet this was not only an attack on America: the terrorist acts also aimed at the United States as the flag bearer of the Western world and its core values and as the dominant power of the present international order. However warped al Qaeda’s ideas and objectives for an alternative order were, its acts were meant to mount a challenge to the very principles and norms underlying the present international order, as well as America’s pivotal position in it. Although the terrorist attacks were broadly condemned and abhorred, there also was a widespread reaction of»schadenfreude«, a sense that »America had asked for this«, particularly in the Islamic world. 1 This lack of legitimacy reflects the realities of misery and violence in many parts of the South: the number of casualties claimed by the terrorist attacks would hardly register in the abject statistics of violence in places like Sudan, Af­ghanistan(before Oct.7), or Central and West Africa. In short, al Quaeda’s attacks not only were motivated by a different view of interna­tional order(however twisted it may seem to us), but this view found considerable resonance worldwide, at least ex negativo – i.e., in its rejec­tion of the prevailing Western views of international order. In its response to»terrorism with a global reach«, the United States launched a war against al Qaeda and its backers, the Taliban regime, in Afghanistan. But Washington also assembled a broad coalition of gov­ernments and initiated a wide range of cooperative international initia­tives. The attacks therefore have not only shaken international order and bared its limited legitimacy, but they also have stimulated new efforts to 1. Cf. Naím, Moisés:»Why the World Loves to Hate America«, in: Financial Times , Dec. 7, 2001 ipg 2/2002 Maull, Challenges to International Order 9