How Patriotic Is the Patriot Act? Freedom Versus Security in the Age of Terrorism and From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations

Extract

How Patriotic Is the Patriot Act? Freedom Versus Security in the Age of Terrorism. By Amitai Etzioni. New York: Routledge, 2004. 224p. $26.00.

From Empire to Community: A New Approach to International Relations. By Amitai Etzioni. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 272p. $29.95.

In How Patriotic Is the Patriot Act? Amitai Etzioni analyzes the United States response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, from the perspective of “responsive” or “new” communitarianism. New communitarianism, according to the author, can be distinguished from authoritarian communitarianism because it seeks a balance between freedom and security or social order (pp. 3–4). According to Etzioni, during the 1960s and 1970s, America “overcorrected” for forms of authoritarian government, such as racial segregation or J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation. As a result, the country experienced “excessive individualism” and “moral anomie.” With what he considers to have been an overemphasis on individual rights, certain policies, such as the possibility of a quarantine in the face of bioterrorism or highly communicable disease, have been “stigmatized” as being “beyond the pale” of reasonable discussion (pp. 87–89). By noting, for example, that the United States has allowed for quarantines at earlier junctures in its history and that a quarantine could be set up on a vacation island, he is clearly trying to rehabilitate the quarantine as a policy option. But this is just one policy among many that are emerging post–September 11 in the United States that are correcting the balance between liberty and security, for Etzioni. That is, he understands policies such as the USA Patriot Act, US VISIT (U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indication Technology program), CAPPS II (a proposed measure to update the current Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System (CAPPS) airline security program that was subsequently killed in the summer of 2004 because of its burden on civil liberties), national identification cards, and various biometric and facial recognition technologies to be relocating a balance between freedom and security that was apparently lost in the 1960s and 1970s.