Contemporary liberal discourse oscillates between these two unsatisfactory positions. Both flatten the phenomena they seek to understand, opting for certainty over accuracy.
The recent attack on Berlin’s Pride parade is a perfect example.
Between grievance and terrorism lies a struggle over interpretation: over who possesses the authority to name the causes of suffering, define the enemy, and transform discontent into a coherent political project.
For the German far right, the attack became another exhibit in the indictment against immigration and multiculturalism. For much of the liberal centre, it became another reminder of the dangers of prejudice, exclusion, and social marginalisation.
Each side translated the event into a confirmation of what it had believed beforehand. Yet what made the attack politically significant was precisely its refusal to fit comfortably within either narrative.
The alleged attacker was not a newly arrived asylum seeker or an undocumented migrant but a German citizen, born and raised in Berlin. Nor can the attack be understood simply as the spontaneous expression of social alienation.
According to German prosecutors, he had long exhibited a commitment to jihadist ideology; had previously tried to enter territory controlled by the Islamic State; had already been convicted of preparing a serious act of violence; and allegedly pledged allegiance to ISIS before carrying out the attack.
The Berlin Pride tragedy therefore requires an examination not merely of the attacker but of the political order within which rival explanations of terrorism have become so rigid, predictable, and inadequate.
Public debate increasingly proceeds through binary oppositions that leave little room for historical or institutional analysis.
Terrorism must be either the product of pathological ideology or the consequence of adverse social conditions. Immigration must explain everything or nothing. Responsibility must rest entirely with the individual or entirely with society.
Such dichotomies generate endless political theatre but remarkably little understanding.
For much of the European right, immigration has become the master category through which questions of security, culture, and social cohesion are interpreted. Every attack is folded into a larger story about uncontrolled borders, failed asylum policy, and civilisational decline.
The Berlin case resists this interpretation. This act was not committed by someone who had recently entered Germany or remained outside its legal institutions. It was carried out by someone who had spent his entire life within German society.
A politics that treats immigration as a universal explanatory principle mistakes the territorial border for the decisive boundary in contemporary political life. The border that mattered in Berlin was not simply the one surrounding Germany, but the one separating rival beliefs about what constitutes legitimate political order.
The liberal response to actions like the Berlin Pride attack typically suffers from an inverse reductionism. Here the emphasis falls upon discrimination, exclusion, socioeconomic disadvantage, and failures of integration.
Modern European societies undeniably generate forms of inequality and marginalisation that fall disproportionately upon particular communities. Educational inequality, labour-market discrimination, and cultural exclusion all shape the horizons within which individuals make sense of their lives.
Yet it is equally insufficient to suppose that these conditions explain terrorism in any straightforward manner. Millions experience exclusion without embracing revolutionary violence. Material insecurity does not mechanically produce a specific political theology.
Islamist terrorism is neither simply an irrational eruption of religious fanaticism nor merely poverty translated into violence. It emerges through complex interactions between material conditions, political institutions, ideological narratives, organisational networks, and individual choices.
Grievance alone cannot explain why one disaffected individual embraces religious absolutism while another joins a far-right movement, a conspiratorial subculture, or no movement at all. Nor can ideology alone explain why particular political languages become compelling to particular people at particular moments.
Ultimately, the question is not simply which grievances exist, but what makes it possible to organise them. If we wish to develop a more fruitful analysis of acts of violence like the Berlin Pride attack, we must abandon the search for a single master cause.
Social dislocation may create conditions of receptivity. Digital networks may provide pathways of recruitment. Ideology furnishes a language through which diffuse frustrations are transformed into a comprehensible moral universe. Organisations cultivate commitment, produce authority, and normalise violence. Institutional failures determine whether known extremists retain the capacity to act.
Because each element interacts with the others, privileging one does not reflect the complexity of reality so much as the political needs of whoever is doing the explaining.
One of the defining features of neoliberal Europe has been the gradual hollowing out of those institutions which stabilised collective identity.
Trade unions have declined. Mass political parties have lost much of their social rootedness. Stable employment has given way to fragmented labour markets. Civic associations, municipal institutions, neighbourhood organisations, and forms of working-class sociability have weakened.
The importance of these institutions was never simply that they provided companionship or community.
They taught people how to understand their social position, connect personal experience to larger structures, and transform resentment into organised demands. They produced leaders, organisers, newspapers, educational networks, rituals, and political vocabularies. They mediated between everyday life and the state, giving conflict an institutional form and allowing people to see themselves not merely as isolated victims of circumstance but as members of groups capable of acting upon the world.
Although individuals are still formally endowed with rights, they are increasingly detached from modes of social organisation capable of translating private grievances into collective political claims.
The decline of civic institutions does not eliminate grievance but leaves it politically unclaimed. That space is never empty for long. Where democratic and socialist organisations retreat, other forces move in.
Nationalist movements reinterpret social dislocation as ethnic dispossession. Conspiracy communities translate powerlessness into narratives of hidden control. Religious fundamentalism converts frustration into a cosmic struggle between purity and corruption.
Each seeks not merely to comfort the disaffected but to establish authority over the interpretation of their lives. They identify enemies, impose moral hierarchies, and explain why existing institutions deserve neither loyalty nor obedience.
The attraction of jihadist ideology in the West must be understood within this wider contest over political and moral authority.
ISIS did not simply offer recruits a sense of belonging. It presented an alternative conception of legitimacy. It claimed that existing states were corrupt, their laws invalid, their institutions idolatrous, and their citizens complicit in an illegitimate order. It relocated sovereignty from constitutional institutions to a transcendent source and transformed violence into an act of obedience rather than criminality.
Liberal democracy understands itself primarily as a framework of rights, procedures, and neutral institutions. It guarantees formal equality and seeks to manage competing interests without imposing a substantive conception of the good.
Yet every durable political order depends upon more than legal compliance. It requires people to recognise its institutions as legitimate, to see personal interests reflected within them, and to regard participation as meaningful.
Consent cannot be generated solely through constitutions or elections. It must be reproduced through schools, workplaces, parties, unions, cultural institutions, and the ordinary experience of citizenship.
Contemporary liberalism has become increasingly poor at acknowledging this requirement. It often assumes that legitimacy follows automatically from legality and that inclusion follows from formal membership. A person possesses rights, a passport, and access to public institutions and is therefore presumed to be politically incorporated.
Yet juridical membership does not guarantee identification with the social order. A person may be formally German while remaining outside the networks through which German political life becomes meaningful.
This may reflect social exclusion, but also the active success of rival ideological forces in persuading individuals that the citizenship conferred on them by their coveted passport is fraudulent, corrupt, or morally void.
The target in Berlin must be understood in this context. A Pride parade is not simply a gathering of individuals exercising private freedoms. It is a public performance of a particular conception of political community. It dramatises the claim that groups once criminalised or excluded can appear openly within the national public sphere and demand recognition as equal citizens.
Pride’s significance extends beyond sexuality. It embodies an account of social order in which pluralism, legal equality, and public visibility are presented as legitimate achievements of democratic life. That is why such an event becomes a meaningful target for someone like the Berlin attacker.
Terrorism is communicative violence. Its objective is rarely confined to the immediate victims. It seeks to dramatise the vulnerability and illegitimacy of a political order by attacking the institutions, groups, or rituals through which that order represents itself.
Synagogues, concert halls, newspapers, Christmas markets, elections, and Pride celebrations are not selected randomly. Each condenses a wider set of meanings.
Violence against them attempts to destroy not just bodies but authority. It announces that the law cannot protect those who trust it, that pluralism is weakness, and that the existing order has no rightful claim upon the attacker’s allegiance.
The choice of target highlights the conflict between antithetical conceptions of politics.
Pride affirms that previously subordinated identities can be incorporated into a pluralistic civic order. Jihadist violence denies that such an order possesses legitimacy at all, not only rejecting a particular identity or behaviour but also the authority of the secular public world within which such identities can appear as legitimate.
The temptation after every terrorist attack is to search for a single culprit capable of resolving the resulting moral anxiety. Immigration, Islam, racism, neoliberalism, social media, policing, and intelligence failures each become candidates for explanatory supremacy. But political violence emerges where multiple failures intersect: failures of material security, political incorporation, institutional competence, ideological resistance, and democratic leadership.
No single reform can eliminate these conditions because no single process created them.
The deepest implication of Berlin is not simply that liberal societies misunderstand terrorism. It is that they increasingly misunderstand the political labour required to sustain their own legitimacy.
The far-right fixation upon borders cannot explain violence committed by citizens who have never crossed them. The liberal fixation upon inclusion cannot explain why some citizens reject inclusion in favour of a rival conception of political belonging.
What remains largely absent is an analysis of how political orders secure allegiance, how institutions translate social experience into public meaning, and how rival movements organise discontent into competing claims upon authority.
If Europe is to move beyond the sterile alternation between securitised nationalism and managerial liberalism, it will have to recover this neglected political dimension.
The answer to absolutist movements cannot consist solely in more policing, nor solely in better social policy, important though both remain. It must also involve rebuilding institutions through which solidarity is produced, conflict is organised, political judgment is cultivated, and ordinary people experience themselves as participants in a shared public world.
A stable democratic order requires the belief that its institutions belong to the people who inhabit them, that its conflicts can be organised politically, and that participation possesses consequence.
The crisis exposed by Berlin is not that liberal democracy has enemies. Every political order has enemies. The more troubling possibility is that contemporary liberal democracy increasingly lacks the institutional depth necessary to have prevented the terrorist attack on Berlin Pride.
Photograph courtesy of Matthias Berg. Published under a Creative Commons license.
