>>When I talk of Empire I mean something like the political order that
>>corresponds to and supports the construction of the world market. But
>>whenever one deals with globalization, one has to maintain a kind of dual
>>strategy of discussion, because within the various processes of
>>globalization many old boudaries are maintained (sometimes partially) and
>>new ones created. So, I agree with Angela that one cannot talk about this
>>global order as if it were completely deterritorialized. There are, as
>>she says, important territorial obstacles that we should oppose, such as
>>national border controls and immigration policies. (I'm reminded of a
>>Deleuze and Guattari line that sometimes instead of resisting the forces
>>of global capital we have to push its deterritorializations further,
>>accelerate the process, to come out the other side.)
>Traverse the fantasy?
>The scary Thomas Friedman put the task of constructing the market rather
>pungently in the excerpt from his book that ran in the New York Times
>Magazine a few weeks ago:
>"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -
>McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the
>F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's
>technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine
>Corps.... Without America on duty, there will be no America Online."
>You could argue, following Polyani and/or Zizek (see quote below), that the
>construction of the world market produces the very "monsters" that the U.S.
>and its allies end up bombing. So, contrary to the classic Marxian argument
>about the world market creating a world civilization, it inevitably creates
>a cosmopolitan core and an excluded periphery. It may be that you can't
>push capital's deterritorializations further, because capital
>reterritorializes as it deterritorializes.
>>But this is fundamentally different than the old imperialisms and the US
>>certainly does not play the same role, say, that Britain played in the
>>British Empire. In that imperialist paradigm, global expansion was
>>effectively the extension of the powers and structures of the
>>nation-state. This Empire is not.
>It's different for sure, but not always in the direction of less state
>presence. The world financial system a century ago was denonimated in gold,
>a stateless money (though the Bank of England and the British Navy were its
>ultimate guarantors); now, we've got multilateral state institutions like
>the IMF, itself dominated by the U.S., regulating the international
>financial system. Then, when there was a panic, things collapsed; now, we
>have state-managed bailouts to insulate the creditor countries and shift
>the costs of adjustment onto the debtor countries.
>Compared to previous empires, has there ever been anything like the U.S.?
>We don't call it an empire now, the way it was common in speech 100 years
>ago, but the U.S. military is everywhere - it's got bases even in Japan and
>Germany, its principal economic rivals. Was there anything comparable in
>the past?
>The thrust of U.S.-sponsored development policy has been to weaken
>selectively Third World states - to cut back their role in economic
>development and social policy. But structural adjustment policies have
>required lots of state coercion too. It's no accident, as the vulgar
>Marxists used to say, that the Latin model countries are Chile and Mexico,
>the first prepared for the role by Pinochet, and the second by an effective
>one-party state. The state terror of the 1970s and 1980s in Latin America
>prepared the ground for the sham democracy of the 1990s.
>>My suspicion is that in many important respects the US (as nation-state) is
>>not the center of the present global Empire, which Doug refers to as the
>>"post-cold-war imperial order." Perhaps we are too swayed by the role of
>>military power, in which the US is certainly dominant. Empire, or any
>>global power, however, is only partly dependent on military might. It
>>must equally be economic power, political power, cultural power: these
>>are the primary elements of hegemony. And in these regards the US is not
>>predominant and we can begin to imagine an Empire without center,
>>composed on networks of global power.
>I wonder how much of these ideas of decentered empire come from taking
>bourgeois propaganda too seriously. One reason the Latin states have been
>so pliable is that their military and technocratic elites are heavily
>US-trained, at the School of the Americas, MIT (which, though private, gets
>oodles of federal government money), or World Bank economics institutes,
>where they learn neoclassical theory, which is mostly a US product.
>And as for cultural power, can you beat Hollywood?
>Doug
>----
>from Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With The Negative
><quote>
>This pathological "stain" also determines the deadlocks of today's liberal
>democracy. The problem with the liberal democracy is that a priori, for
>structural reasons, it cannot be universalized. Hegel said that the moment
>of victory of a political force is the very moment of its splitting: the
>triumphant liberal-democratic "new world order" is more and more marked by
>a frontier separating its "inside" from its "outside" - a frontier between
>those who manage to remain "within" (the "developed," those to whom the
>rules of human rights, social security, etc., apply) and the others, the
>excluded (the main concern of the "developed" apropos of them is to contain
>their explosive potential, even if the price to be paid for such
>containment is the neglect of elementary democratic principles). This
>opposition, not the one between the capitalist and the socialist "bloc," is
>what defines the contemporary constellation: the "socialist" bloc was the
>true "third way," a desperate attempt at modernization outside the
>constraints of capitalism. What is effectively at stake in the present
>crisis of postsocialist states is precisely the struggle for one's place,
>now that the illusion of the "third way" has evaporated: who will be
>admitted "inside," integrated into the developed capitalist order, and who
>will remain excluded from it? Ex-Yugoslavia is perhaps the exemplary case:
>every actor in the bloody play of its disintegration endeavors to
>legitimize its place "inside" by presenting itself as the last bastion of
>European civilization (the current ideological designation for the
>capitalist "inside") in the face of oriental barbarism. For the right-wing
>nationalist Austrians, this imaginary frontier is Karavanke, the mountain
>chain between Austria and Slovenia: beyond it, the rule of Slavic hordes
>begins. For the nationalist Slovenes, this frontier is the river Kolpa,
>separating Slovenia from Croatia: we are Mitteleuropa, while Croatians are
>already Balkan, involved in the irrational ethnic feuds which really do not
>concern us; we are on their side, we sympathize with them, yet in the same
>way one sympathizes with a third world victim of aggression. For Croatians,
>the crucial frontier, of course, is the one between them and Serbians,
>i.e., between the Western Catholic civilization and the Eastern Orthodox
>collective spirit which cannot comprehend the values of Western
>individualism. Serbians, finally, conceive of themselves as the last line
>of defense of Christian Europe against the fundamentalist danger bodied
>forth by Muslim Albanians and Bosnians. (It should be clear, now, who,
>within the space of ex-Yugoslavia, effectively behaves in the civilized
>"European" way: those at the very bottom of this ladder, excluded from all
>- Albanians and Muslim Bosnians.) The traditional liberal opposition
>between "open" pluralist societies and "closed" nationalist-corporatist
>societies founded on the exclusion of the Other has thus to be brought to
>its point of self-reference: the liberal gaze itself functions according to
>the same logic, insofar as it is founded upon the exclusion of the Other to
>whom one attributes the fundamentalist nationalism, etc. On that account,
>events in ex-Yugoslavia exemplify perfectly the properly dialectical
>reversal: something which first appeared within the given set of
>circumstances as the most backward element, a left-over of the past, all of
>a sudden, with the shift in the general framework, emerges as the element
>of the future in the present context, as the premonition of what lies
>ahead. The outbursts of Balkan nationalism were first dismissed as the
>death throes of Communist totalitarianism disguised in new nationalist
>clothes, as a ridiculous anachronism that truly belongs to the
>nineteenth-century age of nation-states, not to our present era of
>multinationals and world integration; however, it suddenly became clear
>that the ethnic conflicts of ex-Yugoslavia offer the first clear taste of
>the twenty-first century, the prototype of the post-cold war armed
>conflicts.
></quote>