>>>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>