>I suspect that, with patience, we could have a useful discussion on three
>points where we do seem to disagree.
Yes, I'd like that.
? First, you object when I say that
>force can only rule up to a point and that consent is necessary. You say
>that "the US has run a very successful empire for over 50 years using
>massive amounts of force." Yes indeed. But you seem to ignore the need
>for consent. Hegemony is never won exclusively through force.
I entirely agree. But when hegemony seems to be slipping away, the U.S. will not hesitate for a second to use brutal force. In fact, it may be that the very excess of force acts in the service of consensual hegemony: who would dare challenge a power that wouldn't think twice about applying "irrational" amounts of violence?
>Second, I am trying to understand how there is today some form of
>supranational power that extends beyond the power of the nation-States and
>is ultimately sovereign. Anytime someone suggests a limit to the power of
>the nation-States, you immediately say, aha!, he's saying the nation-State
>has no power. It serves nothing to mischaracterize the argument in that
>way. I agree that nation-States have a great deal of power, some more
>than others, but I think we need also to recognize the limits to their
>power. In the old imperialist model, which you seem stuck in, European
>nation-States did rule predominantly through force. But that old model is
>strained beyond its limits trying to account for the contemporary global
>hegemony.
I think this war, like the Gulf War, is partly about creating a post-Cold War imperial order (so in that sense I agree with James Heartfield that the Gulf War wasn't just about oil, but I wouldn't go as far as he does). For the U.S. the challenge is to keep the EU from getting too independent, which means acting outside NATO. That doesn't mean that Germany & other European powers don't have their own agenda in this war, but without the U.S. taking the lead, there'd be no bombers over Belgrade right now. There's an analogy here to the G-7 structure, which is an attempt to manage the world political economy through an executive committee led by the U.S. For Washington the challenge seems to be to let the process be a bit more collective than it was in the days of the Cold War but without surrendering final authority.
>My purpose is to understand
>what is really behind the discourse on human rights. My point in this
>essay is that the only right that is acted on here is not any economic,
>political, or social right, but merely the right to life. One of the
>things to understand about this is that guaranteeing the right to life
>acts as a cover for the campaign to deny other rights, economic,
>political, and social.
Sorry if I missed this point. But the U.S. has long justified wars in the name of human rights, and even classical imperialism was legitimated with rhetoric of humanitarian uplift.
All that aside, I'm strongly behind your attempt to conceive of a non- or antinationalist opposition to the war. On this list, we've had Chris Burford arguing for a "European" solution, as opposed to a U.S.-led one; elsewhere we've heard a lot of apologetics for the Serbs who, while they're not the only guilty parties in the region, don't really deserve apologetics. So I'm all for putting our collective heads together and figuring out a rhetoric and a strategy for opposing the war that doesn't reinforce the claims of nationalism. If NATO and its publicists (like Havel) are using an antinationalist rhetoric to justify imperial war, then it might be a good idea to take the rhetoric seriously and show how it bears no relation to their real motives. The fact that they're using it suggests that it has more popular appeal than we may realize.
Doug