Dear Doug and Angela,
thanks for your messages and we certainly do share the desire to conceive of some internationalist opposition to the war. It is difficult to develop both a position with respect to this war and an understanding of the larger developments of which it is part.
I want briefly to respond to only a few of the complex questions you bring up, ones that I have struggled with and don't really know how to resolve.
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.) In any case, I recognize this as a problem rather than knowing how to resolve it: how to understand simultaneously, as Angela says, the territorialized or local forces of rule and the processes of deterritorialization.
Doug brings up the question of the role of the US in the contemporary global order, or in Empire. I've struggled with this and don't know how to respond. I think the analysis of the Kosovo war in terms of competition between the US and Europe is fundamentally correct and important. It is probably no coincidence that the war comes not long after the establishment of the Euro and the (real or imagined? Doug is the one to ask) threat of a united European currency to the supremacy of the dollar. The reassertion of Nato keeps the US and Britain the central players in European affairs and prevents any possible expansion to unity with the East. So both in this war and in the world order in general, the US does seem to have a privileged role.
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.
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 realize that is still rather sketchy and enigmatic, but I've got to go right now. I'll try again to be more clear and specific.
yours, Michael