>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>