>I'm all for the internationalization of people. I'm confused but
>fascinated by the fact that some of the strongest defenders of
>nationalism/localism on this list are people living in lands far
>from their birth. Is this some fantastic longing for rootedness
>playing itself out through politics?
As I said, I like travel, not travail....
At bottom, I'm interested in neither localism nor nationalism (nor is Pat, I imagine). What I think leftists should become interested in is the _state power_ (here I don't presume that Pat will concur with me). No state power, no chance of putting a leftist program -- even a mildest reform, not to mention the abolition of capitalism & other sources of oppression -- in practice on a large scale (not to mention worldwide). You know I'm a fan of Machiavelli. So are Hardt & Negri, in fact, as you can see from _Empire_; they just draw a different lesson (= the Empire is "progressive") from the man than mine (= an anti-imperial synthesis of Machiavelli, Marx & Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Althusser, etc.).
Now, what does "the internationalization of people" mean _within the Progress of the Empire_? In practice, doesn't it tend to translate into the globalization of the most _banal_ parts of _provincial_ American culture? Hardt & Negri write, paradoxically seeing a revolutionary potential in the _Federalist_ (of all things!): "The American Revolution and the 'new political science' proclaimed by the authors of the _Federalist_ broke from the tradition of modern sovereignty, 'returning to origins' and at the same time developing new languages and new social forms that mediate between the one and the multiple. Against the tired transcendentalism of modern sovereignty, presented either in Hobbesian or in Rousseauian form, the American constituents thought that only the republic can give order to democracy, or really that the order of the multitude must be born not from a transfer of the title of power and right, but from an arrangement internal to the multitude, from a democratic interaction of powers linked together in networks....The contemporary idea of Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal U.S. constitutional project" (Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, _Empire_, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000, pp. 161, 182). In contrast, I think that "the internal U.S. constitutional project" is not at all based upon "an arrangement internal to the multitude, from a democratic interaction of powers linked together in networks"; in fact, _the former is dedicated to making the latter impossible_.
Why do Hardt & Negri insist on calling the American Empire "progressive"? Such an optimism of the intellect can only help those who think like a Marine Colonel in _Full Metal Jacket_ who proclaims: "We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out" (at <http://www.sawnoff.demon.co.uk/script.txt>).
Yoshie