``With the end of the cold war, the United State was called to serve the role of guaranteeing and adding juridical efficacy to this complex process of the formation of a new supranational right. Just as in the first century of the Christian era the Roman senators asked Augustus to assume imperial powers of the administration for the public good, so too today the internation organizations (the United Nations, the international monetary organizations, and even the humanitarian organizations) ask the United States to assume the central role in a new world order....'' (181p, Empire, H&H)
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See? This is weak shit. (I just read this passage...)
First of all, the US wasn't asked anything. The US govt, founded and or systematically rigged, populated, funded/didn't, pressured, cajoled, and manipulated these interlocking international organizations for decades as extensions of its own foreign policy goals, making them in effect puppets to US interest---however these interests were variously defined. All of these organizations were in one way or another established as the realpolitik means of the general containment policies of post-WWII---by the so-call Western Allies, The Free World, etc, etc.
Fifty years later, nobody call upon anybody. The `call' arose as a manufactured `consensus of international opinion' (State Dept diplomatic pressures) and that theoretical consensus just happened to exactly correspond to US-EU/govt-corp interests as they were defined at the time.
So, part of the problem with the Empire that Hardt and Negri have written is that it fails to make the explicit empirical case, which I seriously believe can be made, that Empire exists. It is an interlocking network of political, legal, and financial organizations, treaties, trade agreements, oversight boards, committees, and other bureaucratic administrative paraphernalia. As such an entity, it can be reformed, dismantled, resisted, destroyed, or reconstructed.
But in order to attempt any of these, it has to be made explicit, visible, knowable, known, discussed and part of the everyday consciousness of the people whose lives are in broad outline determined by it. This is the point to detailing out the empirical case. Of course nobody can fight against or reform a nebulous chimera like a `supranational right'. What can be done is to go after the legal, financial, and political institutions that give expression to such a chimera.
So, I think basically this is why Yoshie and others pose the question, given H&N's Empire, is all resistance futile? Hell no.
Pretending that Empire doesn't exist is very similar to the neoliberal pretense that the free market economy is a natural process of some sort. The pretense ignores the entire support system of legal constructions and institutional manipulations that make the Market or Empire work the way they do.
Chuck Grimes