Check out Part 3 here.
Cross posted at Critical Stew.
Part 4: Empire Returns
4.1 Brief History of a Failed Coup D’État
Let the Dead Bury the Dead
For Hardt and Negri, the definitive event of the 21st century so far has been the failure of unilateralism. They see the failure of the US to gain imperial supremacy as a evidence that imperialism itself is a dead ideology, and that scholarly acceptance of the US as imperialism, based on out-moded theories, hastens the necessity that “the dead bury the dead.” Drawing from their work in Empire, they suggest that toward the end of the 1990s “Empire” was a new global order that was qualitatively different that previous forms of imperial power that had their basis in the dominant political unit of the nation-state. Instead, the problem for the 21st century is one of a wide networked distribution of varied powers contributed to by many actors. I t was characterised by the collaboration of states, corporations, global economic and political institutions, etc. For international relations scholars then, the traditional narrative of world history that moved from a multipolar world, through a US/USSR dominated bipolarity, to an “end of history” unipolar world dominated by the US were no longer adequate for understanding the emergence of a new global order. Hardt and Negri argue that reactionary forces, typified by American neoconservatives, pursued an agenda of unilateral imperialist glory that rejected the emergent formation of Empire, in essence “a coup d’état within the global system.” (205) The defining moment for this coup was the catastrophe of September 11th. They argue, however, that the imperial attempt failed largely due the neoconservatives’ rejection of Empire. The neoconservatives were in favour of American exceptionalism, seeing the US as having a responsibility to unilaterally impose political power around the world, spreading democracy, and thus guarantee peace. But, Hardt and Negri point out, a reliance on, but inability to adapt military strategy, coupled with a tenuous relationship to economic concerns, hastened the failure of the project. Finally, taking for granted that other nation-states would simply play along, these new imperialists disregarded the need for moral or political authority. In the end, this imperialist project attempted to “assert hegemony without concern for, and even scorning the necessary prerequisites for, that hegemony itself.” (208) Imperialist projects, they argue, did not fail because of poor execution, as many neoconservative hard liners would suggest, but rather because “unilateralism and imperialist projects were already dead.” The furore over the imperialist actions of the US gave rise to a series of criticisms from the Left that, according to Hardt and Negri, declared there was in fact no new world order, and that imperialism remained as it was defined in the 19th and 20th centuries. These writers accepted the exceptionalism of the US as a force of domination, and this acceptance mimics the outmoded ideologies of imperialism itself.
The Exhaustion of US Hegemony
In this section Hardt and Negri examine the details of the military, political, and moral breakdown that were part of the failure of US unilateralism. Economic breakdowns appear in the following section, while this section is dominated by military discussion. They propose that the war in Iraq demonstrates the soundness of “two well-established truths of military thought.” (210) First, the nature of size and composition of a force is crucial. In Iraq the US experimented with reduced troop numbers and preferred a mobile, technologically-enhanced formation. Both of these factors make for a successful offensive strategy, but do not function well as a defensive strategy for an occupying force–occupations require large numbers. Second, different subjectivities emerge from the conflict between occupied and occupier. In this case, occupied forces take on a subjectivity of resistance, a “willingness to risk harm and death,” (211) while occupying forces, especially now when justifications for foreign wars can barely rely on notions of patriotism, lack access to subjective production. Occupying armies are populated by mercenaries, who presumably lack any kind of ideological attachment to a “cause.” These obstacles are only enhanced by the problems associated with urban warfare. Hearkening back to their discussion of the metropolis as a site of production of the common (pp. 153-56), Hardt and Negri note here that insurrections that emerge in urban centres rely on the established spaces, communication circuits, and social networks. Remarkably, the same mobile, technologically advanced force that is failing in Iraq and Afghanistan is still the paradigm that military thinkers are relying upon to hold sway over the larger-in-number but less well equipped armies of emergent nations such as China. The political and moral breakdown of US unilateralism go hand in hand: the ideological explanation for US hegemony, so it goes, held the notion that the US was always acting in the interest of peace and democracy, both domestically and internationally. The reality, Hardt and Negri argue, is different: other nations accepted US hegemony only when US interests also advanced their interests. The last vestiges of a virtuous US were erased by Abu Ghraib and the legitimisation of the practice of torture, and when it became clear that the US was pursuing a unilateral agenda. The “ideological cover” that aided and abetted US hegemony had already been hollowed out because the pursuit of war, its economic policies, etc., no longer advanced the interests of formerly willing accomplice states.
What is a Dollar Worth?
Here, Hardt and Negri offer the key aspects of the breakdown of US economic supremacy, what they see as a series of “no confidence votes”: the “neoliberal experiment” of Iraq and its failure; economic relations to other nations; currency; global finance’s interdependency, and; the recognition of wasteful spending of the War on Terror. Iraqi oilfields were important to the US, they argue, but the real point was to see if it was possible to create a functioning neoliberal state from the ground up. Thus, in Iraq, existing economic, social relations, labour structures, etc. were destroyed and then rebuilt according to neoliberal logic. The newly privatised nation ran into trouble when foreign corporations were afraid to invest due to violent instability that made it difficult to conduct business, and when they doubted the legitimacy of their operations under the eyes of international law. The experiment’s failure was further exacerbated by the resistance of Iraqi workers to privatisation. Whether or not US unilateralism was good for business then became a key question, not so much for individual corporations, but for the international community. In fact it was not, and thus the US lost the ability to impose its economic will on other nations. Especially in Latin America, US interests ceased to align
@paaitken