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It has to be relaised none of this is really new.
The colonial empires of Britain and France peddled a
similar ideology, almost identical but for details.
i was astounded to find a real ideology lay behind the
British Empire, Americans may have been unconvinced.,
but the British liberal establishment totally bought
it.
These territories were backward, politically,
culturally and economically. We were trustees, ruling
the natives in trust for the day when they would be
able to handle their own affairs. The Trustee Theory.
Economically, it was all done for the good of all, a
sort of benevolent society, where the advanced races
made economic decisions for those more backward.
This is why we get the hrad of Colonial office
recruitment saying "we wnat to make this a real
missionary service" and why the question kept being
asked at the end of colonialism, that so many
Governors were liberals. Answer - of course you can be
a liberal if you accept the assumptions.
But it enslaved culturally and interlectually as well,
defining reality and rewriting history. So we got the
phenomenon of the 2brown Englishman" - an elite who
completely accepted the Imperial culture as to be
emulated as a sign of status and completely believing
it. This has been the subject of not a few British
novels
I could go on and on.
--- Rick Rozoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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>
> [I don't know how to begin to take this advertizing
> blurb for the new global imperialism apart, except
> to
> speculate what similar pseudo-post-structuralist
> gibberish might be applied to the reigns of Attila
> the
> Hun and the Third Reich. Change a few names....Jim,
> Les, Kole and others please help.]
>
> Observer Comment Extra
> Empire
> This extract from 'Empire', drawn from the book's
> preface, argues that the transformations of the new
> global order make the emerging Empire quite
> different
> from previous eras of imperial dominance and
> capitalist expansion, opening new spaces for
> political
> projects seeking to construct a truly democratic
> global society
> Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
> Sunday July 15, 2001
> The Observer
> Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over
> the
> past several decades, as colonial regimes were
> overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet
> barriers to the capitalist world market finally
> collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and
> irreversible globalization of economic and cultural
> exchanges.
> Along with the global market and global circuits of
> production has emerged a global order, a new logic
> and
> structure of rule - in short, a new form of
> sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that
> effectively regulates these global exchanges, the
> sovereign power that governs the world.
> The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of
> modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism,
> Empire
> establishes no territorial center of power and does
> not rely on fixed boundaries and barriers. It is a
> decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule
> that progressively incorporates the entire global
> realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire
> manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and
> plural exchanges through modulating networks of
> command. The distinct national colors of the
> imperialist map of the world have merged and blended
> in the imperial global rainbow.
> Most significant, the spatial divisions of the three
> Worlds (First, Second, and Third) have been
> scrambled
> so that we continually find the First world in the
> Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost
> nowhere at all. Capital seems to be faced with a
> smooth world - or really, a world defined by new and
> complex regimes of differentiation and
> homogenization,
> deterritorialization and reterritorialization.
> Many locate the ultimate authority that rules over
> the
> processes of globalization and the new world order
> in
> the United States. Proponents praise the United
> States
> as the world leader and sole superpower, and
> detractors denounce it as the imperialist oppressor.
> Both these views rest on the assumption that the
> United States has simply donned the mantle of global
> power that the European nations have now let fall.
> If
> the nineteenth century was a British century, the
> twentieth century has been an American century; or
> really if modernity was European, then postmodernity
> is American. The most damning charge critics can
> level, then, is that the United States is repeating
> the practices of old European imperialists, while
> proponents celebrate the United States as a more
> efficient and more benevolent world leader, getting
> right what the Europeans got wrong.
> Our basic hypothesis, however, that a new imperial
> form of sovereignty has emerged, contradicts both
> these views. The United States does not, and indeed
> no
> nation-state can today, form the center of an
> imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation
> will be world leader in the way modern European
> nations were.
> We should emphasise that we use 'Empire' here not as
> a
> metaphor, which would require demonstration of the
> resemblances between today's world order and the
> Empires of Rome, China the Americas, and so forth,
> but
> rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a
> theoretical approach. The concept of Empire is
> characterised fundamentally by a lack of boundaries:
> Empire's rule has no limits.
> First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire
> posits
> a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial
> totality, or really that rules over the entire
> 'civilized' world. No territorial boundaries limit
> its
> reign.
> Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as
> a
> historical regime originating in conquest, but
> rather
> as an order that effectively suspends history and
> thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for
> eternity. From the perspective of Empire, this is
> the
> way things will always be and they way they were
> always meant to be. In other words, Empire presents
> its rule not as a transitory moment in the movement
> of
> history, but as a regime with no territorial
> boundaries and in this sense outside of history or
> at
> the end of history.
> Third, the rule of Empire operates on all registers
> of
> the social order extending down to the depths of the
> social world. Empire not only manages a territory
> and
> a population but also creates the very world it
> inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions
> but
> also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The
> object of its rule is social life in its entirety,
> and
> thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of
> biopower.
> Finally, although the practice of Empire is
> continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire
> is
> always dedicated to peace - a perpetual and
> universal
> peace outside of history.
> The Empire we are faced with wields enormous powers
> of
> oppression and destruction, but that fact should not
> make us nostalgic in any way for the old forms of
> domination. The passage to Empire and its processes
> of
> globalization offer new possibilities to the force
> of
> liberation.
> Globalization, of course, is not one thing, and the
> multiple processes that we recognize as
> globalization
> are not unified or univocal. Our political task, we
> will argue, is not simply to resist these processes
> but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new
> ends. The creative forces of the multitude that
> sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously
> constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative
> political organization of global flows and
> exchanges.
> The struggles to contest and subvert Empire, as well
> as those to construct a real alternative, will thus
> take place on the imperial terrain itself - indeed,
> such new struggles have already begun to emerge.
> Through these struggles, and many more like them,
> the
> multitude will have to invent new democratic forms
> and
> a new constituent power that will one day take us
> through and beyond Empire.
> Michael Hardt is Assistant Professor in the
> Literature
> Program at Duke University. Antonio Negri is an
> independent writer and researcher and an inmate at
> Rebibbia Prison, Rome. He has been a Lecturer in
> Political Science at the University of Paris and a
> Professor of Political Science at the University of
> Padua.
> Excerpted from Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio
> Negri, published by Harvard University Press.
>
>
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