Empire (33 page)

The emergence ofthe various components ofthe New Left was

an enormous and powerful affirmation of the principle of constituent

power and the declaration ofthe reopening ofsocial spaces.

Beyond the Cold War

During the cold war, when the United States ambiguously adopted

the mantle ofimperialism, it subordinated the old imperialist powers

to its own regime. The cold war waged by the United States did

not defeat the socialist enemy, and perhaps that was never really

its primary goal. The Soviet Union collapsed under the burden of

its own internal contradictions. The cold war at the most produced

some ofthe conditions ofisolation that, reverberating within the

Soviet bloc itself, multiplied those explosive contradictions. The

most important effect of the cold war was to reorganize the lines

ofhegemony within the imperialist world, accelerating the decline

ofthe old powers and raising up the U.S. initiative ofthe constitu-

tion ofan imperial order. The United States would not have been

victorious at the end ofthe cold war had a new type ofhegemonic

initiative not already been prepared. This imperial project, a global

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project ofnetwork power, defines the fourth phase or regime of

U.S. constitutional history.

In the waning years and wake ofthe cold war, the responsibility

ofexercising an international police power ‘ fell’’ squarely on the

shoulders ofthe United States. The GulfWar was the first time

the United States could exercise this power in its full form. Really,

the war was an operation ofrepression ofvery little interest from

the point ofview ofthe objectives, the regional interests, and

the political ideologies involved. We have seen many such wars

conducted directly by the United States and its allies. Iraq was

accused ofhaving broken international law, and it thus had to be

judged and punished. The importance ofthe GulfWar derives

rather from the fact that it presented the United States as the only

power able to manage international justice,
not as a function of its

own national motives but in the name of global right.
Certainly, many powers have falsely claimed to act in the universal interest before,

but this new role of the United States is different. Perhaps it is most

accurate to say that this claim to universality may also be false, but

it is false in a new way. The U.S. world police acts not in imperialist

interest but in imperial interest. In this sense the GulfWar did

indeed, as George Bush claimed, announce the birth ofa new

world order.

Legitimation ofthe imperial order, however, cannot be based

on the mere effectiveness of legal sanction and the military might

to impose it. It must be developed through the production of

international juridical norms that raise up the power ofthe hege-

monic actor in a durable and legal way. Here the constitutional

process that had originated with Wilson finally reaches maturity

and emerges again. Between the First and Second World Wars,

between Wilson’s messianism and the international economic-

political initiatives ofthe New Deal (which we will return to in

Section 3.2), a series ofinternational organizations was built that

produced what in the traditional contractual terms ofinternational

right is called a surplus ofnormativity and efficacy. This surplus

was given an expansive and tendentially universal basis in the spirit

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ofthe San Francisco accords that founded the United Nations. The

unifying, internal process was hindered by the cold war, but not

completely blocked by it. Through the years ofthe cold war there

was both a multiplication ofinternational organisms capable of

producing right and a reduction ofthe resistances to their function-

ing. We emphasized in Section 1.1 how the proliferation of these

different international organisms and their consolidation in a set of

symbiotic relationships—as ifthe one asked the other for its own

legitimation—pushed beyond a conception ofinternational right

based in contract or negotiation, and alluded instead to a central

authority, a legitimate supranational motor ofjuridical action. The

objective process was thus given a subjective face. The great interna-

tional institutions, which had been born on the limited basis of

negotiations and pacts, led to a proliferation of organisms and actors

that began to act as ifthere were a central authority sanctioning right.

With the end ofthe cold war, the United States was called

to serve the role ofguaranteeing and adding juridical efficacy to

this complex process ofthe formation ofa new supranational right.

Just as in the first century ofthe Christian era the Roman senators

asked Augustus to assume imperial powers ofthe administration

for the public good, so too today the international 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. In all the regional conflicts

ofthe late twentieth century, from Haiti to the Persian Gulfand

Somalia to Bosnia, the United States is called to intervene mili-

tarily—and these calls are real and substantial, not merely publicity

stunts to quell U.S. public dissent. Even ifit were reluctant, the

U.S. military would have to answer the call in the name ofpeace

and order. This is perhaps one ofthe central characteristics of

Empire—that is, it resides in a world context that continually calls

it into existence. The United States is the peace police, but only

in the final instance, when the supranational organizations ofpeace

call for an organizational activity and an articulated complex of

juridical and organizational initiatives.

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There are many reasons for the United States’ privileged posi-

tion in the new global constitution ofimperial authority. It can

be explained in part by the continuity ofthe United States’ role

(particularly its military role) from the central figure in the struggle

against the USSR to the central figure in the newly unified world

order. From the perspective ofthe constitutional history we are

tracing here, however, we can see that the United States is privileged

in a more important way by the imperial tendency ofits own

Constitution. The U.S. Constitution, as Jefferson said, is the one

best calibrated for extensive Empire. We should emphasize once

again that this Constitution is imperial and not imperialist. It is

imperial because (in contrast to imperialism’s project always to

spread its power linearly in closed spaces and invade, destroy, and

subsume subject countries within its sovereignty) the U.S. constitu-

tional project is constructed on the model ofrearticulating an open

space and reinventing incessantly diverse and singular relations in

networks across an unbounded terrain.

The contemporary idea ofEmpire is born through the global

expansion ofthe internal U.S. constitutional project. It is in fact

through the extension of
internal
constitutional processes that we enter into a constituent process ofEmpire. International right always

had to be a negotiated, contractual process among
external
par-

ties—in the ancient world that Thucydides portrayed in the Melian

Dialogue, in the era ofstate reason, and in the modern relations

among nations. Today right involves instead an internal and consti-

tutive institutional process. The networks ofagreements and associa-

tions, the channels ofmediation and conflict resolution, and the

coordination ofthe various dynamics ofstates are all institutionalized

within Empire. We are experiencing a first phase ofthe transforma-

tion ofthe global frontier into an open space ofimperial sovereignty.

2.6

I M P E R I A L S O V E R E I G N T Y

The new men ofEmpire are the ones who believe in fresh starts,

new chapters, new pages; I struggle on with the old story, hoping

that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was that I

thought it worth the trouble.

J. M. Coetzee

There is a long tradition ofmodern critique dedicated

to denouncing the dualisms ofmodernity. The standpoint ofthat

critical tradition, however, is situated in the paradigmatic place of

modernity itself, both ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside,’’ at the threshold or

the point ofcrisis. What has changed in the passage to the imperial

world, however, is that this border place no longer exists, and thus

the modern critical strategy tends no longer to be effective.

Consider, for example, the responses offered in the history of

modern European philosophy from Kant to Foucault to the question

‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ Kant provides the classic modernist char-

acterization ofthe mandate ofthe Enlightenment:
Sapere aude
(dare

to know), emerge from the present state of ‘‘immaturity,’’ and

celebrate the public use ofreason at the center ofthe social realm.1

Foucault’s version, when we situate it historically, is not really all

that different. Foucault was dealing not with Fredrick II’s despotism,

which Kant wanted to guide toward more reasonable political posi-

tions, but rather with the political system ofthe French Fifth Repub-

lic, in which a large public sphere for political exchange was taken

for granted. His response nonetheless insists once again on the

necessity ofstraddling the border that links what traditionally would

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be considered the ‘‘inside’’ ofsubjectivity and the ‘‘outside’’ ofthe

public sphere—even though in Foucault’s terms the division is

inverted so as to divide the ‘‘inside’’ ofthe system from the ‘‘outside’’

ofsubjectivity.2 The rationality ofmodern critique, its center of

gravity, is posed on this border.

Foucault does add another line ofinquiry that seeks to go

beyond these boundaries and the modern conception ofthe public

sphere. ‘‘What is at stake . .

. is this: How can the growth of

capabilities [
capaciteś
] be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?’’ And this new task requires a new method: ‘‘We

have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative.’’ Foucault’s

response, however, is quite traditional: ‘‘We have to be at the

frontiers.’’3 In the end, Foucault’s philosophical critique ofthe

Enlightenment returns to the same Enlightenment standpoint. In

this ebb and flow between inside and outside, the critique ofmoder-

nity does not finally go beyond its terms and limits, but rather

stands poised on its boundaries.

This same notion ofa border place that serves as the standpoint

for the critique ofthe system ofpower—a place that is both inside

and outside—also animates the critical tradition ofmodern political

theory. Modern republicanism has long been characterized by a

combination ofrealistic foundations and utopian initiatives. Repub-

lican projects are always solidly rooted within the dominant histori-

cal process, but they seek to transform the realm of politics that

thus creates an outside, a new space ofliberation. The three highest

examples ofthis critical tradition ofmodern political theory, in our

opinion, are Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx. Their thought is

always grounded within the real processes ofthe constitution of

modern sovereignty, attempting to make its contradictions explode

and open the space for an alternative society. The outside is con-

structed from within.

For Machiavelli, the constituent power that is to found a

democratic politics is born out ofthe rupture ofthe medieval order

and through the necessity ofregulating the chaotic transformations

ofmodernity. The new democratic principle is a utopian initiative

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that responds directly to the real historical process and the demands

ofthe epochal crisis. In Spinoza, too, the critique ofmodern sover-

eignty emerges from within the historical process. Against the de-

ployments ofmonarchy and aristocracy, which can only remain

limited forms, Spinoza defines democracy as the absolute form of

government because in democracy all ofsociety, the entire multi-

tude, rules; in fact, democracy is the only form of government in

which the absolute can be realized. For Marx, finally, every libera-

tory initiative, from wage struggles to political revolutions, proposes

the independence ofuse value against the world ofexchange value,

against the modalities ofcapitalist development—but that indepen-

dence exists only within capitalist development itself. In all these

cases the critique ofmodernity is situated
within
the historical evolution ofthe forms ofpower,
an inside that searches for an outside.
Even in the most radical and extreme forms of the call for an outside,

the inside is still assumed as foundation—albeit sometimes a negative