9.11.01 and its aftermath empire strikes back

7/29/2019 9.11.01 and Its Aftermath Empire Strikes Back

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From 9.11.01 to 5.1.03 and the Aftermath:

Empire Strikes Back?

Timothy W. Luke

Department of Political Science

Virginia Polytechnic Institute

and State University

Blacksburg, VA

Presented at the Annual Meeting of the

International Studies Association,

March 16-20, 2004


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O. Introduction

On September 11, 2001 (9.11.01), three different, but

closely coordinated, attacks by the Al Qaeda terrorist

network tore a hole in the Pentagon, the Pennsylvania

countryside, both towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in

New York City, and, most significantly, the New World Order

tied to American hyperpower as it had formed between the

rapid conquest of Kuwait and the final dissolution of the

Soviet Union in 1991. By May 1, 2003 (5.1.03), President

George W. Bush was staging a media event at sea in the

Pacific Ocean, flying out to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in

the second seat of a Navy Viking jet to declare a cessation

of hostilities in Iraq and extol Americas on-going

successes in war against terrorism after ousting the

Taliban from power in Afghanistan and toppling Saddam

Husseins regime in Iraq. During those twenty months of

struggle, and what is now almost a year after, the forces

many regard as an/the Empire struck back. This study

reconsiders 9.11.01, 5.1.03, and the aftermath to explore

what all these events might mean, how such developments

unfolded, and what forces are at work within them. Still,

it does this while remaining cognizant of developing

events. As the train bombings of March 11, 2004, or

already el Once de Marzo, in Madrid illustrate, one


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aftermath in the war on terror soon becomes prologue to

fresh rounds of violence.

Almost all the mythography centered on the violent

events of 9.11.01 in the U.S.A. has concentrated upon

creating new rhetorical frames to transform these attacks

into an essentially American tragedy. This move is, at

best, factually incorrect, and, at worst, politically

motivated. Of course, the strikes themselves were felt in

the United States of America-in New York City, Northern

Virginia and rural Pennsylvania. Many, if not most of the

victims on United Airlines Flight 179 and at the Pentagon,

were American citizens However, they also were members of

the worlds multinational multitude, whose daily needs for

care and feeding, security and housing, transport and

protecting, work and consuming, all express themselves

daily in the worlds space of flows. At the WTC in New

York City, which was in many ways, one of the planets

largest sites for the worlds spaces of commercial,

financial, and managerial flow, this transnational

multitude and its global victimization were quite obvious.

Yet, the Bush White House, much of official Washington, and

many observers also have been undeniably plain about

nationalizing this moment of transnational pain.


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From those few minutes of a media event in which the

President stood on the rubble of WTC with a bullhorn in

hand and promised violent retribution against evil-doers

to the hardhats and first responders still looking for

survivors, President George W. Bushs administration

largely has Americanized the human and material losses

suffered on 9.11.01. During 2002, from the Presidents

State of the Union address through the mid-term elections

for Congress and into the 2004 race for the White House,

many mythographers have been especially busy at keeping

these fibula of Americas victimization active by wailing

ceaselessly over the more than 3,000 Americans killed on

that day. In 2002, this mythic narrative enabled Al Qaeda

and the Taliban to be eclipsed first, by the axis of evil

states, and then, more recently in 2003, by Iraq along

with Saddam Hussein. As the White House initially worked

to rid Afghanistan of its home-grown radical Islamicist

rulers and foreign fellow-travelers in 2001, and then

prepared to invade Iraq to oust its Baathist regime in

2003, the Americanization of 9.11.01, in part, has enabled

the Bush administration to pull off one of the more

successful mid-term electoral victories in the republics

history during November 2002. Many believed Washingtons

assault on Baghdad in March 2003 would be one of shock and


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awe, but this trope actually captures better the global

multitudes reactions --in the U.S.A. and elsewhere -- to

how the U.S.A. has reacted during these months from 9.11.01

to 5.1.03 until to today.

This paper, then, questions such political

maneuverings and the mythography behind them. It does this

for three reasons. First, with globalization, the targets

and victims on 9.11.01 were not only American--hundreds who

died were Mexicans, Pakistanis, Britons, Australians,

Germans, Canadians, Indians, or nationals from dozens of

other nations. Second, many of the tensions leading up to

these attacks in the U.S.A. have root causes in other

struggles, contradictions, and antagonisms that reach

further into many other regions of the world. And, third,

the post-Cold War moment perhaps has not been the birth

date of unipolar American national hegemony, but rather the

origin of something, as Hardt and Negri argue in their

Empire, like Empire, whose structures of governance

perhaps truly are repolarizing, post-American,

transnational, but not yet entirely hegemonic.

Ironically, an overnationalized image of Empire, as

essentially or even exclusively tied to the U.S.A., is

perpetuated by both supporters and critics of Americas

place in the New World Order after 1991 (Kaplan and


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Kristol, 2003; Kupchan, 2000; and, Johnson, 2000), but it

has been accentuated by President Bushs invasion of Iraq

on 3.20.03 (Brzezinski, 2004; Garrison, 2004; Moore, 2004;

and, Soros, 2004). Those who accept tout court the

overnationalized assessments of 9.11.01, as they were made

by either in the U.S.A. by Tom Ridge, Rudy Giuliani, and

Jim Gilmore or by Condi Rice, Dick Cheney or George W. Bush

as well as abroad by Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and

Vladimir Putin or Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or

Kim Jong Il, will miss the much broader implications of

these violent episodes for what might be Empire, because

the war on terrorism is wrapped up, once and for all, in

the mythographic trappings of American exceptionalism. When

President Bush declared the end of combat operations in

Iraq on 5.1.03 from the flight deck of the U.S.S. Abraham

Lincoln, 91 Americans had died there. In the intervening

year, over another 500 American and coalition service men

and women have been killed through March 15, 2004. This

level of continuing resistance only underscores the limits

behind Washingtons campaign of shock and awe.

I. Coercive Constructivism and Empire

This paper, as the same time, begins to strip out the

roots and branches of what some call the benevolent or

benign hegemony now being tested on the world stage by


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the U.S.A. after 9.11.01. As it has been articulated by

the so-called neoconservatives of the current Bush

administration, however, benevolent hegemony often appears

neither benevolent nor hegemonic, especially as it has been

put into practice in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the larger war

on terrorism. Instead, benign hegemony increasingly seems

to be just befuddled. And, the roots of this

befuddlement can be traced back, as Robert Kagans Of

Paradise and Power (2003) illustrates, to its essentially

retro-exceptionalist, paleo-interventionist, or crypto-

globalist derivations.

These qualities point, in fact, toward new disposition

of theory and practice in the U.S.A. which now is embarked

on yet another expansion of its strategic purview in such

a manner that everyone in the world must readjust to the

new reality of American hegemony (Kagan, 2003: 90, 96).

Indeed, President Bush argues in his epistolatory preamble

to The National Security Strategy of the United States of

America that the U.S.A. must use this benign hegemony as a

unique moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of

freedom across the globe....to bring the hope of democracy,

development, free markets, and free trade to every corner

of the world .

Bushs moment of opportunity, however, instead seems for


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many others to be only the latest incidence of an opportune

momentum to consolidate an unacknowledged empire

(Prestowitz, 2003: 19-49).

In taking up this analysis, one must not repeat the

theoretical and practical errors of many other studies, or

the failure to take account of the power of theory

(Bourdieu, 1998: 53). President Bushs notoriously

nonintellectual qualities easily promote this misstep. Yet,

those in authority frequently call upon other authorities,

who are put forth--on professional technical grounds--as

being personal exemplars of an authority, and the impact

of such networks of collective authority often manifests

itself by generating cooptation, consensus, and

collaboration. These collectives of consensus, in turn,

can anchor todays political events in chains of popular

acceptance with such a measure of replicable stability that

the dominant ideologies often mobilize mathematics as their

scientific cladding (Luke, 1989). Thus, the work of

rationalization--giving reasons to justify things that are

often unjustifiable--has now found a very powerful

instrument in mathematics....which dresses up simple

conservative thought in the guise of pure reason

(Bourdieu, 1998: 54).


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For neoliberalism to work, and work well around the

world, many authorities in the U.S.A. believe a benevolent

hegemony is essential for neoliberal markets.

Neoliberalisms commitments to maintaining global

confidence in the markets requires that it also benignly

sustain the world markets for confidence. Without an ever-

present willingness to go any where any time and fight any

foe in the struggle for freedom, confidence declines.

Hence, without a willingness to spend selectively--life,

liberty or lucre--to support the 24x7 markets in

confidence that CNN, Univision, BBC Word or Sky News help

to vend, the constructivist impulse behind the new reality

of American hegemony can become crippled (Diebert, 1997).

Here, of course, mathematized rational choice emerges

as the ultimate theodicy for technocratic authority by

which powers to make collective choices are delegated to

the allegedly most competent individuals. These figures

are, in turn, often found connected to, and collaborating

with, one another in professional interactions. A recent

case in point can be found amidst the small circle of North

Atlantic intelligence experts who apparently connived, or

were pressured, to pretend that Baghdad had built,

deployed, and hidden massive stocks of many new weapons of

mass destruction (WMD). Their probabilistic analyses held


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these WMD assets could be built, so they must have been

built. Therefore, a preemptive war was justified, so that

these WMD assets could be destroyed forthwith by a benign

outside intervention. While these dangerous tools may

still be found, they remain in early March 2004: missing

in action. Of course, new cadres of experts today are at

work, suggesting that Iraqi looters carted them away, the

Syrians have them, or the WMD assets are a new cache of

buried Mesopotamian treasures that await excavation

somewhere in desert caves and crevices. And, they might

well be right. Yet, these patterns of action illustrate

how clusters of cooperative competent cliques in powerful

governments, markets, and societies generate what must be

seen as the sociodicies behind so many of the policies

chosen by todays dominant groups in the worlds

unacknowledged empire.

A central precept of the coercive constructivist

project--to read constructivism a bit ironically and

against its grain--is the states open or hidden acceptance

of the primacy of economy over society; or, perhaps, more

aptly, economy as society (Greider, 1997; French, 2000; and

Frank, 2000). Amidst the triumphalism of 1989 and its

aftermath, neoliberal precepts and practices became self-

evident presuppositions for these cliques. Beginning with


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anticommunist liberal democratic capitalisms reinvention

of itself in the 1950s and 1980s, a new dominant discourse

was produced, circulated and articulated by cadres of like-

minded economists, political scientists, sociologists, and

diplomatic strategists. In this new social formation, as

Bourdieu observes, it is taken for granted that maximum

growth, and therefore productivity and competitiveness, are

the ultimate and sole goal of human actions; or that

economic forces cannot be resisted: (1998: 30-31).

What took form as the end of ideology in the 1950s

(Bell, 1960) assumed a new guise in the 1990s as the end

of history (Fukuyama, 1992). Under the cover of

neoliberalism, as its most basic driving force, coercive

constructivism spread with some rapidity as its

individualized solutions to all collective problems have

turned into ideas with immense social force (Soros, 2004).

Its ideology of happiness does acknowledge the possible

obverse effects of unhappiness, but during commitments to

interventionist efforts are real (Chua, 2004).

Like Bleiker, this analysis is prepared to forget IR

theory (1997: 57). Rather than running through the old

line-ups of well-known philosophical players, who stage an

endless series of staged skits where liberalism meets

realism, neorealism confronts postpositivism, idealism


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battles modernism or postmodernism engages with

constructivism, one maybe should just forget IR theory to

escape the mire of such bickering (see, for more, Holsti,

1985; Onuf, 1989; Rosenau, 1990; Lapid and Kratochwhil,

1996; Smith, Booth, and Zalewski, 1996; and, Walt, 1998b).

Otherwise, the impact of critical voices remains confined

within the larger discursive boundaries that were

established through the initial framing of debates, and

one cannot get to the ultimate purpose of a critical

analysis, namely, theorizing world politics without being

constrained by the agendas, issues, and terminologies that

are presented by orthodox debates (Bleiker, 1997: 58).

At the core of many orthodox disciplinary debates, one

finds the ideas of constructivism, which have become one of

todays more favored framework for analysis,

interpretation, and theorizing about world politics today

(Wendt, 1999; 1995; and, 1992). Yet, much of the politics

of todays world pushes one to ask if constructivism has,

ironically, become a system for action, change, and

transforming todays world order. If one is to do more

than interpret the world, one must ask if world

interpretations, like constructivism, are actually leading

many changes on the ground in todays new world order (see


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Frum and Perle, 2003; Kaplan and Kristol, 2003; or, Kagan,

2003).

While it is highly improbable that President George W.

Bush reads chapters from Wendts Social Theory of

International Politics before turning out the lights on

nights before his most weighty decisions are made, it seems

pretty clear that the anarchy we see in the world today

is something that the United States has made much of,

especially since November 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court

essentially named George W. Bush President after a close,

and very messy, election. Perhaps Dick Cheney, Condi Rice

or Paul Wolfowitz is to blame, but there is remarkable

leitmotif in the actions of President Bush in his war on

terrorism. And, its key chord is constructivist. The

conditions of chaos created by, or which arose from

9.11.01, are becoming something that one state under George

W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Cheney are making a

great deal about, as they act pre-emptively in Afghanistan,

Iraq, Syria, or the Philippines as well as Palestine,

Kurdistan, Chechnya, or Haiti

Indeed, this outcome seems to be the only lesson

that constructivism has taken from postmodernism--that

identities are socially constructed through practice

(Weber, 1999: 239). Whether it is President Bushs own


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swaggering promise to bring in Osama bin Laden dead or

alive in 2001, or Gerhard Schroeders desperate depictions

of the U.S.A. as a cowboy hyperpower in 2002 with his der

deutsche Weg for the SPD-led Berlin Republic, or Saddam

Husseins vain attempts to remain in power from 1991 to

2003, the coercive constructivism of the world after

9.11.01 reaffirms that international relations need the

author function to remain intact. The author is a

constructed identity, but it is also the heroic rational

actor who restores certainty in the most of socially

constructed chaos (Weber, 1999: 439). Yet, in so doing,

coercive constructivism for the U.S.A today also displaces

an ontological uncertainty to authorship: with a new

series of agent/structure, process/institutions or

identity/interests debates....to resurrect the anarchy myth

while the author/state holds the promise of our heroic

rescue from the traumas of anarchy (Weber, 1999: 440).

To face down the anarchical aggression of the Taliban,

Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, the world system grudgingly

accepted the constructivist coercion of General Tommy

Franks, guided by George Bush and Tony Blair. Those who

will not forget IR theory may see constructivism spanning

the chasms dividing modernist and postmodernist analytics,

but those claims are in many ways immaterial. For a world


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still being remade after what were the first strikes made

by airliners-as-missiles launched by irregular Islamicist

strategic forces, all that matters is coercive

constructivism. It can fabricate a web of new global

analytics that circulate well and rejuvenate the ailing

IR myths like anarchy and state centrism while preserving

IRs commitments to positivism and the author/decisionmaker

function (Weber, 1999: 440) in its benign hegemony.

Still, this vision of order also began to unravel, if not

entirely crumble, during 5.1.03 after President Bush made

his now infamous carrier landing off of San Diego, and

appeared in a Navy flight suit as the C-in-C of Americas

armed forces on global radio and TV to declare that all

major hostilities had ended in Iraq. Since then, CNN,

the BBC, and Fox News report day-after-day that one, two,

three or more coalition troops, along with five, ten,

scores or more Iraqis, have been killed or wounded to

enforce this brittle hegemony, making Washingtons efforts

to put an end to evil seem more befuddled than benign as

well more conflicted than coercive.

II. Empire and Empire

A few others, like Mohammed Bamyeh (2000) Francois

Debrix (1999), Gearid Tuthail (1998) or Arjun Appadurai

(1996),have sought to map the contours of the post-Cold


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War era, and their evenhanded analyses have many merits.

Yet, with an audacity that few other recent books readily

display, Empire came out on the boards from stage left in

2000. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri claim they began

their work well after the end of the Persian Gulf War,

but finished their analysis well before the beginning of

the war in Kosovo (2000: xvii). Amidst the dot-com boom

of the 1990s, they thought one could detect something new

materializing before our very eyes, namely, Empire, or

an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic

and cultural exchanges, out of which has emerged a global

order, a new logic and structure of rule in short, a new

form of sovereignty, and it now is the political subject

that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the

sovereign power that governs the world (Hardt and Negri,

2000: xi).

Dismissing those who see all sovereignty dissipating

in the magic of markets, Hardt and Negri assert that only

the peculiar sovereignty of territorialized nation-states

is eroding away in the spaces of global flows. Bigger

changes allegedly are now at work, and the forces of

sovereignty survive within a decentered and

deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively

incorporates the entire global realm within its open,


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expanding frontiers, which leaves the twenty-first century

discovering sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of

a series of national and supranational organisms united

under a single logic of rule (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xii).

Empire, therefore, is, has been, and will be erasing the

pre-1914 social individuality of territorialized nation-

states and their older imperialisms as well as effacing the

Cold Wars pre-1989 tripartite zoning of the planet into

the First, Second, and Third Worlds (Agnew and Corbridge,

1995). Moreover, these political trends match up closely

to the dominant informational transformation in the worlds

productive processes themselves, leading to many sites of

industrial factory labor eclipsed by communicative,

cooperative, and affective forms of labor. With this

shift, or the postmodernization of the world economy,

Hardt and Negri maintain the creation of wealth tends

evermore toward what we will call biopolitical production,

the production of social life itself, in which the

economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly

overlap and invest one another (Hardt and Negri, 2000:

xiii).

At some level, if Hardt and Negri are correct,

globalization-from-above and globalization-from-below

represent a struggle over how biopower is generated,


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shaped, and managed in which spatial registers as well as

by whom and in whose interests (Bourdieu, 1998). The

exercise of governance, whether it proceeds under the

horizons of self-rule or not, entails a measure of

governmentality entrusted to experts and elites charged

with the generation and management of biopower. Who,

where, when, why, and how it is done are all vitally

important questions to the multitude. As power has evolved

from coercive into productive forms, then who surveys

populations, inventories their energies, enhances their

capabilities, and enforces their norms becomes critically

significant. The concrete materialities of biopower--

national or global, territorial or telematic, statal or

imperial--rest at the heart of a global populations, or

the multitude, unrest or passivity. With globalization,

the right of the social body to ensure, maintain or

develop its life (Foucault, 1980: 136) becomes a key point

of contestation.

However, what is the social body of the multitude, who

exercises its rights, and where does its life arise and go?

Today in 2004, for the multitude, does Empire, or some

agency closer to them, now work to incite, reinforce,

control, monitor, optimize, and organize forces under it:

A power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and


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ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them,

making them submit, or destroying them (Foucault, 1980:

136). Empire in some sense may represent a new planetary

field of intervention (Foucault, 1991: 92-93) for systems

of governmentality to unfold and operate on a worldwide

scale, albeit in a still discontinuous and unequal manner

(Kaplan, 1996). Through CNN, the UN, McDonalds, the Web,

and Wall Street, new institutions to order, organize, and

operate the social body are now at work. But the culture

and constitution of this social body is deeply contested as

the worlds shock and awe about the U.S.A. since 9.11.01

or 3.20.03 demonstrate.

Even though they approach the issues from opposite

directions, if not from parallel universes, Michel Foucault

with his analysis of biopower seems to be pushing down the

same paths as Joseph Nye and his accounts of soft power

(1989; and, 2002). While the widespread resentments

against the U.S.A. can be chalked up to its apparent

preference for using hard power assets, like B-2 bombers,

cruise missiles, and C.I.A. special ops teams, in times of

crisis, the war on terrorism cannot be easily disentangled

from Americas soft power, like the workings of Wall

Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Disney World. Nyes

analysis of the paradox of American power (2002) leads


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him to chastise Washington for relying too frequently upon

its hard power, because he believes that Americas soft

power is the genuine basis of its global pre-eminence.

Those who share Nyes more liberal international views have

a hard time disagreeing with his claims, but things might

not be this simple.

Perhaps the United States is not the center of Empire,

but it plays an important role within it by inspiring other

national and supranational organisms around the world to

emulate its formal constitution, which is a written

document behind a legal apparatus, and material

constitution, which promotes the continuous composition and

reorganization of global social forces (Hardt and Negri,

2000: xv). The ongoing operation of Empires loose formal

and material constitutions gives rise, at the same time, to

the creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire,

and these continuously forming, and reforming, social

forces actually are also capable of autonomously

constructing a counter-Empire, and alternative political

organization of global flows and exchanges (Hardt and

Negri, 2000: xv). The multitude, as a result, can remake

the world through, around, and beyond Empire. In the

meantime, Empires rule has no limits, and it is


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characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries

(Hardt and Negri, 2000: xiv).

Ultimately, Empires apparatus of economic

productivity calls forth the disruptive diasporas of the

multitudes movements to sustain the material and

immaterial commodity chains of the aggregate global

product.

Every path is forged, mapped, and traveled. It seemsthat the more intensely each is traveled and the moresuffering is deposited there, the more each path

becomes productive. These paths are what brings theearthly city out of the cloud and confusions thatEmpire casts over it. This is how the multitude gainsthe power to affirm its autonomy, traveling andexpressing itself through an apparatus of widespread,transversal territorial reappropriation (Hardt andNegri, 2000: 398).

Thus, as Palestinians and Pakistanis produce Saudi oil, as

Mexicans and Canadians labor in American workplaces as one

people under NAFTA, and as Egyptians, Algerians, and

Kuwaitis sign up for graduate studies in Canada, France or

California, and as Indians and Russians write software code

at home for companies in South Korea, Germany, and Ireland,

the multitudes movements as well as capitals commodity

chains are breaking down the territorial regime of states

and nations. These complex movements of the multitude,

which groups like Al Qaeda utilize to their advantage,

clearly do,


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designate new spaces and its journeys establish new

residences. Autonomous movement is what defines the

place proper to the multitude. Increasingly less will

passports of legal documents be able to regulate

movements across borders. A new geography is

established by the multitude as the productive flows

of bodies define new rivers and ports. the cities of

the earth will become at once great deposits of

cooperating humanity and locomotives for circulation,

temporary residencies and networks of the mass

distribution of living humanity (Hardt and Negri,

2000: 397).

Recognizing this, countries like the U.S.A., Australia,

France, or Great Britain push forth their own visions of

homeland security, but Empires movements suggest that

they will always be too little, too late. The cities and

countrysides of the earth already always are intertwined by

transport, communication, and production networks by the

productive flow of bodies that are, in many ways, far

beyond their real ability to control effectively now

(Kennedy, 1992).

This analysis is innovative, critical, and

problematic--all at the same time. Hardt and Negri have

their advocates and detractors. Nevertheless, one must

ask: what do the events of 2001 to 2004 mean if Hardt and

Negri are right about Empire? Are the conflicts of the New

World Order after 1991 increasingly those of the multitude

in, about, through, and against Empire? As a sovereign

force, the national and supranational organisms that


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Empires powers flow through have many qualities that

obviously can promote and exacerbate continuous conflict.

First, more concretely,

The concept of Empire posits a regime thateffectively encompasses the spatial totality, orreally that rules over the entire civilizedworld. No territorial boundaries limit itsreign. Second, the concept of Empire presentsitself not as a historical regime originating inconquest, but rather as an order that effectivelysuspends history and thereby fixes the existingstate of affairs for eternity. From theperspective of Empire, this is the way thingswill always be and the way they were always meant

to be. In other words, Empire presents its rulenot as a transitory moment in the movement ofhistory, but as a regime with no temporalboundaries and in this sense outside of historyor at the end of history. Third, the rule ofEmpire operates on all registers of the socialorder extending down to the depths of the socialworld. Empire not only manages a territory and apopulation but also creates the very world itinhabits. It not only regulates humaninteractions but also seeks directly to rule over

human nature. The object of its rule is sociallife in its entirety, and thus Empire presentsthe paradigmatic form of biopower. Finally,although the practice of Empire is continuallybathed in blood, the concept of Empire is alwaysdedicated to peace a perpetual and universalpeace outside of history (Hardt and Negri, 2000:xiv-xv).

Empire, then, is many things, but it most importantly

appears to operate in a fashion that suspends time, works

outside of history, pushes beyond historical practices, or

breaks temporal boundaries. Fixing the existing state of

affairs for eternity is a threatening political project,


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especially those who are the losers in todays world

system. Empires peculiar technocentricity,

ethnocentricity, and chronocentricity beggar many peoples

imaginations. So perhaps the new cartography for an

alternative global society really is being written today

through the resistances, struggles, and desires of the

multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xvi).

Unfortunately, the broadly interdisciplinary

approach of Empire to the project of Empire is one whose

merits tend to be lost upon most readers. The blinkered

empiricism of middle-of-the-road liberal democratic

capitalist reasoning coupled with the aggressively

atheoretical orientations of many schools of mainstream

social, political and economic science today, particularly

in North America, make reading Hardt and Negri a hard

reach. Few readers today have the taste or training to

fathom arguments that are equally philosophical and

historical, cultural and economic, political and

anthropological (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xvi), and many of

those few who can cover such scope soon are hobbled in

their reactions by the trained incapacities needed to

survive successfully in the small conversations sustaining

contemporary university scholarship. Hardt and Negri

believe that they have afforded the multitude with a


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toolbox of concepts for theorizing and acting in and

against Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000: xvi). This faith

is admirable, and the sky-high sales of Empire (which

remains, for example, ranked at 16,720 in March 2004 --

down from 2,777 in March 2003 -- of the three million plus

books available on Amazon.com) might even lead others to

believe this toolbox of concepts is being used. Empire,

however, still seems unfazed by Empire.

Taking this premise of Empire seriously, however,

leads one to reconsider the position of the multitude

within the workings of Empire. At the end of the day, the

multitude stands in the extraordinary position of what

should be regarded as an identical subject/object. Such

entities, as Hardt and Negri (2000: 63) assert, move in

realms of practice in accord with a materialist

teleology. Hardt and Negri indicate that when we speak

about a materialist telos we are speaking about a telos

that is constructed by subjects, constituted by the

multitude in action. This involves a material reading of

history which recognizes that the institutions of society

are formed through the encounter and conflict of the social

forces themselves. The telos in this case is not

predetermined but constructed in the process (2000: 470).

Consequently, one can track these many new subjects as well


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as their political ends and institutional means in the

affairs of states and nations.

While their allusions are quite overblown, Hardt and

Negri gin up their odd vision of todays New World Order

from the doppelkpfiger Adler of the Hapsburg crest. As

claimants to the aura of the Holy Roman Empire, and as the

occupants of Mitteleuropa, the Hapsburgs designed their

crest to feature the two crowns on a two-headed eagle - one

German and one Magyar - facing apart - one West and one

East. Above them die Kaiserkrone of Empire ties two

states, two ruling houses, and many peoples into one realm.

Todays much less choate global order--due to the new

terrain mobile in space and flexible in time (2000: 60)

Empires globality rests upon--has two heads facing each

other, as Hardt and Negri claim, each attacking the other

(2000: 60). As soon as they launch their metaphor, they

admit it breaks down as any sort of adequate

representation, because, in part, Hardt and Negri position

the two heads as equal, continuous, and one, and, in part,

because where die Kaiserkrone rests cannot be found despite

all of their talk about sovereignty.

Nonetheless, this confusion throws forth many

intriguing concepts that must be confronted. To the one

side, the first head of the imperial eagle is a juridical


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structure and a constituted power, constructed by the

machine of biopolitical command. The juridical process and

the imperial machine are always subject to contradictions

and crises. Order and peace the eminent values that

Empire proposes can never be achieved but are nonetheless

continually reproposed (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 60). To

the other side, Hardt and Negri argue the other head of

the imperial eagle is the plural multitude of proactive,

creative subjectivities of globalization that have learned

to sail on this enormous sea. They are in perpetual motion

and they form constellations of singularities and events

that impose continual global reconfigurations on the

system. This perpetual motion can be geographical, but it

can refer also to modulations of form and processes of

mixture and hybridization (2000: 60).

From this ontopolitical frappe, permanent revolution

seems to bring continuous struggle between the system and

asystemic movements, which spring forth from the radical

contingency embedded in the unforseeability of the

sequence of events (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 61). Thus,

the new figures of resistance surface from the multitude.

In fact, this is another fundamental characteristic of the

existence of the multitude today, within Empire and against

Empire. New figures of struggle and new subjectivities are


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produced in the conjuncture of events, in the universal

nomadism, in the general mixture and miscegenation of

individuals and populations, and in the technological

metamorphoses of the imperial biopolitical machine (Hardt

and Negri, 2000: 61).

How does resistance by the multitude become political?

For Hardt and Negri, the street battles in Seattle, the

mountain skirmishes in Afghanistan, mosque bombings in

Karbala, and rebel gangs roving across Haiti are all

decisive signs of the multitude politicized. That is, the

action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it

begins to confront directly and with an adequate

consciousness of the central repressive operations of

Empire (2000: 399). Neither the efforts of John Zerzan

and his neo-Ludite circle of ecoanarchists in the Pacific

Northwest nor Osmana bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network in

Southwest Asia arguably have failed to check the central

repressive operations of Empire, as they missed changes to

prevent Empire from continually to reestablish order, but

these groups, and many others, are gathering together their

experiences of resistance to wield against the nerve

centers of imperial command (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 399).

With a certainty that reaches beyond the evidence at

hand, Hardt and Negri also claim these new resistances are


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full of sublative potentialities. While they are anti-

systemic, they are much more than forces striking blows

against Empire. Consequently, the metaphor brings Hardt

and Negri to see the multitude as forces that also,

...express, nourish, and develop positively their

own constituent projects; they work toward the

liberation of living labor, creating

constellations of powerful singularities. This

constituent aspect of the movement of the

multitude, in its myriad faces, is really the

positive terrain of the historical construction

of Empire. This is not a historicist positivity

but, on the contrary, a positivity of the res

gesta of the multitude, an antagonistic and

creativity positivity. The deterritorializing

power of the multitude is the productive force

that sustains Empire and at the same time the

force that calls for and makes necessary its

destruction (2000: 61).

Once here in their brief, Hardt and Negri are forced to

release their metaphorical two-headed eagle, seeing that

tremendous hierarchies and discontinuities actually define

the Empire/Multitude relation. Hence, the multitude is

the real productive force of our social world, whereas

Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives off the

vitality of the multitude--as Marx would say, a vampire

regime of accumulated deal labor that survives only by

sucking off the blood of the living (Hardt and Negri,

2000: 62). Now, as Empire morphs from what was cast as a

two-headed eagle into a sorry autophagous vampire, many

readers rightly will scratch their heads in wonder. Still,


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perhaps there are some nuggets of valuable insight to be

pulled from the metaphysical rush of Hardts and Negris

rhetoric.

III. Empire and the Discourse of Benign Hegemony

The greatest challenges to global security prior to

9.11.01 were largely still tied to the aftershocks of

12.25.91, or, more specifically, the final collapse of the

Soviet Union. While the U.S.A. welcomed this development

in Moscow, the first Bush administration of George H. W.

Bush really did very little to lay out any new discourses

for global security on the level of the Cold Wars

experiments with containment, rollback, coexistence or

detente. For nearly a decade, the larger world system

experienced a series of mostly disconnected, and usually

minor, disruptions in the liberal democratic peace that

many believed would follow forever from the New World order

forged in the Gulf War of 1991 (Rosenau, 1990; Luke, 1996;

and, Kaplan, 1996). Itself another instance of minor

fallout from the unraveling of the old Soviet bloc, the

Gulf War, however, created many of the dangerous

preconditions for 9.11.01 (Ikenberry, 2000).

9.11.01 has transformed the ambiguous terrains of the

post-Cold War era as the U.S. and its allies seized upon a

coercive constructivism to anchor fresh struggles against


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global terrorism, which are not easily tied to either the

Cold War or the post-Cold War eras. Defining and

developing such a regime requires a new discourse, and one

must examine a few of President George W. Bushs

pronouncements about terrorism for insights into this

process. While the themes developed more fully in the

Presidents major addresses surface repeatedly in Bushs

daily comments on public affairs, his Address to a Joint

Session of Congress and the American People on September

20, 2001, the Get on Board speech at OHare International

Airport on September 27, 2001, the Address to the Nation on

October 7, 2001 announcing attacks on Afghanistan, the

State of Union Address on January 29, 2002 and the

Graduation Speech at West Point on June 1, 2002 are where

much of the Bush administrations agendas for the war

launched on 3.20.03 seem to be most clearly first

articulated. In fact, much of what now sits on the White

House servers as The National Security Strategy of the

United States of America ties back to these key speeches in

2001-2002. More concretely, a curious rhetorical figure

introduced by President Bush in the 2002 State of the Union

speech, namely, the so-called axis of evil states, might

provide insights into how benign hegemony is evolving.


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A hyperpower needs a worthy adversary, if not an

absolute enemy, to ground its efforts, and the U.S. clearly

has drifted during the 1990s without any readily defensible

opposition (Kennedy, 1992). Despite all the talk about

Iraq from 1991 to 2003, Baghdad plainly lacked the heft to

constitute a credible enemy by itself, but 9.11.01 allowed

this condition to be respecified. Today, a vague axis of

evil, which allegedly counts Iraq among its ranks, is far

more plausible threat, even if the cohesiveness and purpose

of such a coalition is hard to detect. Nonetheless, saying

something is so, often moves it towards becoming so. To

imagine a new community of allies, it also helps to have a

very clearly defined enemy (Anderson, 1991).

For a benign hegemon, the struggle is a contest of

will, but allegedly not a will to power. Instead,

Our war against terror is a contest of will in which

perseverance is power. In the ruins of two towers, at

the western wall of the Pentagon, on a field in

Pennsylvania, this nation made a pledge, and we renew

that pledge tonight: Whatever the duration of this

struggle, and whatever the difficulties, we will not

permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men -

- free people will set the course of history.

Today, the gravest danger in the war on terror, thegravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw

regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and

biological weapons. These regimes could use such

weapons for blackmail, terror, and mass murder. They

could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist

allies, who would use them without the least

hesitation.


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This threat is new; Americas duty is familiar.

Throughout the 20th century, small groups of men

seized control of great nations, built armies and

arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and

intimidate the world. In each case, their ambitions of

cruelty and murder had no limit. In each case, the

ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism were

defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength

of great alliances, and by the might of the United

States of America.

Now, in this century, the ideology of power and

domination has appeared again, and seeks to gain the

ultimate weapons of terror. Once again, this nation

and all our friends are all that stand between a world

at peace, and a world of chaos and constant alarm.

Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our

people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we acceptthis responsibility.

In all these efforts, however, Americas purpose is

more than to follow a process -- it is to achieve a

result: the end of terrible threats to the civilized

world. All free nations have a stake in preventing

sudden and catastrophic attacks. And were asking them

to join us, and many are doing so. Yet the course of

this nation does not depend on the decisions of

others. Whatever action is required, whenever action

is necessary, I will defend the freedom and securityof the American people

.

Consequently, this odd construction of Iraq as the pivotal

directing point for an axis of evil has been an essential

ingredient in Washingtons strategies for coping with the

post-Cold War, and now what comes after in the post-post-

Cold War world order (Hardt and Negri, 2000).

In contrast to Presidents Clinton or Reagan before

him, President George W. Bush is not an effective


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speechmaker. Instead he relies a great deal, like his

father and President Ford, upon a cadre of speech writers

whose words he often struggles to deliver. Even so, this

speech writing has become a space where the U.S.A.s

leadership is developing new figures of speech to define

its national security in the twenty-first century.

Likewise, there is apparently no great architect of this

transition at work either in the White House or the State

Department. Secretary of State Powell has a dissident

voice that carries against the Secretary of Defense, but he

is, at least thus far, proving to be no George Marshall, no

Henry Kissinger nor even a George Schultz when it comes to

public proclamations of vision. Bushs remarks on foreign

and domestic affairs since 9.11.01, however, do provide a

tremendous source of material to consider larger questions

about where the U.S.A. is headed in the twenty-first

century as well as where Washington now draws its lines

between a friendly inside and threatening outside

(Walker, 1993).

Anyone who still abides by an instrumental

understanding of language in which words are assumed to

have certain meanings, follow permissible uses, and abide

by correct constructions will be disappointed by this

analysis. Such approaches to language are all too often


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unsophisticated, presumptuous, and confused. Instead, this

investigation will go along with Bourdieu (1990: 54), who

observes that when dealing with the social world, the

ordinary use of ordinary language makes metaphysicians of

us. Diplomatic communiqus, official pronouncements, and

executive declarations all rely upon using words in quite

artful performances whose power and knowledge effects can

be profound and pervasive precisely because of their

metaphysical import. Language is action, and the word-

making moves of world statesmen often have world-making

outcomes for the states that hang upon such words (Greimas,

1987; and, Bourdieu, 1990). Speech writing, then,

produces speech writs. Once such writs are issued, the

speech wrights in government often work towards rewrighting

the world to fit their words or fulfill their writs--

whether by coercion, culture or commerce (Martin and

Schumann, 1998).

Writ comes into modern English from Old Norwegian,

Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old English where it

first meant a penstroke, a character, or a drawing. In

many ways, the rhetorical writs spun up by speech writing

today are efforts aimed at drawing and redrawing the

characteristics of the worlds geopolitical terrain. From

strokes of rhetoric, the Bush administration has struggled


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in the aftermath of 9.11.01 to propound a series of new

national security writs about the nature of conflict and

cooperation in the twenty-first century. Because most of

the immediate post-Cold War period made little sense to

people inured to the antagonisms the Cold War, this post-

9.11 task is doubly demanding.

The last vestiges of Cold War struggle with the USSR

essentially were erased by Washingtons many friendly

dealings with Moscow under Yeltsin and Putin, but the

complexities of the New World Order declared by President

George H. W. Bush during the Gulf War never substantially

shifted most of the U.S.A.s diplomatic or military

practices. The U.S.A. actually declared a war on

terrorism back during the Reagan administration, as that

GOP regime fought against its own allegedly vicious

antagonists among allegedly Islamic terrorist cells and

states in Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, and Syria. While

this war has been largely forgotten after Fukuyamas end

of history, many of todays troubles began during those

struggles nearly two decades ago. The audacity and

effectiveness of the Al Qaeda terrorists on 9.11.01,

however, definitely provided the administration of

President George W. Bush with his own remarkable

opportunity to reframe the nations domestic and foreign


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strategies of governance to suit what he and his regime

imagine to be new twenty-first century realities.

Consequently, the formal speech writing of this

administration since 9.11.01 should be read more

attentively to observe how this regime is redrawing world

geopolitical realities as well as the U.S.A.s engagement

with many new enemies and friends in this global

environment.

While it lacks the gravitas of President Wilsons,

Roosevelts, Kennedys or even Reagans declarations about

organizing world order, Presidents Bush vision of the

U.S.A.s benign and benevolent hegemony is embedded at the

core of his regimes national security strategy:

The great struggles of the twentieth century betweenliberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisivevictory for the forces of freedomand a singlesustainable model for national success: freedom,democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-firstcentury, only nations that share a commitment toprotecting basic human rights and guaranteeingpolitical and economic freedom will be able to unleashthe potential of their people and assure their futureprosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speakfreely; choose who will govern them; worship as theyplease; educate their childrenmale and female; ownproperty; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These

values of freedom are right and true for every person,in every societyand the duty of protecting thesevalues against their enemies is the common calling offreedom-loving people across the globe and across theages.

Today, the United States enjoys a position ofunparalleled military strength and great economic and


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political influence. In keeping with our heritage and

principles, we do not use our strength to press for

unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a

balance of power that favors human freedom: conditions

in which all nations and all societies can choose for

themselves the rewards and challenges of political and

economic liberty. In a world that is safe, people will

be able to make their own lives better. We will defend

the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will

preserve the peace by building good relations among

the great powers. We will extend the peace by

encouraging free and open societies on every continent

.

Coercive constructivism, then, is benign and benevolent

hegemony intent upon guarding the transnational neoliberal

order and the markets that sustain it.

In this respect, Bourdieu usefully notes that the

social world is the locus of struggles over words which owe

their seriousnessand sometimes their violenceto the fact

that words to a great extent make things, and that changing

words, and, more generally, representations (for example,

pictorial representation, like Manet), is already a way of

changing things. Politics is, essentially, a matter of

words (1990: 54). This observation is true inasmuch as

individuals and groups tussle over words, with language,

and in deeds, for greater symbolic power. And, the

metaphysical act of naming things, and thereby bringing

them into being out of nothingness, is, as Bourdieu

asserts, the most typical demonstration(Bourdieu, 1990:

55) of such power-in-action. Speech is a series of


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strokes, whose characters draw and redraw realities in new

writs of action. Thus, what is essentially Empire (Hardt

and Negri, 2000) becomes instead benign and benevolent

hegemony. In declaring war on 3.19.03 prior to the 3.20.03

assaults against Iraq, Bush promised liberation to the

Iraqis. That is, helping the Iraqis achieve a united,

stable, and free country will require our sustained

commitment. Welcome to Iraq with respect for its citizens,

for their great civilization and for the religious faiths

they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to

remove a threat and restore control of that country to its

own people

.

Political rhetorics, therefore, roll up together

versal possibilities as they become entangled in the

politics of actualizing their more complete realization in

practice. At the same time, experts can opine about these

emerging rhetorics, while lay persons may believe

wholeheartedly those opinions, which begins the

confirmation of the new doxa expressed by these discourses

(Bourdieu, 1998: 39-63). Such speech then extrudes

elements of what is out of what it refers to. Out of all

the debates exploring what the subjects under discussion


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could be, speech writing wrights what will be. By

presuming to suggest what such changes should be, the

exponents of this or that speech often cause parallel

events and processes to come into effect, which tests, in

turn, what they should and should not be. The hesitant

multiversal qualities of these transformations can become

much more definitive and universal, because speaking about

them anchors the practical invention of their referents

(Peirce, 1955). President Bushs axis of evil could be

many different things, but its rhetorical construction now

requires very specific forms of completion, definition, and

execution in American policy. Whatever the axis of evil

might be, it is so because of how it has been imagined by

the White Houses rhetorics that discover, define, and then

describe such terms in political debates (Halton, 1995).

Terms, like the axis of evil, enduring freedom,

evildoers or struggle of freedom and fear, are the

creations of speech writers intent on rewrighting the

unspoken and spoken understandings of fully mediatized and

highly educated publics to accept benign hegemony. Such

audiences often accept, as Bourdieu claims, the vague

debates of a political philosophy without technical

content, a social science reduced to journalistic

commentary for election nights, and uncritical glossing of


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unscientific opinion polls (Bourdieu, 1998: 7). Because

they openly trade into and out all of the ordinary opinions

that are so dearly embraced by some simply because they

have already been accepted by many, such speech writers now

act as doxosophers.

These mediated doxosophies then frequently anchor the

basic ideas and ethics that the voting public relies upon

in its processes of self-governance. Not surprisingly,

such speech writers, as Bourdieu indicates, often see

themselves as technicians of opinion who think themselves

wise, and their patterns of speech writing usually pose

the problems of politics in the very same terms in which

they are posed by businessmen, politicians, and political

journalists (in other words the very people who can afford

to commission surveys...) (Bourdieu, 1998: 7). As lovers

of opinion, they continue propounding new doxa from their

work in speech writs. Speech writing is decisively

important here. When successful, it flows into the larger

cultural habitus of neoliberalism shared by major

corporate, governmental, and professional authorities.

Allusions to alikeness and definitions of difference in

such rhetorical constructs can be easily expressed through

diplomatic actions when political agents share such

outlooks.


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The necessity, desirability, and universality implied

by such speech writing are imparted to institutions and

interjected into other ideas as the speech wright

retranslates the intrinsic and relational characteristics

of a position in the world with its many styles of living

into a unitary set of choices of persons, goods,

practices (Bourdieu, 1998: 8). Once these doxic effects

begin to shape the fields of action and decision, those

results easily are integrated into a shared neoliberal

habitus. Inside of such doxological systems of

valorization, speech wrights help make distinctions

between what is good and what is bad, between what is right

and what is wrong, between what is distinguished and what

is vulgar (Bourdieu, 1998: 8), as the constructs of the

world carried by words push and pull everyone toward world

constructions that match the wordings tested by rhetoric in

diplomatic discourses

Shared speech bolsters the symbolic order of society

to the extent that its terms are, first, systematic and

coherent as discursive frameworks, and, second, consistent

and agreeable with objective conditions in the

institutional structures of society. With these

dispositions, speech writing ensures popular belief in the

established order as well as coordinates the actions and


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thoughts of the larger publics with

ruling/owning/controlling elites by finding the right

relations of doxic submission which attaches us to the

established order with all the ties of the unconscious

(Bourdieu, 1998: 55). The work of speech writers as

political speech wrights has become even more intriguing in

the aftermath of the Cold War as the extraordinarily

bizarre media event staged on 5.1.03 aboard the U.S.S.

Abraham Lincoln reveals. Having won the long twilight

struggle against communist totalitarianism, the United

States is governed by leaders who now believe this

government incarnates what is best in the human spirit

(Reich, 1991; Barber, 1995; and, Frum and Perle, 2003).

Consequently, a type of world politics, whose key issues

range from global peace to individual freedom to political

justice, are getting greater consideration in the

pronouncements of the White House (Moore, 2004; Garrison,

2004; and, Brzezinski, 2004). In the benign hegemonic

forms sold by Americas presidents, benign hegemony is

being bought by many as they wend their way through the

post-Cold War era. But there are doubts. Having a

president dressed up as a flyer for a service in which he

did not serve, and declaring the Iraq war over -- when

shootings and bombings continued -- on a ship at sea


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steaming around in circles off San Diego, and then

witnessing this same president failing yet to honor

ceremoniously one of the nearly 600 American war dead truly

does now elicit a sense of shock and awe a year after

3.20.03.

On one level, as the still missing weapons of mass

destruction in Iraq show, it is possible to claim there is

very little evidence substantiating the existence of an

axis of evil either out on the ground or back in the

farthest corners of the world system. Yet, this is just

the point of coercive constructivism. The Bush

administration has promised to not waver, to not falter,

and to not fail in carrying this battle to the enemy.

Therefore, a suspicion that such weapons could, did or

would exist is all Washington needs. And, strange events,

like Libyas renunciation of WMD aspirations in January

2004, are taken as proof of this geopolitical pudding.

Hence, the coercive constructivist pretext for heroic

agency and authorship will continue to convey Americas

intent whenever, wherever and to whomever it must.

Asserting that an indefinite axis of evil exists, and then

doing everything it can to generate suspicions, or even

evidence, to support its case, expresses of the ideal

coercive constructivist speech condition needed to delimit,


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detail, and defend the Bush Administrations vision of

twenty-first century world affairs.

IV. Empire Evolving

In fact, the resistance of the global multitude, now

and perhaps back for years, if not decades, may well be an

insurrection against such soft power rather than a

reaction to hard power politics. Of course, when

confronting a major threat, common sense suggests that U.S.

should take its allies into consideration, co-align

Washingtons interests with those of foreign capitols, and

engage in closer consultations. Engaging in these

maneuvers makes it more likely to accentuate the allegiance

of allies as well as to reduce their resentment. Yet,

diplomacy usually is pitched at inter-elite relations in

which diplomatic and military leadership groups allegedly

must show greater sensitivity about the values, opinions,

and cultures of others in framing American foreign policy.

Such tolerance also might play well out on the street, in

peoples living rooms or amidst conversations in the

market.

Nonetheless, the axes of soft power turn upon

admiration, allure, and attraction. And, what American

soft power represents, despite what many Americans believe,

has real limits. Not everyone wants what Hollywood and


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Silicon Valley or Disney World and Wall Street have to

offer. The goals of consumerism, the attractions of media

entertainment or the persuasions of affluence, as

popularized by transnational businesses for upwardly-mobile

North American suburbanites, can be easily rejected by many

among the worlds multitude. And, if their localist

efforts to deflect American soft power are matched by more

intrusive hard power supplements, then the multitudes

resistance can quickly deepen, broaden, and stiffen.

Whether it is Jos Bov in his localist resistance against

McDonalds to defend culinary sovereignty, Jodie Williams

in Vermont mobilizing millions of moms over the Internet

along with Princess Diana to ban the profligate use of

landmines, or Osama bin Laden issuing videotaped

communiqus over Al Jazeeras global media links, the

allure of America, and therefore the extent of its soft

power, clearly is shown to have real limits. In March

2004, McDonalds declared it would no longer supersize

customer orders in its restaurants around the world, but

the Pentagon already demonstrated its unwillingness and

inability to supersize American strike forces when it hit

Iraq in March 2003. Unfortunately, this decision has led to

the past years chaos.


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Plainly, these critical perspectives are not widely

shared in the U.S.A., so Hardts and Negris heterodoxy can

be salutary. In many ways, what is treated as Empire by

Hardt and Negri has been evolving, at least, since the mid-

1960s as the last pretense of radical resistance against

global capitalism by Marxism-Leninism died out, once

Brezhnev and Kosygin throttled Khrushchevs unfocused

efforts at a sort of consumer-oriented perestroika and

Mao Zedong sparked years of internal war during the

Cultural Revolution in China. The Wests struggle with the

East revitalized corporate science and technology,

transformed classical bourgeois society, and weakened state

socialism by waging low-intensity warfare for a generation

out in the peripheries of the capitalist and communist

zone-regimes. By 1968, as the last big anti-bourgeois bout

of street-fighting fizzled out in Paris, actually existing

socialism proved it had to be kept in place by tanks in

Prague, and most peasant revolutions no longer sought

guidance for their national liberation from either Moscow

or Beijing. Instead, communist states increasingly

operated as sub-imperial adjuncts of the rising powers of

transnational global exchange, as Yugoslavia, Hungary, East

Germany and even North Korea engaged in more and more overt

and covert interactions with the West (Luke and


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Boggs,1982). During the 1970s, Nixon and Kissinger

accepted nuclear parity with Brezhnev and Kosygin, Brandt

and Honecker enacted Ostpolitik, and the capitalist roaders

returned from their rustication in the Peoples Republic of

China after Maos death to launch the four

modernizations. By the time that Gorbachev entered office

in 1985, it was even obvious in Moscow to the CPSUs

apparatchiki that the incipient New World Order required

restructuring, democraticization, and openness of all those

who hoped to profit from its powers and privileges by

becoming tributaries in this new space of flows (Luke,

1994). 9.11.01, then, strangely ties together the Cold

Wars death throes with the post-Cold War eras birth

pangs. Yet, in many places, the anchor points of a new

geopolitics for the twenty-first century are hard to find.

The unipolar moment in American history, if this

analysis holds, was not long-lasting. Events set into

motion during 1989 led to the U.S.S.R. collapsing on

December 25, 1991, which many marked as a victory of the

West over the Eastern bloc. Within weeks, however, another

Western-led bloc of states launched, fought, and won a war

to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. After turning

its back on the mujahedeen who allied with it during the

Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S.A. greatly


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aggravated and further alienated many Islamic groups by

stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, aiding Israel against

Iraqi attacks in the Gulf War, and failing to accommodate

Palestinian interests in the struggles for statehood and

territory to the fullest possible extent. By February 23,

1993, when the first attack on the World Trade Center took

place, the unipolar moment in American history was clearly

in crisis, if not beginning to end. If that attack showed

the limits of American soft power in a time of uncommon

hegemony, September 11, 2001 simply underscored how fragile

and contestable soft power actually is (Bauman, 2002; and

Agnew, 1998). Every bombing, shooting, and missile attack

in Iraq since 5.1.03 also seconds the brittleness of soft

power out on the ground.

V. Empire as New World Order

Rather than being a break, crisis, or rupture in

modernity, the vision of postmodernization in Empire

presents global change as a turn in the existing routines

for already modernized forms of being (Ohmae, 1990; Reich,

1991; Poster, 1995). By making the consumption of

commodities a way of everyday modern life, the

postmodernity of Empire essentially mimics the "fast

capitalism" (Agger, 1989) of markets: it rejects older

notions of the political (Schmitt, 1996) with their


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closed structures, fixed meaning, and rigid order in favor

of chaos, incompleteness, and uncertainty ( Tuathail,

1999; Thrift, 1998; and, Rosenau, 1990). Empires politics

apparently repudiate fixed territories, sacred spaces, and

hard boundaries in favor of unstable flows, proliferating

all of the non-places used to channel secularized

practices, and permeable borders (Diebert, 1997; Aug,

1995; Agnew and Corbridge, 1995). Postmodernity is not a

wholly new social order, but under Empire the production

and reproduction of an almost totally commercialized way of

life has become generalized on a transnational scale (Luke,

1999; Bourdieu, 1998; Greider, 1996; Harvey, 1996; and,

Appadurai, 1996). It is upon this terrain that resistance

by the multitude operates, finding both the tools of

assault and their targets for destruction in the mass-

produced non-places of criss-crossed borders and rushing

flows of global exchange (Luke and Tuathail, 1997).

Some argue that destroying the WTC and damaging the

Pentagon were futile efforts to topple the global economy

and American military power. In some ways, they are right.

World trade now really has no single center, and the armed

forces of the U.S. can be controlled from many different

points scattered all around the nation, as the air and

ground war in Afghanistan conducted from Tampa, Florida


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since October 2001 easily demonstrates. Nonetheless, the

multitude recognizes such iconic buildings are signs, as

well as sites, of wealth, power, and culture for Empire.

Directing such dramatic violence against those centers of

todays transnational ways of life, and then destroying or

damaging significant buildings, constitutes a very

successful first strike in a war against Empire.

9.11.01 represents many forms of anonymous resistance

by the multitude as its opposition nests in networks,

struggles against systems, and probes into processes. This

insurgency is simultaneously underground, on the ground,

and ungrounded in many different locales (Cooley, 2000;

Bowden, 2000; and, Rashid, 2000). Transnational

ethnonational diasporas and ragged failed states shelter

its militants, mobilize its supporters, and nurture its

many streams of discontent (Chua, 2003; and, Soros, 2004).

Because so many of the mechanisms, structures, and links in

world capitalism must be essentially unsecure to operate

optimally, defense against the insecurities of all, who now

live amidst these linked aggregates in Empires big market-

driven systems, is neither certain nor final. Such

uncertainty and contingency, once again, characterize

todays postmodern times.


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Organized stateless violence emerged from the

multitude during the Cold War in wars of national

liberation, narcocapitalist crime syndicates, ethnic

secessions, and shadowy counterintelligence units (Luke,

1993; and Walker, 1993). Tolerated by the superpowers from

the 1940s to the 1990s, these entities often proved to be

reliable tools in the border conflicts between the

capitalist and socialist zone-regimes that once were tied

to Washington and Moscow (Kaldor, 1999). In the political

vacuum created in many countries after 1989-1991, however,

these entities acquired quasi-sovereign powers in far too

many territorial areas across Africa, Asia, Latin America,

and even parts of the former Soviet Union.

Therefore, one finds small organized war machines with

varying levels of capability, but not true control over

entire territories and populations, demodernizing many

different places around the world in pursuit of their

contrasovereign illegitimate power (Bowden, 2000). From

the Congo, Somalia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone to

Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya, and Palestine, there are many

demodernized wildzones in Empire where these stateless

formations for organized violence play out their quest for

institutional power on both a local and global level

(Rashid, 2000; Agnew, 1998; Huntington, 1998; and, Doty,


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1996). Mostly dismissed as insignificant vortices of minor

turmoil when their first effects were registered on 2.26.93

in the U.S. at the WTC, such operations could be regarded

as sources of resistance by the multitude after 9.11.01.

Instead of considering this condition a historical oddity,

however, Empire needs to ask what strategic failures,

political inconsistencies or economic discontinuities now

plague its global regimen.

A culture war perhaps does rest at the core of

9.11.01, but it is not one between Islam and Christianity,

even if it can be tied to the incommensurability of

secularism and devotion in many respects of Empires

everyday life (Barber, 1995; Appadurai, 1996; Huntington,

1998). Liberal ideologies rest at the core of modern

consumer society for the multitude. Without the codes of

conduct that channel everyday human behaviors through codes

for autonomous rational agency, the technics that underlie

market exchange, instrumental action, and personal

happiness would grind to a halt (Crang and Thrift, 1999;

and, Harvey, 1996). Empires biopolitics subsist upon a

simple directive: to live is to consume, and to consume is

to live (Davidson, 1997). By these lights, few individuals

even can imagine how one could decide rationally and choose

freely, not to consume or to die. Consequently, the


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sensibilities of some publics, for example, have been

shocked from the first big airline hijackings in 1970 by

Palestinian fighters to the WTC bombings in 2001 by Al

Qaeda when they face those whose dedication to violence,

committed in accord with illiberal visions of existence, is

steadfast. Empire cannot easily accept how readily some

will put other nonimperial collective goals ahead of the

individual right to consume, work or acquire property.

Believing God, History or Nature is on their side,

those "others," like bin Ladens jihadi, willingly can

sacrifice themselves, their families, and their riches to

attain long-term strategic goals (Mayer, 2001; Rashid,

2000; and, Halberstam, 2001). While destroying the

Pentagon or WTC might not seem to offer many strategic

benefits, the audacious devotion to such violent goals

always can, first, shock, and, then, awe liberal

understandings of the self and society down to their core.

Empire fosters a frightening insularity, and it is shared

by most average consumers in the rich OECD countries as

they aspire to buy more and more of the world product at

their local Walmarts. Unfortunately, too many remain

utterly clueless about how those goods are so abundant,

cheap, and endless. Nor do they know why their credit is

so steady, sound, and bottomless; or whose welfare


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elsewhere in the world is not as solid, certain, and

strifeless.

In this respect, Islamic fundamentalists are most

coherently united, however, in their being resolutely

opposed to modernity and modernization (Hardt and Negri,

2000: 147). This opposition is pitched most intensely

against social modernization as it comes with global

markets. Yet, their allegedly fundamentalist reactions

only highlight the importance of returning to the Quran

and the Sunna for truly legitimate foundational principles.

For all other purposes, Islamic fundamentalism stresses a

form of conventional discourse in Islamic scholarship,

ijtihad, or original thought. Like Christian, Jewish,

Hindu or Buddhist fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism

represents, as Hardt and Negri argue, the invention of

original values and practices, which perhaps echo those of

other periods of revivalism or fundamentalism but really

are directed in reaction to the present social order

(2000: 149).

Instead of continuing to stand resolutely for modern

ideals, like democracy, equality, and freedom, Empire left

tyrants like Saddam Hussein in place after Kuwait's oil was

once again secure, permitted gangster capitalism to

establish itself securely in places as varied as Russia,


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Columbia, Romania, Congo, Haiti, and Ukraine, and

temporized as horrendous civil strife racked Yugoslavia,

East Timor, Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Bosnia, Congo, Iraq, and

most of former Soviet Central Asia as well as Afghanistan

(Luke, 1996). At the same time, Washington ineffectively

brokered a flawed peace process between Israel and the

Palestinians that only increased tensions between Jews and

Arabs as more militant groups on both sides pushed more and

extreme measures to attain their goals after the Oslo peace

accords (Usher, 2000; Masalha, 2000).

The difficult detail, then, that most overlook in the

putative triumph of "the West" over "the Rest" in the 1990s

is how fully Empire coexists with another vast global

modernity of failure beneath, behind or beside the

modernizing successes brought on by globalization through

transnational corporate commerce (Greider, 1996; and,

Harvey, 1996). For every Hong Kong, Singapore, Frankfurt,

or San Jose in the 1990s, there were five Groznys, Kabuls,

Luandas, Mogadishus, Sarajevos, or Kinshashas (Power, 2001;

Gourevitch, 1999). As the 21st century dawned in some

places, many others slipped back into 17th or 19th century

conditions of demodernizing disintegration (Luke and

Tuathail, 1997). Large parts of the world now do not have

effective territorial governance by modern nation-state


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institutions (Debrix, 1999). Under Empires watch, many

regions of the world have slid back into early modern

relations of trade in which black markets for gems, oil,

weapons, drugs, timber or even people clearly eclipse the

open exchange for legitimate goods and services (Martin and

Schumann, 1998). Amidst this chaotic flux, the modernity

of failure suffered by many is easily blamed upon a

modernity of success enjoyed by the few as Empire

apparently favors the U.S.A. and its network of

supranational organisms among other highly modernized

nation-states (Barber, 1995; Bourdieu, 1998; Friedman,

1999).

Therefore, any defense of Empires supposedly liberal

capitalist ways of life always will require an

uncomfortable on-going effort to comprehend the radical

indifference to its codes of conduct, which illiberal ways

of acting and thinking generate (Campbell, 1992). Radical

Islamism obviously fills this bill as its advocates allege

a New World Order tied to liberal capitalist values, and

the American society and state that stand behind them, are

threatening Islam as a whole (Friedman, 1999; and, Griffin,

2001). Moreover, in the eyes of Islams faithful during

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the U.S. in Iraq,

Serbs in Bosnia, Hindus in Kashmir, Russians in Chechnya,


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the French in North Africa, or the Israelis in Palestine

are all working to destroy the faith.

Hence, dispossessed radical followers among the

worlds multitude easily will swear allegiance to "defeat

the mightiest military power of modern times" by trusting,

as bin Laden maintains, how fully "your lives are in the

hands of God" (Newsweek, September 24, 2001, 44). What is

most remarkable about Islamic fundamentalism, according to

Hardt and Negri, is really the refusal of the powers that

are emerging in the new imperial order, so instances of

its politicization, like the Iranian revolution, the

Algerian civil war of the 1990s, or the Taliban takeover of

Afghanistan, represent a powerful rejection of the world

market that might be thought of as the first

postmodernist revolution (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 149).

An absolute profession of religious faith keeps

radical Islam disciplined and resourceful, but its origins

also highlight how easily everything has soured under

Empire in the poorer, less developed regions of the world

from Morocco to Indonesia as the peaceful followers of the

faith struggle to coexist with fundamentalistic radicals

(Lewis, 2001; and, Wright, 2001). Moreover, the generic

forms of liberal capitalist life brought to millions by

transnational firms now compete on the same terrain with Al


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9.11.01 and its aftermath empire strikes back

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