June 04, 2004

Empire: Global civil society

Under the section entitled Interventions in chapter One Hardt and Negri connect empire to global civil society.

They make the connection in terms of moral instruments:


"In the previous section we referred to both the structural means of intervention that involve the deployments of monetary mechanisms and financial maneuvers over the transnational field of interdependent productive regimes and interventions in the field of communication and their effects on the legitimation of the system. Here we want to investigate the new forms of intervention that involve the exercise of physical force on the part of the imperial machine over its global territories....The arsenal of legitimate force for imperial intervention is indeed already vast, and should include not only military intervention but also other forms such as moral intervention and juridical intervention. In fact, the Empire's powers of intervention might be best understood as beginning not directly with its weapons of lethal force but rather with its moral instruments."

They then make a suprise turn by linking moral instruments with global civil society:

"What we are calling moral intervention is practiced today by a variety of bodies, including the news media and religious organizations, but the most important may be some of the so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which, precisely because they are not run directly by governments, are assumed to act on the basis of ethical or moral imperatives. The term refers to a wide variety of groups, but we are referring here principally to the global, regional, and local organizations that are dedicated to reliefwork and the protection of human rights, such as Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Médecins sans Frontières. Such humanitarian NGOs are in effect (even if this runs counter to the intentions of the participants) some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new world order-the charitable campaigns and the mendicant orders of Empire. These NGOs conduct "just wars" without arms, without violence, without borders. Like the Dominicans in the late medieval period and the Jesuits at the dawn of modernity, these groups strive to identify universal needs and defend human rights."

That effectively does away with the standard lefty conception of an epic struggle between the forces of imperial rule (empire) and the forces of democratic rule (community), which presently manifests itself in the confrontation between elite corporate globalization and global civil society.

Hardt and Negri go on to say:


".....In effect, this [moral] intervention prefigures the state of exception from below, and does so without borders, armed with some of the most effective means of communication and oriented toward the symbolic production of the Enemy. These NGOs are completely immersed in the biopolitical context of the constitution of Empire; they anticipate the power of its pacifying and productive intervention of justice. It should thus come as no surprise that honest juridical theorists of the old international school (such as Richard Falk) should be drawn in by the fascination of these NGOs.The NGOs' demonstration of the new order as a peaceful biopolitical context seems to have blinded these theorists to the brutal effects that moral intervention produces as a prefiguration of world order."

So global civil society is part of empire. That does away with any conventional conception of empire identified in which the US is a hegemonic power; or plays off unilateralists against multilateralists.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 4, 2004 11:58 PM | TrackBack
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