A review of Hardt and Negri's Empire by Bashir Abu-Manneh. He says that the crucial or defining issue:
"....of the debate surrounding Empire is whether capitalism has now entered into a “post-imperialist” stage, as Hardt and Negri argue, or whether it has consolidated a new phase of imperialism."
The issue is stated clearly. What I will do is indicate the way that Bashir Abu-Manneh argues. He acknowledges that capital was universalized for the first time in history during the 1990s. He states his position clearly:
'In reality, the new world order is substantially different from the one depicted in Empire. Imperialism has indeed persisted. And American empire is the real goal of globalization.This has been clearly demonstrated in Peter Gowan’s The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance. The new world order, he argues, is in essence about the U.S. drive to dominate the world economy unchallenged, to “go global” in order “to entrench the United States as the power that will control the major economic and political outcomes across the globe in the twenty-first century.” Globalization and neoliberalism are U.S. strategies for global dominance, allowing the United States to shape both “the internal and external environments of states in directions which will induce them to continue to accept U.S. political and economic dominance.”'
The first is Hardt & Negri's acceptance of the United States discourse during and after the Gulf War that it is managing international justice in the name of global right, and not as a function of its own national motives. Bashir Abu-Manneh says:
"To accept and uncritically replicate this hegemonic U.S. discourse of policing the world, of rights and “just war,” is to fall into the trap of projecting domestic criminal law onto the behavior of states. .... Because the Gulf War couldn’t really be justified in liberal or democratic terms, a moral discourse of right and wrong had to be imported into international relations. International politics, national interests, or even capital reproduction strategies are substituted by a humanitarian discourse, which Hardt and Negri endorse."
Bashir Abu-Manneh concludes that empire is not centreless. It's subject is a hegemonic US. He says the "central U.S. objective has remained a constant since at least as far back as the First World War: global domination." he says that the real challenge for the United States in the 1990s had been finding new ways to legitimize this proposition. The third world and Eastern Europe have had to bear the brunt of this process, as inter-imperialist tensions were projected outwards.
Bashir says that the international Kantian framework, in which each has a share in the government, in which no single country dominates and in which the governing principles are not ethnic but legal, that is favoured by the European Union "stands in sharp contradiction with the United States’ strategy to attain unchallenged supremacy over the world." The United States continues to interpret this international liberalism as a direct threat to its own constitution and national interest since it involves subjecting U.S. domestic law to international constraints.
I'm not going to evaluate Bashir Abu-Manneh response to Hardt & Negri's. I will leave it as an issue that has been placed on the table.