It's a great phrase, 'the rough beast of futurity', isn't it. It also raises some difficult questions.

'The rough beast of futurity', comes from an article by Tom Nairn at open democracy. He says that the rough beast has appeared whilst we were all looking out for the progressive bloke promised by the liberal theoriests.

What did the liberal theoriests promise? Nairn is referring to the neo-liberals.The ones who gave us the competitive market through the instruments of deregulation, privatisation and competition policy. Nairn says:

"For two decades, the globe has heard about little but the decline of the dreary old nation-state: lowering borders, less state interference, just one market under God ... and so on. How come then, that following 11 September 2001, by far the greatest explosion of nationalism since 1945 has taken place in the United States of America – the alleged identikit for global democracy, and the motor of the globalising process itself?

Whatever became of ‘economic man’, and an increasingly prominent economic woman? They were thought to be above this kind of thing. "

Economic man/women is the innovative entrepreneur who makes things happen and ensures ongoing wealth creation.

And what did we get instead? The resurgence of nationalism in the US and Australia. A nationalism that is intimately connected to the US imperial project; a Pax Americana with its rhetoric of a moral mission to convert Middle East to a free market liberal democracy. As Eric Hobsbawm says the US:

"...is a great power based on a universalist revolution--and therefore based on the belief that the rest of the world should follow its example, or even that it should help liberate the rest of the world."

Resurgence because nationality never went away, contrary to the hopes of many liberals and international socialists. Resurgence because the liberal Anglo-American nation states feel threatened in themselves.

Nairn asks: what is that these nation states are afraid of? He answers:

"In Australia and Britain, it is national identity-loss — reduction to the ranks of ordinariness. In the US, another kind of disappearance is more acutely dreaded — internal multiculturalism, plus the utter economic dependence upon ‘globalisation’ entailed by the state’s own post-1989 success."

As an aside. That misreads Australia. Australia has always been ordinary. It's nationalsim has its roots in overcoming the colonial dependency on an imperial UK and asserting its own independence and culture. It has been comfortable in its ordinariness since the turn of the twentieth century. It is the UK and the US who have lost something; an empire for the UK and the Vietnam war for the US.

So what is this rough beast of futurity? Can we go beyond literature (Yeats) and film (Godzilla)?

Eric Hobsbawm has a crack at sketching it. He says:

"The sudden emergence of an extraordinary, ruthless, antagonistic flaunting of US power is hard to understand, all the more so since it fits neither with long-tested imperial policies developed during the cold war, nor the interests of the US economy. The policies that have recently prevailed in Washington seem to all outsiders so mad that it is difficult to understand what is really intended."

This is how many others see a very nationalistic US. Now there will be an instant recoil from that. The 'madness' bit makes it so extreme:- way out lefty stuff from dieold Marxists. So we need to make sense of it if we are to go beyond the liberal warbashing.

One way of making sense of Hobsbawm's interpretation of Nairn's rough beast of futurity is pull a postmodern switch. We can recall the national narrative of the mass media; say of Fox Television. That media acted principally as an extension of the military effort, and it celebrated America as the land of the true and brave. The television coverage of Pentagon war machine ripping through Iraq's defences with ease entered our homes throughout the world. It was a television event. This televisual history as heroic epic shaped our subjectivity, oppositionality and complicity as it created an illusion of internal consensus against an external enemy.

The Iraqi war of Fox Television, was experienced by the distant television spectator as a virtual media event; it could be believed only insofar as one was willing to enter its fictionalized televisual representation, with Saddam Hussein as a Godzilla that had to be destroyed to save the world. (I've just seen Godzilla vs the Destroyer on television. Check out movie reviews). If we avoid the mythic bit, then the two Iraqi wars as a postmodern epic, are premised on a faith in technological mastery that could avoid all the nasty human consequences.

I acknowledge that the rough beast of futurity is not how many in the US understand the way they have made the welfare of their nation-state paramount. Like Robert Purdy these Americans hold that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is both just and moral. They hold that the pursuit of American interests can be, and is, consistent with the collective interest of humanity. They hold that current Bush administration is doing the right thing for their country in Iraq.

Yet nationalism does imply that the concern with national self-interest to the exclusion of the rights of other nations. National self-interest has a track record in the Middle East: one in which America has helped to suppress democratic movements throughout the Middle East. It is a track record that suggests that American rule in the Middle East will founder on the contradiction of a 'democratisation' that ignores the Arab people.

However, the tacit assumption here, that empire is simply an extension of the nation-state, is questionable. Amercia as empire also governs through supranational bodies like the IMF, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. So even though the US as a nation-state dominates global politics, that nation-state's power is also limited by these larger organizations. True, the US as a nation-state uses these global institutions to enforce the order of free market capitalism and it does so to ensure American national interest through laying down the rules America wants. Yet it also finds itself on the receiving of these rules in the WTO. Despite the Washington consensus there is a process of a decentring of the power of nation states as well.

Still we are left with the rough beast of futurity. We are civilians at the margins/center of the Anglo-American empire, distant from the conflict in the Middle East. But we are a part of the rough beast, given our affirmation of being citizens of the UK, US and Australian nation states. It is possible to critique the mass media representation of the war in the name of an enlightening reason. But it is difficult to adopt the comfortable oppositional mode of being against the nation state we belong to in the name of political reason. This is because it is difficult to be totally against who we are as Australians, since we are speaking from within the seeming reality of the virtualized televisual conflict of the war. And we---many of us on the left--- are haunted by that even as we resist and critique the televisual spectacle.

We are forced to acknowledge the gulf between the Iraqi who are being wounded and killed by US missiles and bombs and us Australian citizens. Our experiences of the war are so very different. The war shapes our subjectivities in different ways because 'war' not only refers to the event of the war, but also to the culture and politics of war within the various nation states. So it is easy to
point to, and critique, the paper thin justifications for the going to war with Iraq, it is much more diffcult to deal with the rough beast of futurity.

An option here is to provide/construct a counter narrative to the grand narrative of nations and empires. If so, then should we avoid seeking the guarantors through scholarly integrity and historical truth for our counter grand narrative---eg., the US is bad ---- by pretending that we stand outside the media histories in our living room. We have the truth about what happened, but the poor soldiers still in Iraq are caught up in myths and illusions. Or should avoid the grand narratives altogether by shifting to a more open ended creation of a tangle of narratives from which we must wrestle our own histories?