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May 14, 2004
This article looks to be useful to our discussion. In discussing the pro-American foreign policy of the Howard Government in Australia Chris Reus-Smit, the head of the department of international relations at the Australian National University, touches on some of the concerns of Empire. Chris says that:
"It is increasingly clear, however, that the US is not a world hegemon....today's world is unconducive to hegemony, even for a state with America's military and economic resources....The US still has the ability to thrust issues on to the international agenda and to sponsor the creation of new international regimes."
Chris argue this case along the following lines:
"But just as other states must respond to its initiatives, US policy makers have to devote ever greater amounts of energy and resources to combating initiatives sponsored by other actors, such as the International Criminal Court and the Kyoto Protocol.
Added to all of this is the simple fact that world politics is no longer a game of states, even if they remain centrally important. In contrast to the postwar period, the club of states is now embedded in a web of world politics populated by politically adroit non-state actors, international organisations and internet information citizens."
So what sort of sovereignty do we now have in the complex global order? Ther is a gesture to this:
"The time has come for Australian policy makers, concerned academics and members of the community to reframe the way in which we think about contemporary world politics and US power. We must ask ourselves what constitutes order and security in the contemporary world. We must address in a sober fashion the nature and limits of US power. We must reflect on what the US can and cannot do to foster genuine international order and security... Only when we have answered these questions should we turn to the question of how our special alliance relationship with Washington can be used to foster a more constructive US approach to the multiple challenges of contemporary world order."
There are no answers to the questions raised. For me the importance of Hardt and Negri's Empire is that this text has a go at answering the above questions. However, some think that the book is close to trash. Others recoil from the difficult theoretical prose. Others think differently. Others struggle with the text, like me. Others are thinking about reading it. Others grapple with the idea of empire as a dynamic, fluid network, instead of power structured as an architecture of pyramidal hierarchy. Some are starting to use the ideas.
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