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May 11, 2004
Hardt and Negri write that through the transformation of supranational law, the imperial process of constitution tends to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of the nation-states. They then describe this transformation of supranational law. They say:
"Perhaps the most significant symptom of this transformation is the development of the so-called right of intervention. This is commonly conceived as the right or duty of the dominant subjects of the world order to intervene in the territories of other subjects in the interest of preventing or resolving humanitarian problems, guaranteeing accords, and imposing peace. The right of intervention figured prominently among the panoply of instruments accorded the United Nations by its Charter for maintaining international order, but the contemporary reconfiguration of this right represents a qualitative leap. No longer, as under the old international ordering, do individual sovereign states or the supranational (U.N.) power intervene only to ensure or impose the application of voluntarily engaged international accords. Now supranational subjects that are legitimated not by right but by consensus intervene in the name of any type of emergency and superior ethical principles. What stands behind this intervention is not just a permanent state of emergency and exception, but a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice. In other words, the right of the police is legitimated by universal values."
This refers to the intervention into Iraq by the UK, the US, Australia etc. We can say that was an emergency situation; an exception. The UN was shunted aside. The late justification for the intervention was the universal values of freedom and democracy. So we have state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to the values of justice.
But is it a permanent state of emergency and exception?
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