I've been off-line since Thursday. I've spent the last few days cruising the Eden Valley in South Australia checking out the riesling and other wines. Hence the lack of posting. I've just got back to Canberra and to dial-up internet access, which is better than nothing.
I would like to post these paragraphs from this review article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books because they raise uncomfortable questions. Ones that I'm struggling to answer in relation to an international system governed by the rule of law and backed by military force to ensure global order in a world of individual sovereign States. Judt says:
Those of us who opposed America's invasion of Iraq from the outset can take no comfort from its catastrophic consequences. On the contrary: we should now be asking ourselves some decidedly uncomfortable questions. The first concerns the propriety of "preventive" military intervention. If the Iraq war is wrong—--"the wrong war at the wrong time"---why, then, was the 1999 US-led war on Serbia right? That war, after all, also lacked the imprimatur of UN Security Council approval. It too was an unauthorized and uninvited attack on a sovereign state---undertaken on "preventive" grounds---that caused many civilian casualties and aroused bitter resentment against the Americans who carried it out."
Judt continues:
The apparent difference---and the reason so many of us cheered when the US and its allies went into Kosovo---was that Slobodan Milosevic had begun a campaign against the Albanian majority of Serbia's Kosovo province that had all the hallmarks of a prelude to genocide. So not only was the US on the right side but it was intervening in real time---its actions might actually prevent a major crime. With the shameful memory of Bosnia and Rwanda in the very recent past, the likely consequences of inaction seemed obvious and far outweighed the risks of intervention. Today the Bush administration---lacking "weapons of mass destruction" to justify its rush to arms---offers "bringing freedom to Iraq" almost as an afterthought. But saving the Kosovar Albanians was what the 1999 war was all about from the start.
And yet it isn't so simple. Saddam Hussein (like Milosevic) was a standing threat to many of his subjects: not just in the days when he was massacring Kurds and Shiites while we stood by and watched, but to the very end. Those of us who favor humanitarian interventions in principle---not because they flatter our good intentions but because they do good or prevent ill---could not coherently be sorry to see Saddam overthrown. Those of us who object to the unilateral exercise of raw power should recall that ten years ago we would have been delighted to see someone--anyone---intervene unilaterally to save the Rwandan Tutsis. And those of us who, correctly in my view, point to the perverse consequences of even the best---intentioned meddling in other countries' affairs have not always applied that insight in cases where we longed to see the meddling begin.
Here is an article on external relations between nation-states by Perry Anderson to read whilst I make my way back to Canberra. Entitled 'Arms and Right: Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio in an Age of War', it deals with these philosopher's concerns for a desirable liberal international order.
Both Rawls and Habermas refer back to Kant's utopian 'For a Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch of 1795.' I say utopian because Kant, as Anderson says:
"Kant had believed, by the gradual emergence of a federation of republics in Europe, whose peoples would have none of the deadly impulses that drove absolute monarchs continually into battle with each other at the expense of their subjects---the drive for glory or power. Rather, interwoven by trade and enlightened by the exercise of reason, they would naturally banish an activity so destructive of their own lives and happiness."
Anderson says that Habermas thought so. Anderson briefly outlines Habermas' take on Kant:
"Kant's institutional scheme for a perpetual peace has proved wanting. For a mere foedus pacificum---conceived by Kant on the model of a treaty between states, from which the partners could voluntarily withdraw---was insufficiently binding. A truly cosmopolitan order required force of law, not mere diplomatic consent....The transformative step [that is] still [needed] to be taken [is] for cosmopolitan law to bypass the nation-state and confer justiciable rights on individuals, to which they could appeal against the state. Such a legal order required force: an armed capacity to override, where necessary, the out-dated prerogatives of national sovereignty."
If this is so, then does not the UN lack a mechanism for the resolution of conflicts and the enforcement of individual rights?
Habermas is critical of the nation-state and he sees its power as weakening two broad forces. Anderson says:
"On the one hand, globalization of financial and commodity markets are undermining the capacity of the state to steer socio-economic life: neither tariff walls nor welfare arrangements are of much avail against their pressure. On the other, increasing immigration and the rise of multi-culturalism are dissolving the ethnic homogeneity of the nation. For Habermas, there are grave risks in this two-sided process, as traditional life-worlds, with their own ethical codes and social protections, face disintegration."
"..the powers and protections of different nation-states were transmitted upwards to a supra-national sovereignty that no longer required any common ethnic or linguistic substratum, but derived its legitimacy solely from universalist political norms and the supply of social services. It is the combination of these that defines a set of European values, learnt from painful historical experience, which can offer a moral compass to the Union."
I'm on the road. I will try and post latter when I have internet access.
In the meatime have a look at this article from Prospect Magazine on Liberal Leviathan by John Ikenberry. In the Bush administration's vision of the world an American leviathan provides security to the world and in return the world accepts US dominance. Yet the contract is not working. John says the:
"Bush administration's foreign policy has failed - and failed spectacularly. Bush sought to mobilise the world in a great campaign against new threats, but instead the world is openly questioning the legitimacy of a US-led global order. His administration is seized by the problem of terrorism and the rest of the world is seized by the problem of American unipolar power. The world may not be able to restrain the US by organising a counterbalancing coalition. But the world today is about as close as it has ever come to being in open rebellion against the one global superpower. This global rebellion is particularly intense among citizens in the advanced western democracies, America's oldest and most established allies."
"...there is a basic contradiction at the heart of the Bush administration's national security vision. The Bush administration wants both to serve as the global provider of security and simultaneously to pursue a traditional conservative foreign policy based on narrowly defined self-interest. That is, the administration wants to solve the Hobbesian problem of order by becoming a global leviathan but it also wants to use US power to advance nationalist goals at the expense of others and reduce its commitment to international rules and institutions. It cannot do both - it must choose."
Go read the article.
There has been some discussion of the rise of religious conservatism in Australia has a result of the shift to the right in the Australian federal election. The discussions be found at John Quiggin's place, at Chris Shiel's Back Pages at Troppo Armadillo and public opinion that is connected to with the decline of the political centre argument over at Catallaxy.
One aspect of this shift to conservatism that has been overlooked in the current discussion is the conservative construction of the relations between Islam and Christianity: this relationship is seen to be basically adversarial, a long-drawn-out conflict between the two rival civilizations of East and West. Theirs is a story of conflict, instead of one of the mutual cross-fertilization Western and Islamic civilization.
William Dalrymple's review in the New York Review of Books suggests that a key figure in the conservative clash of civilizations thesis is Bernard Lewis. Dalrymple says that underlying the diverse essays in Lewis' latest work, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East is the assumption that there are two fixed and opposed forces at work in the history of the Mediterranean world. On one hand, Western civilization, which he envisages as a Judeo-Christian block; and on the other hand, quite distinct, an often hostile Islamic world hellbent on the conquest and conversion of the West. Dalrymple quotes Lewis in one essay, "The Roots of Muslim Rage":
"The struggle between these rival systems has now lasted for some fourteen centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests."
The idea that the Islamic world has been humiliated by a West it once despised and ignored, and that it has never come to terms with this reversal, leads Lewis to the clash of civilizations thesis:
"This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both."
This clash of civilizations thesis underpins the neocon's understanding of international relations after 9/11.
In the previous post I indicated Paul Monk's argument that the significance of 9/11 is that the Australian Government will need to confront the outmoded premises of its existing strategic doctrine and adapt and modernize it. Monk bases his argument on Philip Bobbitt's thesis in his The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History. Monk argues that there are three central premises to Bobbitt’s argument and that he draws four powerful inferences from them.
The first premise is that modern history is best understood as a series of epochal wars that have shaped both state constitutions and the international society of states. The struggle between Athens and Sparta was not merely a series of wars but a prolonged, fundamental conflict, which shaped the whole future of the Greek world. Similarly with other epochal wars: – the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years’ War, the Punic Wars. Epochal wars put the constitutional basis of the participants in play and do not truly end until the underlying constitutional questions are resolved.
The inference drawn from this that the wars of the twentieth century between liberalism, communism and facism was an epochal wars. It was fought to determine which form of constitution – liberal parliamentary, fascist or communist – would replace the imperial states of Europe that had emerged after the epochal war of the Napoleonic period and had dominated the world between the Congress of Vienna and August 1914.
The second premise is that strategy, law (both constitutional and international) and history (as a study) are inextricably intertwined, since they shape one another. Properly speaking, none can be understood without close reference to the others. It is stated by Bobbit thus:
"Law cannot come into being until the state secures a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Strategy cannot be formulated unless law prevails, for in its absence there is only civil war or banditry....Yet the legitimacy necessary for law and for strategy derives from history, the understanding of past practices that characterizes a particular society.”
There is a good article by Bruce Grant on the Australia US alliance in the Australian Financial Review's Review section. At one level the alliance is not an issue since the geopolitics of Australia's situation and national interest requires it. Hence the bipartisan support for that alliance.
However, things are not that simple. Grant opens his article with this very accurate remark:
"The curious thing about the alliance with the United States is that, in Australia, it is divisive. You would expect that because it has bipartisan political backing, broad support in the Australian community, and is generally regarded as the most important security arrangement we have, it would have a unifying effect. In fact, it does not bring Australians together. Rather it creates tensions among us. This in turn engenders sensitivities in our relations with the US."
"There has been a conscious strategy on the part of the coalition parties in Australia to lift the bar of enthusiasm for the alliance to a height that their political opponents cannot jump...The complex issues which the White House has to juggle, including public opinion and relations with Congress, apart altogether from the merits of any military campaign itself, are simplified by the time they cross the Pacific to whether Australians are for or against America, or for or against America's declared adversaries or enemies, or for or against democracy or Western civilisation. Or personally for or against the American president."
It is cartoon politics based on insecurity and the desperate need for protection in an anarchic world full of threats. Cartoon politics because it is no longer about a security arrangement with the US. It is about an image of Australia; an image of Australia as pale reflection of the US. That is why many Australians critically talk about Australia becoming the 51st state of the US.They have a different image of Australia; one that that reflects Australia's different (social democratic) pathway in modernity to that taken by the US.
This is an article on Leo Strauss and American foreign policy of the neo-cons. According to Strauss, the purpose of foreign policy is or ought to be survival and independence, or self-preservation, and nothing else of the good city. The fundamental rightness or wrongness of political action or policy in international relations depends on the rightness or wrongness of the political regime which it supports. For the classics, justice, or what Strauss called natural right, is to be found in the best political order, or, to use his term, the best political regime.
So the foreign policy of a sensible nation is never devoted to the good of other nations, except to the extent that the good of another nation accidentally happens to promote one's own nation's existence. For the same reason, a sensible nation will not engage in imperial expansion for its own aggrandizement—though it might have to do so for its own survival.
An excerpt from John B. Judis' Folly of Empire. It is pretty goood. Let me highlight some remarks:
The first is about the philosophy underpinning the foreign policy of the Clinton Whitehouse. John Judis says that these years:
"... represented a triumph of Wilsonianism. Yet, during this period, conservative Republicans challenged Wilson's legacy. The most vocal dissenters included the second and third generation of the neoconservatives who had helped shape U.S. President Ronald Reagan's domestic and foreign policy. They declared their admiration for the Theodore Roosevelt of the 1890s and the United States' first experiment with imperialism. Some, including Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal, called on the United States to unambiguously “embrace its imperial role.” Like neo-isolationist and nationalist Republicans, they scorned international institutions and rejected the idea of collective security. But unlike them, neoconservatives strongly advocated using U.S. military and economic power to transform countries and regions in the United States' image."
"Al Qaeda and its terrorist network were latter-day products of the nationalist reaction to Western imperialism. These Islamic movements shared the same animus toward the West and Israel that older nationalist and Marxist movements did. They openly described the enemy as Western imperialism. Where they differed from the older movements was in their reactionary social outlook, particularly toward women, and in their ultimate aspiration to restore the older Muslim empire to world dominance. But after September 11, as Washington tried to understand what had happened, the neoconservatives insisted that these movements were simply the products of a deranged Islam, inflamed by irrational resentment of —in the words of historian Bernard Lewis—“America's freedom and plenty.” The neoconservatives discounted the galvanizing effect that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Western power in the region had on radical Islam."
"In trying to bring the Middle East into a democratic 21st century, Bush took it—and the United States—back to the dark days at the turn of the last century. Administration officials deeply misunderstood the region and its history. They viewed the Iraqis under Saddam the same way that Americans once viewed the Filipinos under the Spanish or the Mexicans under dictator Huerta—as victims of tyranny who, once freed, would embrace their American conquerors as liberators.Bush resolved the contradiction between imperialism and liberation simply by denying that the United States was capable of acting as an imperial power. He assumed that by declaring his support for a “democratic Middle East,” he had inoculated Americans against the charge of imperialism. But, of course, the United States and Britain had always claimed the highest motives in seeking to dominate other peoples. McKinley had promised to “civilize and Christianize the Filipinos.” What mattered was not expressed motives, but methods; and the Bush administration in Iraq, like the McKinley administration in the Philippines, invaded, occupied, and sought to dominate a people they were claiming to liberate."
The strength of the Judis article is that it shows the hsitorical roots of the imperial presidency in American history:
"Americans have always believed they have a special role to play in transforming the world, and their understanding of empire and imperialism has proven critical to this process. America's founders believed their new nation would lead primarily by example, but the imperialists of the 1890s believed the United States could create an empire that would eventually dwarf the rival European empires. The difference would be that America's empire would reflect its own special values."
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."
"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."
"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."
We now shift to the third part of Chapter One. That chapter is titled World order, whilst its third part is called Universal values. Hardt and Negri start it by asking a good question:
"We might well ask at this point, however, should we still use the juridical term "right" in this context? How can we call right (and specifically imperial right) a series of techniques that, founded on a state of permanent exception and the power of the police, reduces right and law to a question of pure effectiveness?"
The brief remarks at the end of the previous post were about thinking of Empire as imperial right in positive terms. With these remarks Hardt and Negri moved from The Constitution of Empire section of Chapter 1 of Empire to The Model of Imperial Authority section.
So how should we think of Empire positively? Hardt and Negri say that:
"The new paradigm is both system and hierarchy, centralized construction of norms and far-reaching production of legitimacy, spread out over world space. It is configured ab initio as a dynamic and flexible systemic structure that is articulated horizontally.... Some call this situation "governance without government" to indicate the structural logic, at times imperceptible but always and increasingly effective, that sweeps all actors within the order of the whole. The systemic totality has a dominant position in the global order, breaking resolutely with every previous dialectic and developing an integration of actors that seems linear and spontaneous. At the same time, however, the effectiveness of the consensus under a supreme authority of the ordering appears ever more clearly. All conflicts, all crises, and all dissensions effectively push forward the process of integration and by the same measure call for more central authority. Peace, equilibrium, and the cessation of conflict are the values toward which everything is directed."
Hardt and Negri go on to think of this 'governance without government' in machine terms, rather than the world spirit conception of Hegel. They say:
"The development of the global system (and of imperial right in the first place) seems to be the development of a machine that imposes procedures of continual contractualization that lead to systemic equilibria-a machine that creates a continuous call for authority. The machine seems to predetermine the exercise of authority and action across the entire social space. Every movement is fixed and can seek its own designated place only within the system itself, in the hierarchical relationship accorded to it. This preconstituted movement defines the reality of the process of the imperial constitutionalization of world order-the new paradigm."
Is this the influence of Deleuze and Guattari?
I will try and read two texts together: Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Hardt and Negri's Empire.
Why? As I mentioned in yesterday's post I think that Empire works within the broad philosophical tradition of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.
Here is Hegel. The quote is para. 333 and it is on international law:
"The fundamental proposition of international law (i.e. the universal law which ought to be absolutely valid between states, as distinguished from the particular content of positive treaties) is that treaties, as the ground of obligations between states, ought to be kept. But since the sovereignty of a state is the principle of its relations to others, states are to that extent in a state of nature in relation to each other. Their rights are actualised only in their particular wills and not in a universal will with constitutional powers over them. This universal proviso of international law therefore does not go beyond an ought-to-be, and what really happens is that international relations in accordance with treaty alternate with the severance of these relations."
"There is no Praetor to judge between states; at best there may be an arbitrator or a mediator, and even he exercises his functions contingently only, i.e. in dependence on the particular wills of the disputants. Kant had an idea for securing 'perpetual peace' by a League of Nations to adjust every dispute. It was to be a power recognised by each individual state, and was to arbitrate in all cases of dissension in order to make it impossible for disputants to resort to war in order to settle them. This idea presupposes an accord between states; this would rest on moral or religious or other grounds and considerations, but in any case would always depend ultimately on a particular sovereign will and for that reason would remain infected with contingency."
"It follows that if states disagree and their particular wills cannot be harmonised, the matter can only be settled by war."
"....its aim in relation to other states and its principle for justifying wars and treaties is not a universal thought (the thought of philanthropy) but only its actually injured or threatened welfare as something specific and peculiar to itself."
"The fact that states reciprocally recognise each other as states remains, even in war — the state of affairs when rights disappear and force and chance hold sway — a bond wherein each counts to the rest as something absolute. Hence in war, war itself is characterised as something which ought to pass away. It implies therefore the proviso of, the jus gentium — that the possibility of peace be retained (and so, for example, that envoys must be respected), and, in general, that war be not waged against domestic institutions, against the peace of family and private life, or against persons in their private capacity."
What appears to have dropped away is the category of right. Nation-states do not appear to relate to one another on the basis of right. It is self-interest, recognition and custom. The category of right, which figured so strongly within the nation-state, does little work in the international areana.
It is this lack that Hardt and Negri address. The juridical concept of Empire, they say, needs to be developed because of the shift in postmodernity. Towards the end of chapter 1.1 they describe this shift. They say that today:
"...the enemy, just like the war itself, comes to be at once banalized (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy, an absolute threat to the ethical order). The Gulf War [1991] gave us perhaps the first fully articulated example of this new epistemology of the concept."
This is an interesting paper. It is by Lisa Martin and it is on multilateralism. She says:
"I begin by examining the concept of multilateralism, both in theory and in history. I then turn to an analysis of multilateralism, asking why the United States turned to multilateralism after World War II and evaluating its payoffs. The final section applies the insights developed in the rest of the paper to the future of multilateral organizations. It concludes that the current policy of “ad hoc multilateralism,” or turning to multilateral organizations opportunistically, fundamentally misunderstands the nature and motivation for multilateralism. Such a policy is therefore likely to fail, leaving the United States with a stark choice between expensive unilateralism and needing to rebuild its reputation as a reliable participant in multilateral endeavors."
"Multilateralism is remarkable in that it does not give a privileged position to the hegemon. If generalized operating principles are put into place, the hegemon is subject to the same rules as others. As noted above, multilateral principles were not respected fully. Yet it is striking that this immensely powerful state championed principles and norms that served to bind itself; it created institutions that were premised on the notion that even the United States would play by the rules it asked others to accept."
The rules of multilateralsim implied some notion of moral obligation and duty.
It is easy to notice but it is hard to break out of. And it bothers me.
When watching the television news about the Middle East have you noticed the simplification, that reach for the easy cliche? The media represents the conflict between two sides, Israeli's and Palestinians? Its an eternal struggle between white and black; or even a bitter personal conflict between Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat. The complexities of geopolitics and the history do not matter here. And it is unclear where this discourse in media stand on the two state solution. (Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side in peace). It appears that this is tacitly rejected in the media because the Palestinians are assumed to not only want to reclaim the occupied territories but to destroy Israel.
Oh I know, that is the media. We all know that. The media has become infotainment. It (the commercial media) is ever heedful of the bottom line and the low attention span of the channel-jumping consumers. But the public media (the ABC in Australia) are no different. Their representations are black and white as well. They just give a different content to the black and white to the commercial media.
The ABC is more sympathetic to the Palestinians, whilst the commerical media are more sympathetc to the Israeli's. Each inverts the hierarchy of the duality. But generally, in Australia, the Israelis are good guys whilst the Palestinians are the bad guys. It is okay for the Israeli military forces under Prime Minister Sharon to counter terrorism by destroying the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority and the structure of a future Palestinan state.
I'm sure you have noticed the duality in the daily news as well. It bothers me, especially when I post on the subject at public opinion. And I search the Internet for media that would allow me to escape the rigid duality----to prise it open with some geopolitics and history. I don't suceed (for various reasons). I slip back into academic stance of the birds eye view, even though I know that I write from a situated perspective. ( My sympathies are with the Palestinian people because of their suffering from the occupation of their homeland.) But how do we begin to think differently on this?
I know that many Israelis and Palestinians do not agree with the policies and actions of Sharon and Arafat-----their voices are full of dissent and resistance and their strength comes from a love for their country. Recognizing this diversity or difference is a step out of the hierarchal duality onto some new terrain. But then I get lost.
To put in a philosophical way I am not able to put the categories of this discourse into question. In being self-reflexive I can see that I have reversed or reprivileged the hierarchy of the given Israel/Palestinian duality, and so naively passed to the other side of the discourse. But I have not been able to reinscribed the newly privileged term through extending its range and scope.
What I end up doing is puzzling about the straitjacket as I search for help out of the media flybottle. Well I have find something to help and just by chance. Its a little post on a weblog. It was right under my nose. Others had noticed and linked but I didn't see it.
The opening is here The 'Why Israel and Palestine are not morally equivalent' is
a great and courageous post.
I have some quibbles.
First, an ontological one. Consider this remark by Scott that "Jews are not a collective. They are just a collection."
Well no. Jews are not a bunch of stones lying on the ground. We are talking about the Jews as people, then they are a collective, made so by their social relations, culture and history. They are a people who located themselves in a particular to become a nation. They have constructed a state to enable them to do this. It is the relationships that are crucial not just the things.
This is important difference. Consider Scott's next remark:
"Now, this is the key point of this whole post: The Palestinians are a collection, and are therefore incapable of being responsible for terrorism. Hamas is a collective. Fatah is a collective. Al-Qaeda is a collective. They are capable of bearing collective responsibility for terrorism. The Palestinians are not."
Hamas is a collective but so are the Palestinan people, though they are a different kind of collective to military organization. The Palestinan people are bonded by their social relations, culture, and their historical experience of Israel's occupation of their territory. And they have some responsiblity for the terrorism since it is a weapon and tactic which they deploy as a people to defend themselves against an occupying army, the demolition of their houses and the settlements. They do not have tanks, an army, an airforce or a navy funded by an imperial power.
Same with the dissident Jewish people. As citizens they see themselves as having responsibility to fight the occupation and settlements. They see it as a form of colonialism with all its arrogance and inhumanity embodied in its methods of suppressing the local population, seizing land and giving settlers superior legal status. These voices of refusal fight for an other kind of Israel.
Now I agree with Scott's next remark:
"You need do little more than turn on the news to hear someone in the Arab world saying that "the Americans" and "the Israelis" are responsible for whatever injustices they feel aggrieved by. It's easy to get from there to concluding that you are justified in killing Americans and Israelis in response. If they said America and Israel were responsible,I wouldn't be nearly so bothered. Sometimes, I might even agree. It's a lot harder to go from America is doing something bad to Americans must die."
I accept the distinction being made here between a people--the Israeli's ---and the state--Israel. Some sections of the Israeli people are in opposition to the state's actions of occupation and those sections of the Israeli people (the settler movement and ultra-Orthodox communty) who support the state. The Palestinians, in contrast, do not have a state as Scott rightly points out. They have Hamas and Fatah but not a state. One day perhaps the Palestinian Authority might become a state of the Palestinian people.
So what is the point of difference between Scott and myself? One has to do with nationalism. My understanding of a people is that they are nation. Scott says that he hate nationalism because it:
"It makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a battle between two "nations" - two of the same sort of thing - instead of what it really is: a conflict between the Israeli state and a bunch of people called Palestinians."
Well not quite. It is a military conflict---a war--between the Israeli state and Hamas and Fatah etc.
Scott continues and introduces a bigger point. He says that nationalism:
"helps people to confuse collections with collectives. It encourages "us vs. them" sorts of thinking, preventing people from recognising how their conflicts are with collectives rather than with groups of individuals. The outcome of that sort of thinking is obvious enough: repression, collective punishment (which has to do with punishing collections for actions taken by collectives), ethnic cleansing and, in the most extreme cases, genocide."
Nationalism is equated with ethnicity here: an ethnic nationalism And this has given rise to proposals for ethnic cleansing in the form of planned explusions of the Arabs.It could be achieved through the Israeli state imprisoning Palestinians in enclaves surrounded by settlements stripping Arab Israeli's of their citizenship, then expelling all Palestinians from the country. Israel would then be ethnically pure. Beyond that strategy we have the right wing proposal to "transfer" all Palestinians out of Palestine.
But there are different forms of nationalism. For instance, You can fight colonialism (Indians against British rule) or imperialism to defend your country and people from suffering and oppression (Vietminese against the Americans) Dissident Israels can, and do, fight the settlement process and Israel dominion over the occupied territories in the name of the other Israel.
But Israeli nationalism could be a civic one anchored in western liberal values. It did develop a democratic government from the authoritarian David Ben-Gurion days. What can do is to develop a multiple ethnicity----one state two peoples. We can then redescribe ethnic nationalism as cultural nationalism However, integration in liberal democracies is not dependent upon cultural nationalist assimilation policies in the face of cultural heterogeneity. Given this cultural heterogeneity in Israel, a state-sponsored nationalist projects of cultural assimilation may be both ineffective and counterproductive to the goal of integration. One state two cultures may well be an option.
Scott's responsibility claim will have to wait.
I heard Gerard Henderson this morning on Radio National talking about the impact of the neo-cons on the Bush administration. I picked up my ears, as this word has filtered through the layers of media flows of late. I thought it would be interesting to see what he said, considering that he is marketed as having his finger on the political pulse of Australian political life. For those who don't know abou these things, Gerard has the inside running and he just a phone call away from the movers and shakers. We are meant to be impressed. So if anyone in Australia knew what the world looked from the eye of the US eagle it would be Gerard.
Gerard sold himself well in his few minutes on air. He mentioned names, background and personal encounters of the neo-con movement. It was impressive to someone like me whose lot in life is to live on the margins of academia and public life. He then discounted their influence on the Bush administration. There's no need to bother finding about them was the message that came across the airwaves. I went back to eating my breakfast.
Gerard made no mention of geopolitics, power strategies in the Middle East, or even the transfer of Palestinans by the Israeli state. Gerard also gave no indication of the theoretical strategic framework developed by the neo-cons within which the Bush adminstration is working. Gerard is good on assessing the political chit chat of the day but is poor on the concept. He has no idea about the movement of the concept that this weblog of public philosophy goes on about. From the perpective of some living on the margins and anxious to keep their criticsl distance from everything, Gerard sounded as if he was out of his depth on all the geo-political stuff. Then most commentators are. It is political philosophy, and few people in public life in Australia have much time for philosophy. Diehard empiricists one and all with no feeling for the conceptual structure of culture in my considered judgement.
The concerns of this article by Josh Marshall, who also works over at Talking Points Memo, is what Gerard should have addressed this morning, if he knew his stuff. Marshall addresses the possibility of future chaos in the Middle East, due to US neo-con geopolitical strategy in the region. This is what Josh Marshall says about the US neo-con Middle East strategy:
"In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints.
In short, the administration is trying to roll the table--to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative--Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria--while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments--or, failing that, U.S. troops--rule the entire Middle East."
This develops the view of Gary at his public opinion weblog. It provides the background to the thesis of blowback from the Iraqi war on the Indonesian region, and the impact this will have on Australia. Of course, blowback from the Iraqi war is what is denied by the Howard government; denied in the sense of a deception of the hawks in the Howard government deceiving the Australian citizens about pre-emptive strike, the destablizing of Indonesia, launching pre-emptive strikes in Indonesia, and making Islam the enemy. However, blowback is the reason why many foreign policy people, defence analysts, intelligence officers, including many in the Department of Foreign Affairs, view the Howard Government's foreign policy with alarm. And rightfully so.
Many reject the chaos scenario in the Middle East out of hand. They talk about bold American action in Iraq leading to the democratization of the Middle East. Theirs is an argument for hope. However, as Marshall says, it is the heady vision of the broad and radical neo-con initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. The Australian hawks have a quick response to this: a full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam is inevitable. So why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs?Of course you never hear it spoken in public by a member of the Howard Government.
What Gerard Henderson did on Radio National was gatekeeping. He cover all of the above up, with his 'no need to worry' script that said the US neo-cons don't amount to much. In saying this he was basically following Howard's script of deflect, deflect; cover, cover, cover; dissemble, dissemble. Keep the wraps on. Keep the covers there. Blowback from the neo-strategy in the Middle East would not play well with Australian public opinion.
The strategic intellectual framework is important because it gives us an insight into how the Australian hawks (eg., John Howard) think. They basically accept the US neo-con view or political ideology.
Joshua Marshall is very clear on what this stands for in the Middle East.
Marshall describes the neo-con ideology as follows:
"The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world's endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism.
Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States...Trying to "manage" this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?"
One can add that Australian hawks have rejected the Hawke/Keating view of an independent foreign policy within the US alliance, regional cooperation and dialogue and working through the UN. They are in favor of using power against potentially hostile states and doing so in a unilateral fashion and getting the Islamic militants in Indonesia before these terrorists get us.
Marshall then draws attention to what is wrong with the US. necocon strategy. He makes some good points.
1. "every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Why will it be any different this time?"
2. The cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem of the tyrannies in the Middle East being home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we've ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won't get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.
3.Laying down the law and being a global cop will not be enough. Keeping order to prevent chaos in an anarchic requires the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. This will create political resistance in which radical Arab political movements try to drive the US out.
4. Iran will not take the establsihment of US power in the region lying down, nor will the conservative in power in Iraq embrace the deepening of liberal democracy in that country without a fight.
5. creating a democratic, self-governing Iraq will not easy given the ethnic conflict within Iraq between Kurds, Shi'ite and Sunni Muslems?
Marshall's judgement is that the Anglo-Americans are stepping into a hornets nest with this neo-con strategy---- what Marshall calls
"giving a few good whacks to a hornets' nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources---Muslim fundamentalism...."
He then mentions a central problem. Bush, Howard or Blair have not leveled with their citizens that The Anglo-Americans are engaged in is a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East, neo-con style. All that these politicians have presented to their citizens is a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The eason for the deception? The Bush administration's grand neo-con geo-political strategy in the Middle East would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that.
Nor can John Howard sell it to Australian citizens. Tony Blair is in the same boat in Britain. So the Anglo-American leaders haven't really tried. Instead, they have focused on getting us into Iraq knowing that this action will set off a sequence of events with enormous conseqences, which they hope to be able to shape in line with their agenda. The problem for Australia is that the Indonesians and Malaysians know this. They've figured it out. And they are not happy.
One way of gaining a perspective on current American actions in the Middle East is to look at it from through the strategic policy eyes of the past. Lets go back 20 years or so and revisit the Carter Doctrine. On 23 January 1980, in his State of the Union Address, President Jimmy Carter announced a new American policy that came to be called the Carter Doctrine. Referring to the recent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter warned that:
"An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force."
The then President of the US sought to persuade the world that American interests in and around the Persian Gulf were so vital that the United States would fight if necessary to protect them. What Carter was saying is saying is that oil resources of the Persian Gulf War were vital to U.S. security and so he pledged in his Carter Doctrine to defend U.S interests there 'by any means necessary including military force.'
This doctrine restates a central American policy since 1945 to ensure that the United States would always have unrestrained access to Persian Gulf oil. The instruments hae varied. The United States initially relied on Great Britain to protect American access to the Gulf. When Britain pulled out of the Middle East region in 1971, the US then chose to rely on the Shah of Iran. When, the Shah was overthrown by Islamic militants loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 Washington decided that it would have to assume responsibility on its own to protect the oil flow. Hence the Carter doctrine.
Fast forward to the present. Is not the current president of the US, George W. Bush carrying out this doctrine? Consider a speech given by Vice President Dick Cheney on August 26, 2002 before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. It is stated that:
"Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop ten percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail.
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth."
Is this not the Carter Doctrine with a few more bells and whistles? The Iraqi regime threatens vital US interests in the region. Containment does not work. So it must be taken out. Is this saying that the regime must be removed because of the potential threat it poses to the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the US and its allies?
Now this makes a lot of sense. It is Daniel Mahoney's War of words: a diversion from true battle on the conflict between the US and France. It critically addresses the common view of "many Americans (and Australians) that French policy is fundamentally irrational, and that it is guided by nothing more than a reckless desire to obstruct US efforts to deal with terrorist threats in a post 9/11 world."
Daniel says:
"It is no doubt a good deal of fun for stand-up comedians, syndicated columnists and internet bloggers to mock French cowardice and to exaggerate the extent to which anti-Americanism underscores French foreign policy.
But these popular expressions of anti-French sentiment overlook some crucial distinctions. In my view, French foreign policy is guided by considerations of national interest that are not reducible to crude anti-Americanism, no matter what the talking heads say. And French intellectual life long ago ceased to be dominated by the crass anti-Americanism and leftism that Revel rightly continues to excoriate."
The minimium that we should do is make a distinction between anti-Americanism in Europe ( and Australia) and being critical of the conduct of the US on the world stage. The long journalist essay by Eric Alterman, called' Red, white and blues, which can be found in Australian Financial Review(22 Feb. 2003, p. 41ff. archived, payment required) does just that. In this piece Alterman Alterman usefully explores the distinction between anti-Americanism and critically taking issue with the neo-con policies of the Bush Administration. It is hardly anti-American to take issue with the Bush administration's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming; its opposition to further restrictions on nuclear weapons tests or land mines, or its antagonism to other existing and projected international accords.
If anti-Americanism is not the key to understanding French foreign policy, then what is? Scott Wickstein acknowledges this. He says:
"Hostility to American policy is clearly part of [current French actions], but that isn't really a sufficient explaination- such levels of hostility to American policy are evident in Australia, yet the Australian government has been one of the US government's strongest supporters. Nor the Muslim minority, which is also present in the UK. I have no idea what is driving the French government on such a reckless course, but it's quite potent, whatever it is."
Daniel gives us a clue, when he says:
"The people around Chirac, such as Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, are a sober lot and are generally immune to ideological anti-Americanism of the Left and the Right. They have genuine concerns about American imperial overreach, concerns that should not be dismissed out of hand without further consideration. "
The phrase that is of interest is 'American imperial overreach'. John Quiggin uses 'world hegemon' in his 'Pick your hegemon' post , by which he means "one country with unquestioned military superiority over all others and the right to use it as and when it sees fit."
The classic word for hegemon is empire or imperial power. This means that after 9/11 the national security state under the Bush administration considers that the best way protect the US is to achieve national security through the strategy of empire. This means that the US will shape, coerce or structure the international system of nation states under its enlightened hegemony that furthers its national interest.
'Overreach', refers to both the strategy of empire going beyond the resources of the US economy and the backlash that it would create amongst other nation-states and people. They would then seek an insurance policy to protect themselves from American military power.
I have taken a bit of flack in the past for suggesting that the US has taken the path to empire as a way to bring order into a chaotic world of nation-states. American patriots dislike the word empire. Their objection has been that this means the US is enslaving/colonizing other nation-states--'determined efforts on our part to subjugate and dominate the people' says William A Whittle that amounts to imperialism. yet the historical record since 1945 shows otherwise (Europe, Japan, Korea and Iraq in 1991. As Whittle says:
"For the first time in history, a nation powerful enough to rule world has simply refused to do so. It is a moral and ethical choice we make as a people. More than that; it is data. It is evidence...There is no American Empire."
The objection is true. But things cannot be left standing there. Not all Americans think that way. See here But what if empire here is not meant in the bad sense of conquering or pacifying dangerous corners of the world inhabited by terrorists and rogue states and ocupying, their lands and incoporating them into the nation state? The key word is enlightened, as this refers to the civilising mission of the US in world affairs. That means that the US establishes it hegemony through liberal democracy, liberal markets and free trade and brings other nation states under its sphere of influence.
William Whittle in his great essay on empireacknowledges this when he says that:
"We are an empire of the mind, a place whose dreams and ideals have colonized the world. We are a black hole of desire upon which billions place their unfocused hopes. And yet, to them it seems as if we turn them away. We dangle freedom and hope and comfort in front of them with a glimpse into our everyday lives though television and movies."
Now America is not just another nation-state equal amongst others. It is a superpower able to shape the course of events in a way that Australia never could. Is it not then a hegemonic state? William Whittle acknowledges this possibility in the sense of having “authority over others”; only he goes to reject this in terms of cultural imperialism of US pop culture over elitist Europen culture. He says that that American culture is an expression of American myths, fantasies and dreams that "come from our common heritage and our common beliefs'.
He adds, linking Stephen de Beste that these are attractive to Europeans and the Arab street. They are attracted by the American ethos of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which is and deep and strong foundation upon which the edifice of prosperity and success is built. It is what they---we ---do not have.
This is a patriotic celebration of the American way of life. But it does not addess the issue of American military power in the world of nations; nor acknowledge the mechanisms used by the national security state to protect its national interestby shaping the conduct of other nation-states. Basically the US has shrugged off its traditional isolationism, and under the Bush administration it now seeks security through empire. Security through empire is the ethos of the US as a national security state.
The US aims to achieve stability in a disordered world through bothopening up the protective walls of other nation-states to liberal democracy and markets, and using its military power to assimilating them into an over-reaching order. It is able to establish this order because it is a global power. Such a state has military power which it is willing to use to further its interests. This is an imperial state as has a strategic design to shape the conduct of the world of nations as well. That global strategy used to be one of deterrence and containment (close to 50 years), which was deployed against the Soviet Union when it too was a superpower.
That global strategy has been rejected by the neo-con hawks in the Bush administration in favour of an aggressive unilateralism centred around a pre-emptive strike against those nation states, such as Iraq, who challenge US interests. Its antagonism to the UN indicates that the US wants as little constraiint on its potential military actions as possible---it desires absolute freedom.
It is strategy that is resulting in an American occupation of Iraq, a military presence in Afghanistan, central Asia, the Gulf and Turkey to ensure that political shifts in the rest of the region facilitate US interests.
And Europe? On this empire model the US would act to hinder, forestall or prevent an autonomous federated Europe that has sufficient economic, political and military muscle to challenge US hegemony. Europe's autonomous action would destablise the way a hegemonic US orders the world of nation-states. In 'The crisis in NATO: A geopolitical earthquake?' Gabriel Kolko argues this in relation to NATO"
"When the Soviet Union capsized over a decade ago, NATO's nominal rationale for existence died with it. But the principal reason for its creation - to forestall European autonomy - remains...Long before September 11, 2001, Washington was determined to avoid the serious constraints [on its smilitary operations]that NATO could impose. The only question was of timing and how the United States would escape NATO's clear obligations while maintaining its hegemony over its members. It wanted to preserve NATO for the very reason it had created it; to keep Europe from developing an independent political as well as military organisation."
Kolko says that:
"Coordinating NATO's command structure with that of any all-European military organization that may be created impinges directly on America's power over Europe's actions and reflects its deep ambiguity....Washington has decided that its allies must now accept its objectives and work solely on its terms, and it has no intention whatsoever of discussing the merits of its actions in NATO conferences. "
On this account the resistance to US strategic design comes from France and Germany. Unlike Australia, which accept US objectives and work solely on US terms, a united Germany and France are asserting their independence and acting in terms of their national interests. They are hostile to the attempts by the US to regain the mastery over Europe it had during the peak of the Cold War and deeply critical of determined of the Bush administration not to be bound by European concerns and interests.
As Kolko says:
"Washington cannot have it both ways. Its commitment to aggressive unilateralism is the antithesis of an alliance system that involves real consultation. France and Germany are now far too powerful to be treated as obsequious dependents. They also believe in sovereignty, as does every nation which is strong enough to exercise it."
This then is the answer to the question that Scott Wickstein raised about what drives the French government to take on the US over Iraq. Australia may be content to be a dependent on the US---but not France or Germany. Why should they? Chutney at MyIrony puts it so well. She uses Simone Weil to suggest that oppressive power gets too big for its britches. Sums up what France and Germany would be thinking rather well, don't you think. rather neatly, don't you think?
Kolko concludes his article with this judgement and warning for the neo-con hawks in the Bush administration:
"The reality is that the world is increasingly multipolar, economically and technologically, and that the US' desire to maintain absolute military superiority over the world is a chimera."
It is a chimera because of both the overreach of empire and the impossibility of absolute freedom in a world of nation-states. See Chutney's Empire strikes back for some good insights on this overreach from an American perspective.