The State of Emergency and the Revival of American Imperialism: Toward an Authoritarian Post-Fordism
“September 11 changed the world—at least according to most Americans” ( Schmidt 2002: 3; my emphasis). So begins a recent article by the former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt in Die Zeit, the prestigious weekly newspaper. Schmidt argues that September 11 is actually a sign of continuity rather than a dramatic caesura and suggests that only Americans were really taken aback by it. According to Schmidt, American foreign policy did not change suddenly in the year after September 11, 2001, but instead had been moving in an increasingly imperialist direction for the past two decades. He suggests that this tendency became especially pronounced during the Clinton presidency, but he also lists a series of unilateral American military interventions dating from the Reagan era. In Schmidt’s view, this trajectory shows that the United States has increasingly understood itself as “the sole global superpower,” one that “no longer needed to consult with its European allies” or to “pay much attention to the interests of other nations.” This view is particularly interesting coming from one of the most conservative members of Germany’s Social Democratic Party and the chancellor who invited the United States to install its modernized missiles in Germany in the first half of the 1980s. But it is not at all unusual on the broadly defined political left.
A different “Left” argument for continuity since September 11 has been presented by Michael Hardt, coauthor with Antonio Negri of the widely discussed Empire (2000).1 Empire is an impressive attempt to theorize broad, epochal sociocultural transformations that had started well before September 11.2 Hardt and Negri also articulate their historical narrative with an explicit political/ethical program. Their critique of the naive anti-Americanism of some strands of the antiglobalization movement is based on an analysis of a very specific historical period that began with the end of the Cold War, when the United States did cede some authority to international coalitions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I am also sympathetic to the book’s deployment of the regulation-theoretic approach and its allied concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism. Hardt and Negri connect the rise of the unique political-juridical form they call Empire to the emergence of the post-Fordist mode of regulation.
I will argue here, however, that Empire should be understood as a historical reflection on the post-Fordist formation that crystallized in the 1990s and that is now coming to an end rather than a consideration of the present and the future. Hardt and Negri’s arresting portrait of Empire is undercut by an explanatory framework that suffers from many of the epistemological shortcomings of traditional Marxism. The authors’ residual reductionism and their adherence to a Marxian end-of-history story line prevent them from grasping the transitory nature of the relatively decentered political formation that they call “Empire.” In addition to the political shock of September 11 and the ensuing war on terrorism, the 1990s also differed in other ways from the current period. As Slavoj Z? iz?ek (2002: 110) points out, this was a period in which there was no dominant “schematization” of the “figure of the Enemy” around a single “central image.” Capitalist profit rates were so satisfying as to make this lack unproblematic. Nor was there anything like September 11 during this decade: no direct and radical attack on the American node in the network of global capitalism. The ideological, political, and economic conditions for the decentered, multivalent system of Empire described by Hardt and Negri thus seem to have disappeared in the past year and a half. The question now is: Which of these conditions are being replaced and which of them retained? What sort of political-juridical form and what kind of regulatory framework are emerging?
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Notes
I am grateful to Julia Adams, Michael Hardt, Julia Hell, Webb Keane, Jeff Paige, Ian Robinson, and participants in the Anthropology and History colloquium at the University of Michigan, 7 December 2001, for responses to an earlier version of this essay.
- Michael Hardt discussed the applicability of the arguments in Empire to understanding global realities after September 11 in a colloquium on “states of emergency” at the University of Michigan, 7 December 2001.
- Reviews by Gopal Balakrishnan (2000), Malcom Bull (2001), Akseli Virtanen (2001), and David Pedersen (2001) are among the best. Alan Wolfe (2001) and Roger Kimball (2001) are not only more hostile; they also distort Hardt and Negri’s argument to fit their own agendas. Kimball (2001) argues that “books like Empire are not innocent academic inquiries” but instead “incitements to violence and terrorism”—despite the fact that Islamic fundamentalism is explicitly analyzed by Hardt and Negri as a wrongheaded attempt to move backward in time against Empire rather than moving through Empire and “coming out on the other side.” The fact that the book was written to combat mindless anti- Americanism by celebrating the positive tendencies of the U.S. Constitution is lost on this author, whose review is entitled “The New Anti-Americanism.” Wolfe’s (2001) analysis is more subtle but nonetheless slips into the tone of the new McCarthyism in sentences like the following: “Their book gives no grounds on which such attacks [on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon] can be condemned.” Wolfe suggests that for Hardt and Negri, “being against the West is the sine qua non of good and effective protest.” In fact, one of the mantras of Empire is that “the West” is no longer the center of power and, indeed, that it no longer really exists. Hardt and Negri’s critique of postcolonial theory, for instance, is that it falls into the binary thinking associated with the earlier period of imperialism by resisting the West, thereby mistaking “today’s real enemy” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 137). Nonetheless, Wolfe points to real problems with the book’s undifferentiated hatred for “the state” in any and all of its forms and its inability to distinguish between right-wing and left-wing politics.