Brian Holmes on Tue, 11 Mar 2003 19:22:19 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Re: There is no America and Europe |
This text by Bifo - INTERNATIONAL FUTURE HUMANITY - is very good, it has already been circulating in France on the Multitudes list, and I thank Tiziana and whoever translated it to English, if indeed it was someone else. In this case, I agree with almost all of Bifo's points. Basically I think that what we are seeing now is a rift within Empire. As I already said in the text, "We Plebeians." But a rift does not necessarily mean a division into two blocs, with a European bloc emerging to claim a kind of social-democratic legitimacy, against an American bloc that claims sovereignty through military might. This would be the worst of outcomes. The rift that is opening up now is one between the essential and opposed dynamics of globalization: sovereign control and constituent power. The European bloc has no legitimacy. It is in desperate lack of legitimacy. Bifo asks: "Can we consider the great Europe [I think that means "greater Europe," after enlargement], the Europe of the national states and of the powerful financial capital, as a force that is capable of imposing respect for human rights?" The answer is no. The Europe that has been planned from the top down over the last 20 years, and increasingly since Maastricht, has become a distorted reflection of NAFTA, a figure shaped by the kind of corporate cooperation-in-rivalry which has been the very definition of globalization as a state-capitalist project. Even if the current assertion of European difference by France and Germany were to succeed in recomposing Europe around these two strategically partnered nations and their "vision of the world," what would that bring? A European hierarchy in which the established social lobbies within the large core states (I mean, the big corporations, major trade unions and state and military bureaucrats) impose their priorities on the whole, creating a semblance of social democracy for a limited sector of the working population, and a control regime of exploitation and exclusion for the majority, especially those on the European fringes (but you have to realize that the same kind of inclusion/exclusion hierarchy gets reiterated in the centers too - 'cause that's where it's invented). The racism that Are Flanagan describes in his post (The Race for War) is the natural extreme of the inclusion/exclusion logic, which is at the very center of capitalism. And this is obviously a dead-end future, because it will lead further down the road of inequality and violence that has brought us to the present moment. I think that many, many people in and around the European region and throughout the world are aware of this, and we have to make it clear: the resistance to the Irak war is founded on resistance to the deadly dynamics of a profiteering world system, one that pays no attention to problems of human development, a system that has exclusion as its norm, and therefore only has military solutions to offer when societies start to collapse. Europe must be transformed, it must be shaken to the roots by a constituent movement that replaces the priorities of money and competition with those of human development, ecological sustainability, world solidarity. It's clear to me that Bush's policy is itself an attempt at a military solution to the problems of American society. Bush wants to get re-elected in a situation where the economy is in a shambles and the pressure on society due to unemployment, alienation and fear, is rising. Bush and his crowd think they can cover up this crisis by terrorizing Americans through the manipulation of the media, then mobilizing their terror into the forms of superpatriotism and military discipline. Bifo is totally right when he says that the resistance movement within the USA is going to be the key to the future of the world. If ever Americans "reelect" the "president" - who wasn't even "elected" the first time - then it looks like history repeats itself, and we're going to have something like the 1930s to look forward to. But I think Americans will reject Bush, as they rejected his father, no less ugly and warlike than himself. More Americans are refusing his policies every day. And I think the English will massively reject Blair if he goes to war without any kind of mandate, and they will make it politically impossible for any such usurpation of democracy to ever happen again, because we're going to see more people on the streets, more people taking principled positions at every level of society, than ever before. People in America will do this at least partially because they do not want to live in a bloc going it alone, just as no sane person in Europe wants to live in a world of rival blocs and military solutions. That's what we're protesting against. I think that the worldwide peace movement, plus the dissolution or at least the severe strain of the old alliances (NATO, UN, Anglo-American special relationship, etc) could possibly force a rift in Empire. That means a rift between globalization as a Euro-American project in the service of capital, on the one hand, and globalization as the constituent movement of the world's populations realizing their interconnectedness and interdependence, on the other. It doesn't necessarily mean that the world is going to retreat into nationalisms of any kind (countries or blocs). That's the worst outcome. The world has to find a way of living together, first to get through the economic crisis that's happening right now, then to get through all the other intense threats on the near horizon (ecological, military, social). To do this there has to be much more legitimacy, much more reciprocity and real solidarity than there is in world affairs right now, which were dominated in the 90s by the transnational coprate agenda, and now are on the verge of being dominated by a nationalist/regional bloc agenda. But the seeds of that reciprocity and solidarity are in germ right now - not at the power-play level of national strategies and European statescraft, but in the unprecedented mobilization and coordination of people around the world who simply refuse the kind of future that is offered by this war. The main thing is this: the war is going to be deadly quick. When it happens, protests have to be total. The strength of the protest will directly determine the shape of our lives over the next decade. Brian Holmes # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net