Anderson contd,
16 Page 17 18
anderson: Editorial 21
discipline on the system as a whole, in the common interests of all
parties. Such 'imposition' cannot be a product of brute force. It must
also correspond to a genuine capacity of persuasion? ideally, a form of
leader ship that can offer the most advanced model of production and
culture of its day, as target of imitation for all others. That is the defini-tion
of hegemony, as a general unification of the field of capital.
But at the same time, the hegemon must? can only? be a particular
state: as such, inevitably possessed of a differential history and set of
national peculiarities that distinguish it from all others. This contradic-tion
is inscribed from the beginning, in Hegel's philosophy, in which the
necessity of the incarnation of reason in just one world-historical state,
in any given period, can never entirely erase the contingent multi plicity
of political forms around it. 11 Latently, the singular universal always
remains at variance with the empirical manifold. This is the conceptual
setting in which American 'exceptionalism' should be viewed. All states
are more or less exceptional, in the sense that they possess unique char-acteristics.
By definition, however, a hegemon will possess features that
cannot be shared by others, since it is precisely those that lift it above the
ruck of its rivals. But at the same time, its role requires it to be as close to
a generalizable? that is, reproducible? model as practicable. Squaring
this circle is, of course, in the end impossible, which is why there is an
inherent coefficient of friction in any hegemonic order. Structurally, a
discrepancy is built into the harmony whose function it is to install. In
this sense, we live in a world which is inseparably? in a way that neither
of them could foresee? both the past described by Lenin and the future
anticipated by Kautsky. The particular and the general are condemned to
each other. Union can only be realized by division.
In the notebooks he wrote in prison, Gramsci theorized hegemony as a
distinctive synthesis of 'domination' and 'direction', or a dynamic equi-librium
of force and consent. The principal focus of his attention was
on the variable ways in which this balance was achieved, or broken,
within national states. But the logic of his theory, of which he was aware,
extended to the international system as well. On this plane too, the
elements of hegemony are distributed asymmetrically. 12 Domination?
11 For this tension in Hegel's thought, see 'The Ends of History', A Zone of
Engagement, London 1992, p. 292. 12
For the asymmetry within any national state, see 'The Antinomies of Antonio
Gramsci', NLR I/ 100, November 1976? January 1977, p. 41. 17
17 Page 18 19
22 nlr 17
the exercise of violence as the ultimate currency of power? tends
necessarily towards the pole of particularity. The hegemon must possess
superior force of arms, a national attribute that cannot be alienated or
shared, as the first condition of its sway. Direction, on the other hand?
the ideological capacity to win consent? is a form of leadership whose
appeal is by definition general. This does not mean that a hege monic
synthesis therefore requires a persuasive structure that is as purely
international as its coercive structure must be irreducibly national. The
ideological system of a successful hegemon cannot derive solely from
its function of general coordination. It will inevitably also reflect the par-ticular
matrix of its own social history. 13 The less marked the distance
between these two, of course, the more effective it will be.
8
In the case of the United States, the degree of this gap? the closeness of
the join? is a reflection of the principal features of the country's past. A
large literature has been spent on the American exception. But the only
exceptionality that really matters? since all nations are in their way sui
generis? is the configuration that has founded its global hegemony. How
is this best expressed? It lies in the virtually perfect fit the country offers
between optimal geographical and optimal social conditions for capital-ist
development. That is: a continental scale of territory, resources and
market, protected by two oceans, that no other nation-state comes near
to possessing; and a settler-immigrant population forming a society with
virtually no pre-capitalist past, apart from its local inhabitants, slaves
and religious creeds, and bound only by the abstractions of a democratic
ideology. Here are to be found all the requirements for spectacular eco-nomic
growth, military power and cultural penetration. Politically, since
capital has always lorded it over labour to an extent unknown in other
advanced-industrial societies, the result is a domestic landscape well
to the right of them.
In Western Europe on the other hand, virtually all the terms of the
American equation are reversed. Nation-states are small or medium
in size, easily besieged or invaded; populations often go back to neo-lithic
times; social and cultural structures are saturated with traces of
13 In other words, the 'universal and homogeneous state' imagined by Alexandre
Koj?ve remains out of reach; for his conception, see A Zone of Engagement, pp. 315? 9 ff. 18
18 Page 19 20
anderson: Editorial 23
pre-capitalist origin; the balance of forces is less disadvantageous for
labour; by and large, religion is a played-out force. Consequently, the
centre of gravity of European political systems is to the left of the
American? more socially protective and welfarist, even under govern-ments
of the right. 14 In the relations between Europe and the US, there
is thus abundant material for all kinds of friction, even combustion.
It is no surprise that sparks have flown in the current tense situation.
The relevant political question, however, is whether these portend some
larger rift or modification in the balance of power between the two, as
the European Union acquires a stronger sense of its own identity.
Viewing the two capitalist centres comparatively, the contrast between
their international styles is clear enough. The characteristic European
approach to the New World Order is drawn from the internal experi-ence
of gradual integration within the EU itself: treaty-based diplomacy,
incremental pooling of sovereignty, legalistic attachment to formal rule-making,
voluble concern for human rights. American strategic practices,
based on a hub-and-spokes conception of inter-state relations, are blunter
and more bilateral. But US diplomacy has always had two languages:
one line descending from the macho axioms of Theodore Roosevelt, the
other from the presbyterian cant of Woodrow Wilson. 15 These are respec-tively,
the national and international idioms of American power. Whereas
in the early twentieth century, the latter was more alien to European
statecraft, today it has become the Atlantic raft to which EU susceptibili-ties
desperately cling. But both are quintessentially American. A great
deal of the recent commotion in the Democratic intellectual establish-ment
within the US has consisted of a reminder to the White House of
the need to offer the world a palatable blend of the two. 16 The National
14 Thus Berlusconi, epitome of the right most feared by the left in Europe, could
in many ways be said to stand to the left of Clinton, who built much of his career
in America on policies? delivering executions in Arkansas, scything welfare in
Washington? that would be unthinkable for any Prime Minister in Italy. 15
This is, of course, a short-hand. A more complex genealogy is offered by Walter
Russell Mead in Special Providence (New York 2001), who distinguishes between
strands deriving from Hamilton, Jefferson, Jackson and Wilson. 16
For a good example, see Michael Hirsh, 'Bush and the World', Foreign Affairs,
September? October 2002, pp. 18? 43, full of expostulation about the importance of
consultation with allies, sanctity of international agreements, value of lofty ideals,
while at the same time making it clear that 'US allies must accept that some
US unilateralism is inevitable, even desirable. This mainly involves accepting the
reality of America's supreme might? and, truthfully, appreciating how historically
lucky they are to be protected by such a relatively benign power'. 19
19 Page 20 21
24 nlr 17
Security Strategy delivered on 21 September to Congress by Bush has
met the demand with aplomb. Here, for listeners at home and abroad, is
a perfectly interwoven duet of the two voices of 'a distinctively American
internationalism'. The phrase is well chosen. The exercise of hegemony
requires just such duality.
American direction, as opposed to domination, of the globe does not,
of course, rest simply on an ideological creed. Historically, it has been
the attractive power of US models of production and culture that has
extended the reach of this hegemony. The two have over time become
increasingly unified in the sphere of consumption, to offer a single
way of life as pattern to the world. But analytically they should be kept
distinct. The power of what Gramsci theorized as Fordism? the develop-ment
of scientific management and the world's first assembly lines? lay
in its technical and organizational innovations, which by his time had
already made the United States the richest society in existence. So long
as this economic lead was maintained? in recent decades it has had its
ups and downs? America could figure in a world-wide imaginary as the
vanishing point of modernity: in the eyes of millions of people overseas,
the form of life that traced an ideal shape of their own future. This image
was, and is, a function of technological advance.
The cultural mirror the US has offered the world, on the other hand,
owes its success to something else. Here the secret of American hege-mony
has lain rather in formulaic abstraction, the basis for the fortune
of Hollywood. In a vast continent of heterogeneous immigrants, coming
from all corners of Europe, the products of industrial culture had from
the start to be as generic as possible, to maximize their share of the
market. In Europe, every film came out of, and had to play to, cultures
with a dense sedimentation of particular traditions, customs, languages
inherited from the national past? inevitably generating a cinema with
a high local content, with small chance of travelling. In America on the
other hand, immigrant publics, with weakened connexions to heteroclite
pasts, could only be aggregated by narrative and visual schemas stripped
to their most abstract, recursive common denominators. The filmic lan-guages
that resolved this problem were, quite logically, those that went on
to conquer the world, where the premium on dramatic simpli fication and
repetition, across far more heterogeneous markets, was still greater. The
universality of Hollywood forms? US television has never quite been
able to repeat their success? derives from this originating task, although 20
20 Page 21 22
anderson: Editorial 25
like every other dimension of American hegemony, it drew strength
from expressly national soil, with the creation of great popular genres
drawn from myths of the frontier, the underworld, the Pacific war.
Last but not least, there was the legal framework of production and cul-ture
alike: unencumbered property rights, untrammelled litigation, the
invention of the corporation. Here too, the result was the creation of
what Polanyi most feared, a juridical system disembedding the market
as far as possible from ties of custom, tradition or solidarity, whose
very abstraction from them later proved? American firms like American
films? exportable and reproducible across the world, in a way that no
other competitor could quite match. 17 The steady transformation of inter-national
merchant law and arbitration in conformity with US standards
is witness to the process. The political realm proper is another matter.
Notwithstanding the formal universality of the ideology of American
democracy, untouched by the complications of the French Revolution,
the constitutional structures of the country have lacked this carrying
power. 18 Remaining for the most part moored to eighteenth-century
arrangements, these have left the rest of the world relatively cold;
although, with the spread of money and television politics, affected by
their corruption.
9
How does the European Union stand in relation to this complex? The
population and output of the EU exceed that of the US, and compose a
mosaic of social models widely considered more humane and advanced
than the American. But these are characteristically embedded in local
historical legacies of every kind. The creation of a single market and
introduction of a single currency are starting to unify conditions of
production, speculation and consumption, but there continues to be
little mobility of labour, or shared culture, high or low, at continental
level. The past decade has seen increasing talk of the need for the
Union to acquire more of the characteristics of a traditional state and
17 For this phenomenon, see the searching remarks in John Grahl, 'Globalized
Finance', NLR 8, March? April 2001, pp. 28? 30. 18
At most, diffusing the plague of presidentialism in caricatural forms? Russia is
the obvious example. Of the recent crop of new democracies, no East European
state has imitated the American model. 21
21 Page 22 23
26 nlr 17
its peoples more of a common identity. There now even sits a consti-tutional
convention, of advisory status. But the same period has also
seen economic, social and cultural paradigms from the New World
spreading steadily through the Old. The extent of this process can be
exaggerated: the two still look, and remain, very different. But the ten-dencies
of change are all in one direction. From labour-market flexibility,
shareholder value and defined contributions to media conglomerates,
workfare and reality TV, the drift has been away from traditional patterns
towards the American standard. Despite much European investment in
the United States, there is scarcely any evidence of reciprocal influence
at all. This is the unilateralism that counts most, yet features least in the
current complaints-book.
Politically, on the other hand, where the American system is petrified,
the European is theoretically in motion. But the Union is not a state, and
the prospects of anything like one emerging are dwindling. On paper,
enlargement of the EU to the East is an enterprise of world-historical
magnitude, on a scale to match the most heroic US ambition. In prac-tice,
trailing in the wake of the American expansion of NATO, thus far it
appears largely a project by default, with no clear constitutional or geo-political
aim, which on present showing is likely to distend and weaken
the already semi-paralysed congeries of institutions in Brussels even fur-ther.
In practice, abandonment of federal deepening can only lead to
national layering, as the existing hierarchy of member-states becomes
a more overt pyramid of power without a summit, with a semi-colonial
annexe to the East? Bosnia writ large. At the top of the system itself,
let alone further down, the limits of coherence are set by recurrent asyn-chronies
in the political cycle of the leading countries, as today when
Centre Left governments rule in Berlin and London, Centre Right in
Paris, Rome and Madrid. In such conditions, the external policies of
the Community tend to become little more than a quest for the highest
common factor of ideological vapour. 19 Whatever the long-run logic of
pan-European construction, today the EU is in no position to deflect or
challenge any major American initiative.
19 This is also, of course, a function of the provincialization of European cultures
in recent years. It is striking how little serious geopolitical thought of any descrip-tion
is now produced in Europe. We are a long way from the days of Schmitt or
Aron. Virtually all such thinking now comes from America, where the exigencies of
empire have constructed an imposing intellectual field in the past twenty years. The
last work of real prescience to appear on the other side of the Atlantic was probably
Régis Debray's Les Empires contre l'Europe, which appeared in 1985. 22
22 Page 23 24
anderson: Editorial 27
It follows that there is no longer an 'organic formula' of internal
neoliberal hegemony across the whole advanced-capitalist world. 20 The
Republican conquest of the White House in 2000 did not reflect any
major shift of political opinion in America, but essentially the faux
frais of Clinton's conduct for the Democratic cause. In office, the new
Administration has exploited? adroitly over-interpreted? its lease to
give a sharp twist away from the rhetoric, and to some extent the prac-tice,
of its predecessor. In Europe, the Centre Right has won convincing
victories in Italy, Denmark, Holland and Portugal, while the Centre Left
has held out in Sweden, and will no doubt soon regain Austria. But in
France and Germany, the two central countries of the Union, the oppo-site
electoral upshots that have kept Chirac and Schroeder in power were
equally adventitious: the one saved by chance dispersion of the vote, the
other by the waters of an act of god. Neither Centre Right in France nor
Centre Left in Germany currently command much attachment in the
population. In this lightweight scene, policies are often the inverse of
labels. Today the SPD clings to the iron corset of the Stability Pact, while
Berlusconi and Chirac plead for Keynesian loosening.
In other words, as could be deduced from the contingent momentum
coming from the US itself, there has been neither an extension of the
life of the Third Way, nor a general turn of the tide towards a tougher ver-sion
of neoliberalism, of the kind that set in with Thatcher and Reagan.
We are back rather in the chequered circumstances of the seventies,
in which there was no clear pattern of domestic political alignments
in the OECD. In these conditions, we can expect the volume of low-level
dispute and recrimination within the Atlantic bloc to go up. The
slippage between the plates of consent and force within the system of
American hegemony that became possible with the end of the Cold War
is becoming more actual.
10
Its immediate symptom, of course, is the outpouring of protest among
the Atlantic intelligentsia? overwhelming on the EU side, substantial on
the US? against the impending war on Iraq. At the time of writing, a
torrent of worries that America has forgotten its best self, invocations
20 For a discussion of this notion, see 'Testing Formula Two', NLR 8, March? April
2001, pp. 5? 22. 23
23 Page 24 25
28 nlr 17
of the UN, paeans to European values, fears of damage to Western
interests in the Arab world, hopes in General Powell, compliments to
Chancellor Schroeder, continue to course through the media. The Gulf,
Balkan and Afghan Wars, we are given to understand, were one thing.
These were expeditions that commanded the emphatic support of this
stratum? its sober applause accompanied, of course, by that sprinkling
of critical observations which denotes any self-respecting intellectual.
But an American attack on Iraq is another matter, the same voices now
explain, since it does not enjoy the same solidarity of the international
community, and requires an unconscionable doctrine of pre-emption.
To which the Republican administration has no difficulty replying, in
Sade's firm words: Encore un effort, citoyens. Military intervention to pre-vent
the risk of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo violated national sovereignty
and flouted the UN charter, when NATO so decided. So why not military
intervention to prevent the risk of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
with or without the nod of the UN? The principle is exactly the same: the
right? indeed the duty? of civilized states to stamp out the worst forms
of barbarism, within whatever national boundaries they occur, to make
the world a safer and more peaceful place.
The logic is unanswerable, and in practice the outcome will be the same.
The White House is unlikely to be cheated of its quarry by any con-cessions
on the part of the Ba'ath regime in Baghdad. A Democratic
Congress could, even now, make more difficulties for it; and any sudden,
deep plunge on Wall Street remains a risk for the administration. But
the probability remains war; and if war, the certainty is an occupation
of Iraq? to the applause of the international community, including
the overwhelming majority of the commentators and intellectuals now
wringing their hands over Bush's 'unilateralism'. Reporters from the
New Yorker and Le Monde, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books,
the Guardian and La Repubblica, will descend on a liberated Baghdad
and? naturally with a level-headed realism, and all necessary qualifica-tions?
greet the timid dawn of Arab democracy, as earlier Balkan and
Afghan. With the rediscovery that, after all, the only true revolution is
American, power and literature can fall into each other's arms again.
The storm in the Atlantic tea-cup will not last very long.
Reconciliation is all the more predictable, since the current shift of
emphasis from what is 'cooperatively allied' to what is 'distinctively
American' within the imperial ideology is, of its nature, likely to be 24
24 Page 25 26
anderson: Editorial 29
short-lived. The 'war on terrorism' is a temporary by-pass on the royal
road leading to 'human rights and liberty' around the world. Products of
an emergency, its negative goals are no substitute for the permanent pos-itive
ideals that a hegemony requires. Functionally, as the relative weight
of force rises within the American synthesis and consent declines, for
the objective long-run reasons touched upon, the importance of the
'softer' version of its set of justifications will increase? precisely in order
to mask the imbalance, which the 'harder' version risks accentuating. In
the not too distant future, the widows of Clinton will find consolation.
Whatever the upshot in the Middle East, the sputtering of the US econ-omy,
where the ultimate foundations of American hegemony lie, does
not, in any case, promise the Republican administration a long leash.
11
Is it necessary to say that the war, if it comes to pass, should be opposed?
The tissue of cruelties and hypocrisies that has justified the blockade of
Iraq for a decade, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, requires
no further exposure in these pages. 21 The weapons of mass destruction
possessed by the Ba'ath regime are puny compared with the stockpile
accumulated by Israel, and winked at by the 'international community';
its occupation of Kuwait was an afterthought to the record of the West
Bank; its murder of its own citizens far surpassed by the dictatorship in
Indonesia, feted in Washington or Bonn to the end of its days. It is not
Saddam Hussein's atrocities that have attracted the hostility of succes-sive
American administrations, and their various European sepoys, but
his potential threat to imperial emplacements in the Gulf and? more
notionally? colonial stability in Palestine. Invasion and occupation are
a logical upshot of the strangulation of the country since Desert Storm.
Disputes in Western capitals over whether to proceed to conclusions
forthwith, or drag out asphyxiation to the end, are differences of tactics
and timing, not of humanity or principle.
Republican and Democratic administrations in the US are not the same,
any more than Centre Right and Centre Left governments in Europe. It is
always necessary to register the differences between them. But these are
21 For a full discussion of these points, see the editorial by Tariq Ali, 'Throttling
Iraq', NLR 5. 25
25 Page 26
30 nlr 17
rarely distributed along a moral continuum of decreasing good or evil.
The contrasts are nearly always more mixed. So it is today. There is no
cause to regret that the Bush administration has scotched the wretched
charade of the International Criminal Court, or swept aside the withered
fig-leaves of the Kyoto Protocol. But there is every reason to resist its
erosion of civil liberties in America. The doctrine of pre-emption is a
menace to every state that might in future cross the will of the hegemon
or its allies. But it is no better when proclaimed in the name of human
rights than of non-proliferation. What is sauce for the Balkan goose
is sauce for the Mesopotamian gander. The remonstrants who pretend
other wise deserve less respect than those they implore not to act on their
common presumptions. The arrogance of the 'international community'
and its rights of intervention across the globe are not a series of arbitrary
events or disconnected episodes. They compose a system, which needs
to be fought with a coherence not less than its own.
2nd October 2002 26 |
