Multitude en failed states

[Antid Oto]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DE6D7173AF936A15754C0A9629C8B63

Een review over een boek dat ook genoemd werd in Upping the
Anti #1. Fukuyama legt in deze review een accent op het
belang van state building. De keyvraag die ik aan het review
zou willen toevoegen: waarom ontwikkelt de United States
zich als een failed state?

MULTITUDE

War and Democracy
in the Age of Empire.
By Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
427 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

Well before 9/11 and the Iraq war put the idea in
everybody's mind, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had
popularized the notion of a modern empire. Four years ago,
they argued in a widely discussed book -- titled, as it
happens, ''Empire'' -- that the globe was ruled by a new
imperial order, different from earlier ones, which were
based on overt military domination. This one had no center;
it was managed by the world's wealthy nation-states
(particularly the United States), by multinational
corporations and by international institutions like the
World Trade Organization and the International Monetary
Fund. This empire -- a k a globalization -- was
exploitative, undemocratic and repressive, not only for
developing countries but also for the excluded in the rich West.

Hardt and Negri's new book, ''Multitude,'' argues that the
antidote to empire is the realization of true democracy,
''the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without
qualifiers.'' They say that the left needs to leave behind
outdated concepts like the proletariat and the working
class, which vastly oversimplify the gender/racial/ethnic/
class diversities of today's world. In their place they
propose the term ''multitude,'' to capture the ''commonality
and singularity'' of those who stand in opposition to the
wealthy and powerful.

This book -- which lurches from analyses of intellectual
property rules for genetically engineered animals to
discourses on Dostoyevsky and the myth of the golem -- deals
with an imaginary problem and a real problem. Unfortunately,
it provides us with an imaginary solution to the real problem.

The imaginary problem stems from the authors' basic
understanding of economics and politics, which remains at
its core unreconstructedly Marxist. For them, there is no
such thing as voluntary economic exchange, only coercive
political hierarchy: any unequal division of rewards is
prima facie evidence of exploitation. Private property is a
form of theft. Globalization has no redeeming benefits
whatsoever. (East Asia's rise from third- to first-world
status in the last 50 years seems not to have registered on
their mental map.) Similarly, democracy is not embodied in
constitutions, political parties or elections, which are
simply manipulated to benefit elites. The half of the
country that votes Republican is evidently not part of the
book's multitude.

To all this Hardt and Negri add an extremely confused
theory, their take on what Daniel Bell labeled
postindustrial society, and what has more recently been
called the ''knowledge economy.'' The ''immaterial labor''
of knowledge workers differs from labor in the industrial
era, Hardt and Negri say, because it produces not objects
but social relations. It is inherently communal, which
implies that no one can legitimately appropriate it for
private gain. Programmers at Microsoft may be surprised to
discover that because they collaborate with one another,
their programs belong to everybody.

It's hard to know even how to engage this set of assertions.
Globalization is a complex phenomenon; it produces winners
and losers among rich and poor alike. But you would never
learn about the complexities from reading ''Multitude.'' So
let's move on to Hardt and Negri's real problem, which has
to do with global governance.

We have at this point in human history evolved fairly good
democratic political institutions, but only at the level of
the nation-state. With globalization -- and increased flows
of information, goods, money and people across borders --
countries are now better able to help, but also to harm, one
another. In the 1990's, the harm was felt primarily through
financial shocks and job losses, and since 9/11 it has
acquired a military dimension as well. As the authors state,
''one result of the current form of globalization is that
certain national leaders, both elected and unelected, gain
greater powers over populations outside their own
nation-states.''

The United States is uniquely implicated in this charge
because of its enormous military, economic and cultural
power. What drove people around the world crazy about the
Bush administration's unilateral approach to the Iraq war
was its assertion that it was accountable to no one but
American voters for what it did in distant parts of the
globe. And since institutions like the United Nations are
woefully ill equipped to deal with democratic legitimacy,
this democracy deficit is a real and abiding challenge at
the international level.

The authors are conscious of the charge that they, like the
Seattle anti-globalization protesters they celebrate, don't
have any real solutions to these matters, so they spend some
time discussing how to fix the present international
institutions. Their problem is that any fixes are
politically difficult if not impossible to bring about, and
promise only marginal benefits. Democratic institutions that
work at the nation-state level don't work at global levels.
A true global democracy, in which all of the earth's
billions of people actually vote, is an impossible dream,
while existing proposals to modify the United Nations
Security Council or change the balance of power between it
and the General Assembly are political nonstarters. Making
the World Bank and I.M.F. more transparent are worthy
projects, but hardly solutions to the underlying issue of
democratic accountability. The United States, meanwhile, has
stood in the way of new institutions like the International
Criminal Court.

It is at this point that Hardt and Negri take leave of
reality -- arriving at an imaginary solution to their real
problem. They argue that instead of ''repeating old rituals
and tired solutions'' we need to begin ''a new investigation
in order to formulate a new science of society and
politics.'' The woolliness of the subsequent analysis is
hard to overstate. According to them, the fundamental
obstacle to true democracy is not just the monopoly of
legitimate force held by nation-states, but the dominance
implied in virtually all hierarchies, which give certain
individuals authority over others. The authors dress up
Marx's old utopia of the withering away of the state in the
contemporary language of chaos theory and biological
systems, suggesting that hierarchies should be replaced with
networks that reflect the diversity and commonality of the
''multitude.''

The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that there is
a whole class of issues networks can't resolve. This is why
hierarchies, from nation-states to corporations to
university departments, persist, and why so many left-wing
movements claiming to speak on behalf of the people have
ended up monopolizing power. Indeed, the powerlessness and
poverty in today's world are due not to the excessive power
of nation-states, but to their weakness. The solution is not
to undermine sovereignty but to build stronger states in the
developing world.

To illustrate, take the very different growth trajectories
of East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa over the past
generation. Two of the fastest growing economies in the
world today happen to be in the two most populous countries,
China and India; sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, has
tragically seen declining per capita incomes over the same
period. At least part of this difference is the result of
globalization: China and India have integrated themselves
into the global economy, while sub-Saharan Africa is the one
part of the world barely touched by globalization or
multinational corporations.

But this raises the question of why India and China have
been able to take advantage of globalization, while Africa
has not. The answer has largely to do with the fact that the
former have strong, well-developed state institutions
providing basic stability and public goods. They had only to
get out of the way of private markets to trigger growth. By
contrast, modern states were virtually unknown in most of
sub-Saharan Africa before European colonialism, and the
weakness of states in the region has been the source of its
woes ever since.

Any project, then, to fix the ills of ''empire'' has to
begin with the strengthening, not the dismantling, of
institutions at the nation-state level. This will not solve
the problems of global governance, but surely any real
advance here will come only through slow, patient innovation
and the reform of international institutions. Hardt and
Negri should remember the old insight of the Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci, taken up later by the German Greens:
progress is to be achieved not with utopian dreaming, but
with a ''long march through institutions.''

Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political
economy at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of
''State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st
Century.''

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********