Chris Burford:
Hardt and Negri appear to be arguing for a new global civil society or a "new transitional democracy" rather than emphasising the sovereignty of individual states.
Yes, this sounds about right.
This is certainly contested global juridical territory.
Contested global juridical territory? Sorry, don't know what this means at all.
Yes, I had to check what Hardt and Negri mean by that. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the meaning as effectively synonymous with "legal". Hardt is full of associations and hints. I do not know why he used this word.
However it is the start of the first chapter of Empire:
"The problematic of Empire is determined in the first place by one simple fact: that there is world order. This order is expressed as a juridical formation."
Hardt presented himself, or allowed his publishers to present him, as a sort of fashionable intellectual style accessory, in the days of the world wide anti-capitalist protests before 9-11 2001. There is also a sentimental desire to believe that all problems can be solved with the naivety of the Italian autonomists, who impressed him in his youth.
[Fashions perhaps should not matter but I think they do. At the moment in Britain it is fashionable to be against Blair being Bush's poodle.]
To the extent that it is worth discussing Hardt now, I think he does, in his confusing style, address questions that are relevant. The nature of evidence, the limits of sovereignty and individual or collective human rights are centre stage of the struggle at the moment. It is extraordinary, but debate in Britain is going back to mediaeval concepts of "What is a just war". But it matters when the head of the Church of England, and the Roman Catholic Church in the UK, and the head of the Catholic Church in the world says effectively that a pre-emptive war is an unjust war.
Hardt and Negri's introduction to Empire is a little clearer, whether you agree we need a revolutionary party, or a radical global network, or both:
"Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule - in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.
"Many argue that the globalization or capitalist production and exchange means that economic relations have become more autonomous from political controls, and consequently that political sovereignty has declined. Some celebrate this new era as the liberation of the capitalist economy from the restrictions and distortions that political forces have imposed on it; others lament it as the closing of the institutional channels through which workers and citizens can influence or contest the cold logic of capitalist profit. It is certainly true that, in step with the processes of globalization, the sovereignty of nation-states, while still effective, has progessively declined. The primary factors of production and exchange - money, technology, people, goods, move with increasing ease across national boundaries; hence the nation-state has less and less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy. Even the most dominant nation-states should no longer be thought of as supreme and sovereign authorities, either outside or even within their own borders. The decline in sovereignty of nation-states, however, does not mean that soveriegnty as such has declined. Throughout the temporary transformations, political controls, state functions, and regulatory mechanisms have continued to ule the realm of economic and social production and exchange. Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supernational organisms united under single logic of rule. The new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire."
Chris Burford
London
