A Trap Set For Protesters
Michael Hardt
Friday February 21, 2003
The Guardian
There is a new anti-Europeanism in Washington. The United
States, of course, has a long tradition of ideological conflict with Europe.
The old anti-Europeanism generally protested against the overwhelming power
of European states, their arrogance, and their imperialist endeavours.
Today, however, the relationship is reversed. The new anti-Europeanism is
based on the US position of power and it protests instead against European
states failing to yield to its power and support its projects.
The most immediate issue for Washington is the European lack of support
for the US plans for war on Iraq. And Washington's primary strategy in
recent weeks is to divide and conquer. On one hand, Defence Secretary
Rumsfeld, with his usual brazen condescension, calls those European nations
who question the US project, primarily France and Germany, "the old Europe",
dismissing them as unimportant. The recent Wall Street Journal letter of
support for the US war effort, on the other hand, signed by Blair,
Berlusconi and Aznar, poses the other side of the divide.
In a broader framework, the entire project of US unilateralism,
which extends well beyond this coming war with Iraq, is itself necessarily
anti-European. The unilateralists in Washington are threatened by the idea
that Europe, or any other cluster of states, could compete with its power on
equal terms. (The rising value of the euro with respect to the dollar
contributes, of course, to the perception of two potentially equal and
competing power blocs.) Bush, Rumsfeld and their ilk will not accept the
possibility of a bi-polar world. They left that behind with the cold war.
Any threats to the uni-polar order must be dismissed or destroyed.
Washington's new anti-Europeanism is really an expression of their
unilateralist project.
Corresponding in part to the new US anti-Europeanism, there is
today in Europe and across the world a growing anti-Americanism. In
particular, the coordinated protests last weekend against the war were
animated by various kinds of anti-Americanism - and that is inevitable. The
US government has left no doubt that it is the author of this war and so
protest against the war must, inevitably, be also protest against the United
States.
This anti-Americanism, however, although certainly justifiable,
is a trap. The problem is, not only does it tend to create an overly unified
and homogeneous view of the United States, obscuring the wide margins of
dissent in the nation, but also that, mirroring the new US anti-Europeanism,
it tends to reinforce the notion that our political alternatives rest on the
major nations and power blocs. It contributes to the impression, for
instance, that the leaders of Europe represent our primary political path -
the moral, multilateralist alternative to the bellicose, unilateralist
Americans. This anti-Americanism of the anti-war movements tends to close
down the horizons of our political imagination and limit us to a bi-polar
(or worse, nationalist) view of the world.
The globalisation protest movements were far superior to the
anti-war movements in this regard. They not only recognised the complex and
plural nature of the forces that dominate capitalist globalisation today -
the dominant nation states, certainly, but also the International Monetary
Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the major corporations, and so forth -
but they imagined an alternative, democratic globalisation consisting of
plural exchanges across national and regional borders based on equality and
freedom.
One of the great achievements of the globalisation protest
movements, in other words, has been to put an end to thinking of politics as
a contest among nations or blocs of nations. Internationalism has been
reinvented as a politics of global network connections with a global vision
of possible futures. In this context, anti-Europeanism and anti-Americanism
no longer make sense.
It is unfortunate but inevitable that much of the energies that
had been active in the globalisation protests have now at least temporarily
been redirected against the war. We need to oppose this war, but we must
also look beyond it and avoid being drawn into the trap of its narrow
political logic. While opposing the war we must maintain the expansive
political vision and open horizons that the globalisation movements have
achieved. We can leave to Bush, Chirac, Blair, and Schröder the tired game
of anti-Europeanism and anti-Americanism.
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Se arrivi a un bivio...prendilo!!
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