The Rise of the New Global ‘Empire’

Before Sept. 11, “Empire,” a dense and lengthy analysis of the globalized economy, was already an unlikely hit. Scholars, activists and intellectuals were drawn to the book’s descriptions of an increasingly borderless world, shaped and dominated not by nations but by corporations and the organizations set up to help them operate. With its nimble mix of old world history and new world order, it seemed to many to offer a blueprint for understanding a new global alignment of power and politics.

Many pronounced it a master theory, a prime candidate for the Next Big Idea. And for activists and intellectuals on the left and right, it helped explain and unify the seemingly disparate complaints of millions of anti-globalization protestors.

The book, nearly 500 pages, sold a brisk 40,000 copies the first year. Then came the devastating attacks on New York and the Pentagon, prompting many to look to the ideas in “Empire” as a framework for a new type of global conflict, one that pits newly forged “multitudes” against the excesses of a globalized “empire” in a world where nations have difficulty finding any real sovereignty.

War, says “Empire” author Michael Hardt, a 41-year-old literature professor at Duke University, had been very much on his mind and that of his notorious co-author, Antonio Negri, a jailed Italian Marxist. Just before the attacks, he says, the two had been discussing “what war looks like when national sovereignty is no longer a function.” For instance, a war on terrorism, with a nation on one side and a diffuse network of differently principled criminals on the other. “That’s something that present public discourse is struggling with,” Hardt says.

“Empire” editor Lindsay Waters at Harvard University Press in Cambridge had received a note from Negri on the morning of Sept. 11, reflecting on the nature of war, and he is only mildly surprised by the writer’s seemingly prescient timing. “There was a buildup of tension, wasn’t there?” he says. “Many of us were aware of global tension beforehand. It was like a big sore that has now exploded.”

As the nation asks “Why?” in the wake of the attacks, even the notion that there was any pre-existing “tension” has been politicized. President Bush tends to brush off this idea, saying that the terrorists were “motivated purely by evil.” Others see the terrorists’ actions as an expansion of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a territorial war, a religious or ethnic conflict. But increasing numbers of people want to look more deeply into the ways the United States may have fed the terrorists’ anger, and that is bringing many of them to explore the thesis of “Empire.”

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In their book, Hardt and Negri argue that a new global economic regime is emerging, which they call simply “Empire.” It is a new form of imperial power defined partly by what it is not. It is not a nation-state. It is not an aligned superpower bloc. It is an empire, in the classic sense, but has no seat like the Roman Empire. It is a distributed network, like the Internet, created by international agreements binding nations big and small into relationships that none of them fully control.

Surprisingly, the authors of this upbeat, even joyful book don’t see the resulting instability as a bad thing. Empire, they write, reduces the role of nations and puts the “multitudes” in direct conflict with power. This creates the perfect conditions for revolution, a term critics have pounced on for its suggestion that societies can be replaced easily.

They also envision a new form of democracy (though they are unable to describe it just yet). This power is so decentralized, with nations unable to intervene, that the desires of a mass of voters or protestors anywhere could affect policy through the world.

The existence of Empire does, though, present a couple of serious challenges to the U.S.-led war on terrorism. One is that the international footing for stable military action by any one country may have already slipped away. Companies and even individuals are now developing relationships to Empire that may supersede their national loyalties, new “hybrid identities”-like Islamic oil dynasties, for example-that muddy nation-versus-nation conflicts. The other, say the authors and many of their peers, is that Empire has damaging effects throughout the world and is most commonly identified with the cultural imperialism of America.

“Empire addresses the current situation directly,” says Professor Tim Murphy of the University of Oklahoma, a Negri translator and scholar. “Its theory is predicated on the notion that economic struggle and social conflict are both asymmetrical and diffuse.” That means economic and military power end up in the hands of a few people, as imperialist systems of old, but this doesn’t lead to stability.

“On the contrary,” he adds, “this situation is far more unstable than the clear polarity of the Cold War.”

It is unstable because Empire doesn’t behave like a nation-state. It behaves like an economic power we’ve never experienced before.

The construct looks like this: New global brands such as McDonald’s--useful here because they are so closely identified with America--need global trade bodies like the World Trade Organization to smooth out differences in rules governing their operations and to function as one company in many countries.

McDonald’s is an American company, and efficiency demands that it try make its business in every country as similar as possible--even if it means, in the extreme, lobbying to bring environmental protections worldwide down to the level of, say, Nigeria’s. The company’s multicultural approach to sales--serving goat burgers in India, where cows are sacred, for example--is a kind of smokescreen for its vastly more important monocultural approach to profit.

There are now hundreds of these transnational companies, a lot of them making more profit than the gross domestic product of most small countries. They have formed a new, floating culture that is really more identified with itself than with any one country. Hardt and Negri call this “Empire.”

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The best evidence of this culture are what the authors call “supranational” organizations, like the WTO, International Monetary Fund, the World Bank or the United Nations, and the dense network of agreements that make them necessary. Gradually, countries relinquish more and more power to this network. Even the United States has begun changing regulations to appease it--chipping away at laws protecting the environment, labor and health and safety put in place by U.S. voters. Thus, the voter and the country become less sovereign.

Early in the book, Hardt and Negri write: “What used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist.”

And also decidedly undemocratic. The lack of openness and public participation in such groups as the WTO has been one of the most common complaints of anti-globalization protestors.

This is not an unexpected analysis, coming from Antonio Negri. Negri, 68, a lecturer in political science at the University of Paris and a professor of political science at the University of Padua, is serving 14 years in prison for links to Italy’s Communist Red Brigades terror group. (Hardt was once his student.)

But one surprise of “Empire” is its high regard for the U.S. Constitution, which it looks to as a model, with its distributions of power and its recognition of the rule of law. “Negri remains very focused on the idea of democracy, which he thinks is perfectible and has not reached its final stage,” says “Empire” editor Waters. “He says to all Socialists, You have to accept the American Revolution, because it actually was a great step forward for humankind.”

The book’s critics, however, are not pleased with any revamping of ideas connected with Negri’s brand of radicalism. “This is no run-of-the-mill kind of bestseller but a political manifesto with the aim of laying out a new guise for Communism,” writes David Pryce-Jones in the conservative journal National Review. His review goes on to detail Negri’s 1979 arrest for “armed insurrection” and “moral responsibility” for inspiring the Red Brigade.

Alan Wolfe, in the New Republic, reads the book in the wake of the bombings and finds it illogical and morally indefensible in its support of “disparate movements of protest whatever their targets or their political coloration.” He slams what he calls the book’s romanticization of violence and notes that the authors “go out of their way to reassure readers of the genuinely subversive nature of the Islamic version of fundamentalism.”

The book’s easy talk of revolution, he says, is badly misguided. “‘Empire is to social and political criticism,” he writes, “what pornography is to literature.” Globalization, he agrees, is a key issue--but he finds the book’s Marxist-based analysis simplistic, even incoherent.

Those who admire the book praise it for pulling together seemingly disparate critiques of corporate and international behavior into one grand theory. “The popularity of the book among liberals and left academics is that it brings a vast amount of material into a coherent framework,” notes globalization expert Lauren Langman, professor of sociology at Loyola University of Chicago. And it helps explain why so many diverse groups see globalization as the enemy. An enemy, Hardt and Negri contend, that has no face. “Our slogan is that ‘Empire has no center,”’ Hardt says.

Others, however, say there’s no way to look at Empire and not see the shadow of America. And this is where the book may contain ominous news about the current conflict.

“Sadly, the thesis of ‘Empire’ also explains the recent tragedies, at least why so many people resent the U.S. as the main force behind Empire,” Langman says. There are plenty of reasons, he adds, why radical Islam would oppose globalization in general and the United States specifically. “The U.S. ... garners great wealth while others suffer poverty and starvation,” he adds. “Its sanctions have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iran. It supports corrupt but ‘friendly’ regimes like the Saudis. It has given unqualified support to Israel at the cost of the Palestinians. Finally, its mass mediated culture of sex, hedonism and materialism offends many.”

This is the kind of self-reflection that has drawn many Americans to the book.

It also begins to describe the treacherous new terrain faced by a U.S. military acting as a sole power in a post-Cold War world, Hardt says. What is good for the United States or its citizens might not be good for Empire. For instance, striking back at an entire nation like Afghanistan for the actions of a few of its “guests.”

In the last two weeks, we’ve most often heard that described as an “asymmetrical” conflict. When placed in the context of Empire and globalization, says Oklahoma’s Tim Murphy, this multiple-sided conflict could be leading the U.S. into unforeseen consequences. The groups involved, he says, “want a basic change in the way the system works. But the system is not designed to process such basic challenges to its operations.”

The implied result is a quagmire of spreading ethnic, religious and sovereignty conflicts, which nation-states might not have the power to contain.

“What does war mean in this kind of world?” Hardt asks. “Is class struggle the adequate framework? What can it mean? Those are some of the questions that we’ve been dealing with and that we’ve seen since [that] Tuesday.”