dr.woooo posts a long essay, in two parts. The second part can be found here.

"The Perverse Perseverance of Sovereignty"

Anthony Burke,
University of Adelaide

1. It's a familiar story: the withering away of the state under globalisation, or if not so much the state, the withering away of a certain idea and formation of sovereignty. A sovereignty that no longer possesses the fullness and power of its Westphalian ideal: a bounded territorial realm in which national authority is absolute, which provides a representative and political principle through which states and their people can manage and control the forces that affect their lives. With the increasing globalisation of capital and trade, the growth of supranational regimes of economic governance such as the WTO, the interventionist zeal of the World Bank and the IMF, and the might and influence of the transnational corporation, sovereignty appears to be a thing of the past - the nostalgic ghost of a world transformed.

2. Such views, with more or less sophistication, are visible across the political continuum. We can recall the Economist's stunning headline of 1986, 'The nation-state is dead', or point to the respected critical scholar of globalisation, Jan Aart Scholte, who maintains that, even while 'the state apparatus survives' and 'is more intrusive in social life than before…the core Westphalian norm of sovereignty is no longer operative'. (Economist 1995/6; Scholte 1999: 21) Even one of the most intriguing and profound discussions of globalisation in recent years, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire, falls prey to this logic. 'The passage to Empire', they write, 'emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty'. (2000: xii)

3. Their words appear at the turn of a millennium, the close of a century which has fulfilled, ended and hollowed out modernity beyond all possible dreams, all nightmares, all utopias and dystopias. The fate of sovereignty, it seems, is bound up with all these dark fates. Yet I am uncomfortable with these resolute metaphors of temporal passage. We might recall that the full title of the famous Economist editorial was 'The Nation-State is dead. Long live the nation-state' (1995/6), and we might also focus on a key contention of Hardt and Negri's, that 'the decline in sovereignty of nation states...does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined'. They portray sovereignty not so much in absolute decline as in passage and transformation, from the bounded national territories of modernity to 'Empire…a decentred, deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers' (Hardt and Negri 2000: xi-xii).

4. Hardt and Negri thus make a paradoxical contribution to this debate. They echo the view that sovereignty, as it was imagined within modernity and tied to the bounded territorial authority of the nation-state, is in decline, but then insist on the emergence of a new - supranational and deterritorialising - form of sovereignty which is still repressive and disabling like its nostalgic echo, but which also forms the terrain of a new mode of critical and revolutionary action - the terrain of 'Empire' and the revolution of the 'multitude'. Yet they go further, to argue that what they call 'modern sovereignty' – a closed, egoistic mode of national identity intolerant and repressive of otherness – is in fact passing; that not even this survives the loss of economic authority and the difference-harnessing capitalist machine of Empire. (2000: 137-158)

5. In the face of this, a number of questions arise. Why is there this persistence of the idea of modern territorial sovereignty as passing away in the face of economic globalisation, neo-liberal ascendancy, the transnational corporation and so on? What other complexities and understandings does this obscure and occlude? Why does this idea of temporal passage coexist, in Empire, with Hardt and Negri's very suggestive account of a new global apparatus of rule? Is it possible and indeed crucial to argue that sovereignty still exists in a complex (and in many ways enabling or ideal) relation to the new imperial space under construction? Are there violences and struggles whose names still need to be heard from beneath the ongoing wreckage of modern sovereignty?

6. This essay thus sets out two critical tasks. First, is a critique of the image of sovereignty's passage presented by both Scholte and Hardt and Negri. It argues that, whatever the loss of economic autonomy experienced under globalisation, sovereignty is not passing away: it forms, instead, a complex and malign articulation of law, power, possibility and force that thwarts a totalising image of decline and irrelevance. Secondly, it is also a critique of the essentialist image of sovereignty at work in The Economist and in writers such as Scholte (1999: 19-20), which closes off an understanding of the ways sovereignty is performed, imagined and conjured via a founding and illegitimate violence. By focusing on an obvious loss of national economic authority the "paradoxical" constitution of sovereignty is assumed, closing out a deeper understanding of the discursive process by which sovereignty - and its exclusionary and subjectifying violence - was brought into being. (Connolly 1995: 137-9; Burke 2002: 1-27)

7. For my purposes, it is Emmanuel Levinas who offers the most profound warning against assuming sovereignty's passage. In Ethics as First Philosophy he invites us to consider not the twilight of modern sovereignty but its persistence - the persistence of its malign, suffocating ontology, its intimate linkages with violent images of truth and being, with the instrumentalisation of knowledge, the technologisation of morality, the arrogance of identity and the death of love. 'Modern man persists in his being as a sovereign who is merely concerned to maintain the powers of his sovereignty', he warns. 'All that is possible is permitted…a miracle of modern Western freedom unhindered by any memory or remorse'. (Levinas in Hand 2000: 78)

8. So it is between these two idioms, between passage and persistence, that I wish to situate some thoughts on the 'fate' of sovereignty under globalisation. I do so in part to counter the relentless rhetorical force of Empire which, while brilliant and suggestive, I suspect of a subtle colonisation of critical thought and thus of emancipatory politics. It is for this reason that I counter Levinas - and the ethical, deconstructive tradition he helped to engender - to a work that airily dismisses its ongoing relevance. Hardt and Negri have spoken too soon when they declare the 'deconstructive phase of critical thought' a 'closed parenthesis' that will fade away in favour of a liberatory fable of cyborgs amid the 'plastic' terrain of new productive technologies. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 217-8) This is to not only close out a still fruitful and urgent stream of critical theory, but to obscure the continuing, horrifying patterns of violence and politics such work helps us to critique and overcome.

9. Tied up with these perspectives are important questions of political priority and practice, which may be enabled or hampered by particular modes of analysis. Do we identify a 'deterritorialising' capitalist globalisation as the major political task at this time, and name this enemy and field of struggle "Empire"? Or do we still view the State - with its monopoly on violence and definitions of public danger, and its technologies of subjectification and authority, often in synergy with sections of capital - as a still important locus of energy and struggle? Once we make such decisions, do we then develop the right images of political solidarity, struggle and subjectivity that will allow us to pursue a concern for justice?

10. As I write, more than six months after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the US continues to fight in Afghanistan and rattles the sabre against Iraq, Israel pulls back its forces from the vicious destruction of "Operation defensive shield", having killed as many as 500 Palestinians in two weeks, and the Indonesian military pursues a vicious war of counterinsurgency in the oil rich province of Aceh (where Exxon-Mobil is a major investor). The Venezuelan military has staged a coup, with tacit US backing, only to reinstate the elected left-wing President after the Organisation of American States condemned their actions and local support evaporated. Dominant public obsessions are with security and its violent, exclusivist, ontologising technologies: counter-terror, border protection, deterrence, 'homeland security', the 'necessary' erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law.

11. In such contexts we see perverse connections of tactics and ideology. A free market US administration demonising its enemies in the starkest terms of self and other, freedom and terror; linking such representations with a global military and diplomatic campaign; yet also accelerating the very forces of globalising capital which are interpreted as hastening the dissolution of the territorial state. There is something more complex at work, which can't be reduced to a new Zeitgeist, to a new, seductive and totalising narrative of historical inevitability. Alongside (and in counterpoint to) an analysis of "Empire" we need to understand something less heartening: the perverse perseverance of sovereignty.

12. By citing a range of contemporary examples – the Asian financial crisis and post-Soeharto Indonesia, Israel's war against the Palestinian Intifada, the post-9/11 'war on terror', and the new xenophobia directed against migrants and refugees in the developed West – this essay argues that we need to consider the complex coexistence of imperial sovereignty with modern sovereignty. This generates a political task which must be at once deconstructive and re-productive: turned towards a critique of the exclusionary repression of sovereignty and towards the creation of an ethical cross-border solidarity of the multitude.

The Founding Violence of Sovereignty

13. But first we must talk about sovereignty - the understanding of sovereignty that transcendent accounts of globalisation occlude and which Hardt and Negri develop only to announce its imminent passage.

14. What is "modern sovereignty"? In developing this concept, Hardt and Negri echo a powerful critique of sovereignty that refutes its basic essentialising claim: that sovereignty forms an unproblematic and legitimate site of authority and legal violence based on its status as a representative signifier for the nation, 'the people'. This is a form of ontological magic first visible in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, where he posits humanity moving on a journey from a mythical 'state of nature' to the 'body-politick', 'a multitude united in One Person'. (1985: 227) Based on this suffocating image of 'many wills' reduced to one, Westphalian sovereignty was made (via Machiavelli) into the basic structural and normative principle for International Relations: the rule of law and morality within the state; the rule of anarchy and amorality outside it, driven by states' eternal competition and struggle for power. (Hobbes 1985; George 1994: 71)

15. It is from this essentialism too that the state under globalisation is understood to be losing authority, without a question as to whether the state had ever deserved authority or been genuinely representative of its 'people'. Yet long ago, in a fragment of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche had declared the sovereign state to be 'the coldest of cold monsters':

Coldly it tells lies too, and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I the state, am the people'…it is annihilators who set traps for the many and call them State; they hang a sword and a hundred appetites over them…State I call it where all drink poison, the good and the wicked; State, where all lose themselves, the good and the wicked; State, where the slow suicide of all is called "life". (Nietzsche 1978: 49-50)

16. More recently a range of writers have shown that the essentialist image of sovereignty effaces the violence and illegitimacy of its own founding. William Connolly, in The Ethos of Pluralization, draws on a spectacular aporia in Rousseau's Social Contract to argue that sovereignty does this by presuming itself to authorise and precede the very act of its coming into existence. 'It is a difficulty that deserves attention', wrote Rousseau, that 'In order that a newly formed nation might approve sound maxims of politics…it would be necessary that the effect should become cause; the social spirit, which should be the work of the institution, should preside over the institution itself; and men should be, prior to the laws, what they ought to become by means of them.' (1998: 42)

17. Connolly calls this the 'paradox of political founding' and argues, following Paul Ricoeur, that it is 'a paradox of politics as such'; no political act ever conforms to its self-image as a pure reflection of prior consent and sovereign authority. Every political act, says Connolly, always 'lacks full legitimacy at the moment of its enactment. Sovereignty always occurs after the moment it claims to occupy'. (1995: 138-9) Hardt and Negri similarly point to the work of Jean Bodin, who admitted that 'force and violence create the sovereign'. (2000: 98) In his turn Derrida asks of the US founding fathers: Who authorised their signatures on the US Declaration of Independence, other than a popular sovereignty which did not yet exist? Derrida calls the Declaration an 'act of faith, a hypocrisy indispensable to any political, military or economic coup de force'. The appeal to God as the document's 'final legitimising instance' only magnifies the conceit at the centre of the United States' sovereign foundations; a conceit that not only conjures popular representative power for an elite but, as Connolly suggests, effaces an enabling juridical and strategic violence against North America's indigenous peoples. (Derrida cited in Norris 1987: 196; Connolly 1995: 138) This is true of colonial conquest of first peoples everywhere, as Irene Watson writes in this issue of Australia:

In imposing ‘sovereignty’ over indigenous laws, the state through military force rapes its way into existence. Creating a sovereignty of viovlence, and not of law. (Watson 2002: 20)

18. In a way that both Nietzsche and Levinas do, Connolly thus warns of the ongoing violence implicit in the perpetuation of such ontological illusions of sovereignty:

The appearance of a pure general will (which must be common and singular) requires the concealment of impurities. Such a strategy succeeds if violence in the founding is treated by the hegemonic political identity to have no continuing effects…the paradox of sovereignty dissolves into the politics of forgetting. (1995: 138)

19. It is only through such a politics of forgetting that George W. Bush can claim, in his post-9/11 address to Congress, that America is historically innocent ('a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old…a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom…a power that went into the world to protect but not to possess…'), effacing completely the long history of dispossession and warfare, from the seventeenth century until 1890, that cleared the North American continent of its owners and destroyed many proud indigenous civilisations. (Bush 2001; Brown 1991) Furthermore, as Connolly suggests, the (effaced) violence of founding has ongoing effects. The gesture of forgetting is invoked as Bush rallies Americans for a war on terror, and it is with a similar discourse of forgetting that Australian leaders efface live questions of Aboriginal sovereignty, land ownership and reconciliation in the same breath that they proclaim a right to exclude asylum seekers on the basis of the nation's 'sovereign rights'. Yet as the Gungalidda elder Wadjularbinna writes, 'this is not John Howard's country, it has been stolen…The refugees were coming here, to OUR country, which we as Aboriginal people have a spiritual connection to…Our Spirit Creator and our ancient law and culture would not stand for how these refugees are being treated.' (Howard cited in Burke 2001: 323; Wadjularbinna 2002)

Secure Sovereignty: Two Genealogies

20. There is a further way of exposing the paradoxical and violent constitution of sovereignty: through genealogy. Genealogy aims to understand the 'conditions of possibility' of modern sovereignty: the political, cultural and discursive space in which it could emerge, and the space it would in turn enable and continue to transform. It also aims to understand how, out of and against its limits, we can imagine a new form of politics.

21. Hardt and Negri pursue such a genealogy of sovereignty in two stunning chapters of Empire, where they develop their concept of "modern sovereignty"; we can also see the contours of such a genealogy emerging in Foucault's Discipline and Punish and his lectures on security, population and governmentality. (1991a, 1991b, 1983, 1988) This is to pursue a genealogy of modern sovereignty via the promise that has always been linked umbilically to it: security. (Burke 2002, 2001a)

22. In Hobbes' Leviathan and Locke's Second Treatise on Government the figure of the sovereign was imagined via a founding exchange of freedom for security: one that fused the individual and sovereign subjects (state and citizen) into a single existential figure that now seems impossible to break apart. This secure modern subject was further imagined as endangered, as primally estranged from the Other of the Criminal, the Socialist, the Aboriginal or the ethnic minority. This entrenched a powerful image of sovereign identity as perpetually under threat, and as intolerant and repressive of difference; thus in pursuit of its own survival, that sovereign subject is always entitled to deploy violence. As Hobbes wrote, the Soveraignty (sic) has right 'to do whatsoever he think necessary to be done…for the preserving of Peace and Security'. (Burke 2002: 7-11; Hobbes 1985: 233)

23. Furthermore sovereignty was not just a juridical figure. It was a political technology which simultaneously reached into the heart of the citizen and most obscure reaches of the social world, and enabled new forms of governmental power that underpinned and accelerated new forms of technological and economic modernity. This Foucault saw as the 'political double-bind…the simultaneous individualisation and totalisation of modern power structures'. (Burke 2001a: 274; Foucault 1983: 216)

24. In this way, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham saw security as essential to the progressive imagination of liberal modernity. Security would safeguard an 'expectation' of the future in which economic gain can be pursued without interruption either by social disorder or socialist redistribution; a security which rested not merely on totalising deployments of police or military violence but on desire, discipline and self government – what Foucault termed "governmentality". Hegel, concerned with similar threats, developed a powerful narrative of economic and social progress in which state and civil society would be fused via an antagonism to the Other, which is to be either expelled or effaced within the higher unity of the One. Such images of progressive western subjectivity would in turn justify an imperialism to which 'the civil society is driven' in its search for new markets, the 'passion for gain which involves risk…the element of danger, flux and destruction'. (Burke 2001a: 278-98, 2002: 16-17)

25. Yet Hegel, in a way relevant to Hardt and Negri's own account, also sought to tame the potentially revolutionary powers of modernity (of which Marxism and socialism were an alternative vision) through a vision of order in which progress takes the form, not of an irruption, but a slow and rational design. In Bentham and Hegel's thought (which has since formed a template for powerful forms of utilitarian liberalism) sovereignty, security, economic prosperity and a central, organising racism powerfully coalesce. (Burke 2001a: 289, 2002: 17) This analysis has echoes in Empire, but it may also help to complicate Hardt and Negri's view of a radical temporal shift from "modern" to "imperial" sovereignty. It could be argued that Hegel's thought transcended mercantilism and helps us understand the coexistence of strong images of the nation-state with globalising capital; certainly in Francis Fukuyama's neo-Hegelian account of the post-Cold War "end of history" (1992), which celebrates a conjunction of neo-liberal democratic governance and globalising capitalism, this is true. Yet Fukuyama's account is virtually missing from Empire.

Modern Sovereignty: Two Modernities

26. The great insight of Hardt and Negri's account of modern sovereignty is that modernity is not a singular process but is profoundly split: between 'a radical revolutionary process' and an ordering 'counter-revolution' that 'sought to dominate and expropriate the force of the emerging movements and dynamics'. (2000: 74) In the first, which they call 'the discovery of the plane of immanence', humans seize the powers of creation from the heavens to create a radical new consciousness of freedom, scientific possibility and democratic politics; a consciousness they see visible in Dante, Spinoza, Thomas More and the Protestant Sects. (2000: 73) The second begins with the Renaissance, is taken up by the Catholic Church and a reaction within the Reformation, and finally becomes a dominant theme of the Enlightenment (in the thought of Descartes, Kant and Hegel).

27. The democratic possibility of the "multitude" that was freed when the medieval divine order was swept away, is thwarted by the reassertion of 'ideologies of command and authority', by 'the deployment of a new transcendent power [that plays] on the anxiety and fear of the masses, their desire to reduce the uncertainty of life and increase security'. (2000: 75) By the time Hegel has transformed 'the pallid constitutive function of Kant's transcendental critique into a solid ontological figure' this counter-revolutionary project has crystallised: in this modernity 'the liberation of modern humanity could only be a function of its domination…the immanent goal of the multitude is transformed into the necessary and transcendent power of the state'. (2000: 82)

28. Hardt and Negri also make two crucial linkages that echo other accounts. They understand that Hegel's 'philosophical recuperation of the Other within Absolute Spirit' and his universal history were linked with the 'very real violence of European conquest and colonialism' and thus were 'a negation of non-European desire'. They also, gesturing to Foucault's accounts of governmentality and the political double-bind, understand sovereignty as 'a political machine that rules across the entire society' - a machine that is disciplinary and bio-political. (2000: 87)

29. Yet what I would emphasise is that such power, exercised through economic regulation, disciplinary apparatuses, coercion and desire, is still ultimately organised around the final authority (and emotional appeal) of the state. In the construction of national identities, all too often in fearful and repressive relation to internal and external Others, we ultimately find the link between individualising and totalising power; between the state and the citizen as linked formations of subjectivity secured by security. This closes off democratic possibility and freedom and, as Hardt and Negri write, establishes a 'new equilibrium…between the processes of capital accumulation and the structures of power'. It makes an ordered 'people' out of the revolutionary and open set of relations which is the multitude. There is 'no longer anything that strives, desires, or loves; the content of potentiality is blocked, controlled, hegemonized by finality'. (2000: 96, 103, 82)

From Modernity to Empire?

30. This, then, is "modern sovereignty": not simply an abstract locus of juridical authority that forms the basis for Westphalian international law and order, but a complex disciplinary and ontological machinery of enormous depth and force; one whose ultimate aim is to harness and control the possibility of freedom within capitalist modernity. In this way Hardt and Negri's is a brilliant and suggestive analysis that resists essentialism and builds powerfully on an extended body of prior and contemporary theory. The problems, in my view, begin when they brazenly assert that 'the end of colonialism and the declining powers of the nation are indicative of general passage from the paradigm of modern sovereignty toward the paradigm of imperial sovereignty'. (2000: 137) In the hope of foreseeing a renewed conflict between the revolutionary and repressive possibilities of modernity they assert a radical, irreversible passage from modernity to Empire:

As modernity declines, a new season is opened, and here we find again that dramatic antithesis that was at the origins and basis of modernity…The synthesis between the development of productive forces and relations of domination seems once again precarious and improbable. The desires of the multitude and its antagonism to every form of domination drive it to divest itself once again of the processes of legitimation that support the sovereign power…Is this the coming of a new human power? (2000: 90)

31. We can hardly mock their desire or fail to share their hope – but to do so is not always to share their optimism. I worry that projecting the emergence of the multitude as a new historical phenomenon – in teleological terms - may be to downplay the very real challenges in forming it into being and generating truly revolutionary potential from its disparate (and divided) sites and spaces of struggle.

32. Even more disturbing is the wanton act of theoretical (and analytical) closure they perform amid this hope. This comes with their suspicion that 'postmodernist and postcolonialist theories may end up in a dead end because they fail to recognise adequately the contemporary object of critique, that is, they mistake today's real enemy':

What if the modern forms of power these critics (and we ourselves) have taken such pains to describe and contest no longer hold sway in our society?…In short, what if a new paradigm and power, a postmodern sovereignty, has come to replace the modern paradigm of rule through differential hierarchies of the hybrid and fragmentary subjectivities that these theorists celebrate? In this case, modern forms of sovereignty would no longer be at issue, and the postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies that appear to be liberatory would not challenge but in fact coincide with or even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule! (2000: 137-8)

33. These are fighting words, with a terrible critical and analytical finality. There appears to be no question: modern sovereignty, in all its repression and horror, is passing away; and the critical paradigms that grappled with it so gamely are now at best passé and at worst complicit with the new hybrid flexible formations of capitalist Empire. This occurs because the world market 'tends to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state' and with them the stable orders and hierarchies of modern sovereignty. (2000: 150) 'Postmodernists,' they say, 'are still waging battle against the shadows of their old enemies: the Enlightenment, or really modern forms of sovereignty and its binary reduction of difference and multiplicity to a single alternative between Same and Other':

The affirmation of hybridities and the free play of differences across boundaries, however, is liberatory only in a context where power poses hierarchy exclusively through essential identities, binary divisions, and stable oppositions. The structures and logics of power in the contemporary world are entirely immune to the "liberatory" weapons of the postmodernist politics of difference. In fact, Empire too is bent on doing away with those modern forms of sovereignty and on setting differences to play across boundaries. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 142)

34. There is much that is profound about their account of imperial globalisation as generating and capitalising on difference; and their warning that simple anti-racism or celebrations of hybridity fail to work as critical tools against the exploitation of disciplinary, biopolitical capital does need to be heeded. But their assertion that Empire is bent on doing away with modern sovereignty, as such, is overdetermined and misleading.

35. True, neo-liberal globalisation 'tends to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state', but not its ontology. Consider the genesis of Empire after the Second World War. Rigid, fear-soaked ontologies of Cold War anticommunism, combined with massive military expenditures, levels of strategic confrontation and internal repression, were central to the vast movement of US, European and Asian accumulation from 1950 to 1989. A rigid and coercive division between 'democracy' and 'communism', between Self and Other, was then fed into a Hegelian discourse of development and progress where the Other ideally dissolved into the Same. (Burke 2001: 97-127) Such ontologies continued in Southeast Asia beyond that, through to the Cambodian settlement and the fall of Soeharto, when they were partially dismantled through the (very limited) liberalisation of Indonesian politics and the normalisation of relations with Vietnam (which did admittedly occur in tandem with new "imperial" movements of foreign capital into the socialist markets of Vietnam and China).

36. For a period, which we can date from the early 1990s until 11 September 2001, a global binary confrontation fractured into more local and regional confrontations: the Persian Gulf War, the Balkans, Chechnya, the first Intifada, civil war in Cambodia and Burma, repression of the Kurds and Tibetans, East Timor and Aceh, the 1998 riots in Indonesia. Yet surely these conflicts were proof that modern sovereignty and its vicious, security-obsessed ontology was not passing. Nor was modern sovereignty unrelated to the continuing reliance of capital on strong states for "stability", the control of labour, and the security of mines and oil fields. Now, the great binary confrontation has returned - between "freedom" and "terror", "civilisation" and "evil" - which draws in wider and wider sections of the global polity and reinforces modern sovereignty in the worst way.

37. Hardt and Negri's analysis here rests, I suspect, on having swallowed the "democratic peace" theory whole, refracted via Fukuyama's "end of history": 'sovereign power', they assert, 'will no longer confront its Other and no longer face its outside, but rather will progressively expand its boundaries to envelop the entire globe as its domain'. (2000: 189) Where Fukuyama divided the world between the developed 'post-historical' world (where democratic peace would reign) and the 'historical' world (where war and conflict continue), Hardt and Negri describe a world of 'minor and internal conflicts'. The 'history of imperialist, inter-imperialist and anti-imperialist wars is over' they say; there are only civil wars, police actions, a 'proliferation of minor and indefinite crises…an omni-crisis'. (Fukuyama 1992: 245-65, 276; Hardt and Negri 2000: 189)

38. This tends to diminish the destructive power of the 'minor and indefinite crises' they cite, both in terms of scale, loss of life and political importance, and with them the theoretical trajectories that are most able to challenge them. While they do briefly acknowledge the import of 'postmodern' theorising in the discipline of International Relations, they still (mistakenly) regard it as trapped in a death-struggle with modern sovereignty, despite their earlier admission that such scholarship 'strive[s] to challenge the sovereignty of states by deconstructing the boundaries of the ruling powers, highlighting irregular and uncontrolled international movements and flows, and thus fracturing stable unities and oppositions'. (2000: 141-2) National Deconstruction, David Campbell's (1998) study of the interpenetration of sovereignty and conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, starkly illustrates the dangers of assuming sovereignty's passage or irrelevance. There he shows how purist discourses of sovereignty and territorial identity both drove ethnic cleansing and crippled international responses. In turn, his attempts to critically rethink sovereignty and democracy via Derridean deconstruction and Levinasian ethics provide invaluable tools for preventing such a disaster from ever reoccurring. Two-hundred thousand dead, UN humiliation, instability in Yugoslavia and the Kosovo war were the legacies of the very violent, and thoroughly contemporary, perseverance of sovereignty in a crisis that was far from 'minor'.

39. This theoretical double-movement - that asserts the disappearance of modern sovereignty from reality and the obsolescence of anti-modernist thought - has two effects that must be interrogated. Firstly, it imagines a new kind of political subject, the "multitude", which can hopefully mimic and subvert the same deterritorialising movement of capital without succumbing to it; and second, it enforces the new description of rule, "Empire", as the most pressing political task.