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.

Michael Hardt is professor of literature at Duke University, North
Carolina,
and co-author with Antonio Negri of Empire

hardt@duke.edu

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