"The Aesthetics of Empire and the Defeat of the Left"

Kees van der Pijl, International Relations and Politics, University of Sussex

The ‘War on Terrorism’ launched by the United States after the suicide attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September, 2001, builds on a longer history of international confrontation and pressure and more specifically, on a series of postures which have been adopted by the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These postures have included ethical foreign policy, humanitarian intervention, and peace enforcement. They are all part of the quest for a coherent, post-cold war global strategy on the part of the neo-liberal, Atlantic core of the international state system. As I have argued elsewhere (van der Pijl, 1998: ch. 3), capital has historically crystallised in an English-speaking ‘heartland’, from which it continues to radiate, overlaying the transnationalisation of capital from other centres such as East Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America. In this heartland, the capitalist class is most firmly rooted and it is from this core that it organises its transnational class alliances across the globe. Certainly in the recent period, fractures have appeared in the effort to multilateralise US global strategy by straight pressure and the ‘international community’ seems to have narrowed down again to the United States and Britain. But the basic premise that it is ‘ethical’ to wage war against sovereign peoples for their own good, or that whatever the cost to the civilian population, an embargo can be imposed on a nation for political reasons, remains widely accepted. The systemic requirement for a continued growth of capitalism and the deepening of its discipline over society and nature on a world scale, in the end ties the fate of the global capitalist class to the continued ability of the US-led ‘West’ to project its power world-wide.The unification of global space under Western hegemony and under capitalist discipline has reached a stage where no separate trajectories of social development can be allowed to persist. As Mark Duffield argues in a seminal study, the Western approach towards the outside world is no longer inspired by a concern to aid indigenous processes of development, but to impose, if need be by force, the Western social model altogether (Duffield, 2001). Or, as Dan Plesch puts it in a newspaper comment entitled ‘Iraq first, Iran and China next’ (Guardian, 13 September, 2002), ‘President Bush’s concern over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction is a pretext for a global strategy of pre-emptive attack. He and his advisers intend to establish precedents with Iraq that can be used against other states that stand out against US global control.’ In hindsight, the Kosovo war against Yugoslavia also fits this pattern, and in the figure of Milosevic, the elements of embargo, the rise of a criminal economy and a new class associated with it, the demonisation of a defiant leader(ship), punitive war, the re-making of the target society, and the final celebration of ‘international justice’ in a show-trial, all come together. Certainly the defiant leader may be a crook or worse, but it is rather his failure to be ‘our’ crook that he is put to task for.

The interventionism by the self-styled international community, although paraded as ‘ethical’ by leaders such as Clinton and Blair is an aestheticisation, an embellishment, of the sustained attack by the West on the remaining elements of non-conformity with neo-liberal global capitalism—just as ‘freedom and democracy’, ‘human rights’, or ‘deterrence’ were aesthetic labels pasted on a strategy of strangulation applied to the Soviet Union. The ‘War on Terrorism’ is merely the unilateral, militarised version of this interventionism. The neo-liberal counter-revolution against the class and international achievements of reformist and revolutionary forces which had gained strength in the 1970s, after the collapse of the USSR has been geared to a new, quasi-imperial aesthetics of righteous power by which the ‘civilised’ world may discipline the ‘barbarians’ who refuse to comply with the directives addressed to them. Confronting the ‘civilised’ realm are a range of ultimately illegitimate alternatives, some worse than others, from which evil may spring and reach out to us. Clearly the murderous attacks of September 11 gave ample proof that this view of the world is superficially correct. And whilst the 'war on terrorism' goes beyond the assumptions of mere ethical foreign policy and peace enforcement, it taps into the same root of self-righteousness. To construct evil in this way, though, it must be abstracted from history, so that its sources, which almost always reside in previous episodes of Western involvement, can be ignored and responsibilities left non-addressed (Kolko, 2002).

The Aesthetics of Capitalist Geopolitics

To highlight the new quasi-imperial aesthetics which I argue underscores Western hegemony in the contemporary world, I will distinguish between the actual ethical aspect of policy or of social situations—as Klaus-Gerd Giesen has shown, every policy, e.g. narrow power realism, too, has an ethical aspect (Giesen, 1992); and a purported ethics, as in ‘ethical foreign policy’ distinguished from a supposedly un-ethical foreign policy. In that case, we are not speaking of ethics but of aesthetics.

As David Harvey argues (1985: 108-9), state authority cannot be legitimated entirely on account of its practical functions in the reproduction of a particular social order. Under contemporary capitalist relations, specifically, the state has to mythologise itself anew, because its actual functions are too technical to inspire the deeper sense of belonging on which earlier types of society relied to legitimate state authority. More specifically, capitalist society today is a transnational society, in which exploitation occurs, and classes form, along lines of gravitation that run across boundaries and therefore involve several states nominally sovereign. The mythology of political authority in contemporary capitalist society therefore must account for systematic foreign involvement, necessary for protecting the transnationalised circuit of capital and the fractions of the capitalist class active in it. Expansion from the original, English-speaking heartland, itself grafted on the crusades and the voyages of discovery, bequeathed the Christian civilisation/heathen barbarity dichotomy, which through its further history, structured the mental appropriation and theoretical elaboration of relations between the West and non-Western societies (cf. Jahn, 2000). In the post-cold war context, this dichotomy has been subtly mutated again, because every hegemonic strategy has to build on the available foundation of attitudes and dispositions in the wider population if it is to be effective.

Today, the missionary ideology constructed around the civilisation/barbarity dichotomy must satisfy the tastes of a Western public which has developed a specific set of sensibilities under conditions of sustained abundance and images of abundance. Cultural permissiveness, the freedom to consume and travel, and unfamiliarity with any direct experience of violence and oppression (to mention a few constitutive elements only), add up to a particular mental substratum on which an idealised way of life, which is the good life, can comfortably rest. This ideal is being continuously recycled by the media and politicians and held up before us as the only legitimate form of existence. Being poor is no longer just a condition that is deplorable, let alone something for which the West might bear any responsibility, but proof of the failure of a society to organise itself like a rich society and with the rich societies—to be culturally permissive, to allow freedom of consumption and travel, etcetera—brief, to be like us.

When the collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by a systematic weakening of states which only had been in control of their societies by virtue of the cold war, indeed by a trail of state collapse, the cry for Western involvement mounted along with the penetration of capital in countries previously closed to it, because often, violence of a very primitive kind, using machetes and clubs rather than B-52s, proved particularly offensive to people whose upper limit of sensitivity to violence has been set by the falling over of a TV actor playing dead by a bullet. Sights of real blood on TV in Somalia or Yugoslavia only confirmed a basic prejudice that ‘we’ have left such barbarity behind us, and therefore should rush in to restore order; which if it required violence, would still leave ‘us’ on a higher moral plane—that of civilisation. After all, ‘murdering Gaels, or foreigners, or Red Indians,… was patriotic, heroic, and just, whereas to defend yourself and your way of life against the advancing forces of English-speaking empire showed human nature at its worst and most bestial’ (Calder, 1981: 36).

The label ‘ethical’ for this involvement (ethical referring to the quest for the good), when used as a claim made on behalf of those who pursue the foreign involvement, actually must be read as ‘aesthetical’ (the quest for the beautiful) because it consciously deals with the appearance of things. It is a construction, rather than one out of a set of inherent qualities. In a discussion of different definitions of aesthetics, Borev concludes that what we experience as beautiful, is related to our capacity to control. We experience the beauty of nature only to the degree it has been appropriated socially in the labour process; in the fullness of collective and individual experience, we are willing to meditate on certain universal qualities of natural objects, while objectifying, that is, appropriating them socially. We experience pleasure by the mere contemplation of our own powers. Nature as it were becomes magnificent in the mirror of our own capacity to change it—to the point where we can enjoy without immediately exerting these powers. The connection with an aestheticisation of politics by calling it ‘ethical’, I would infer, resides in the ‘enjoyment’ of being on the side of the good defined as the controlling side; whilst on the opposite side is raw nature, which we in principle control, but which is ‘barbarian’, uncivilised, in one way or another. In Borev’s words,

Assessing the various phenomena aesthetically, man establishes the degree of his supremacy over the world. This degree is determined by the level and nature of the development of society and its production. The latter reveals the universal significance of the natural properties of objects and defines their aesthetic characteristics (Borev, 1985: 42).

During NATO's Kosovo war in the spring of 1999, Jamie Shea, the spokesman for the alliance, bragged that NATO, by releasing showers of tiny aluminium strips on power plants, could switch the electricity supply of Serbia on and off at will. This is an example of how the might of the West was used in this conflict not just as blind destruction but, in a way that was itself inspiring awe, by playing with the electricity switch and showing ‘restraint’ as a means of demonstrating a far greater power, and civilisation at the same time. Of course, the so-called collateral damage, such as the cluster-bombing of civilian columns, or the attacks on the Belgrade TV studios or the Chinese embassy, were not to the same degree able to convey this aesthetic enjoyment.

But the aesthetics of power, to the degree it was effective, did serve to construct a mythology of authority for the NATO bloc which helped its forward march into Central and Eastern Europe (and on to Central Asia, as I have argued elsewhere, cf. van der Pijl, 2001). The pressing forward of the boundary of civilisation requires an element of consent which cannot be expected from the destructive use of power alone. This in fact is also a liability in the current ‘war on terrorism’. For Western-style ‘polyarchy’ (elite circulation through limited party competition) to function in a forward strategy, a legitimacy must be created of which at least one political formation, in practice the political formation of the aspiring transnational capitalist class in the zone of advance, makes itself the representative. Only then, hegemonic integration can occur (Robinson, 1996).

De-Legitimising Non-Western Existence. The New Barbarians

Fukuyama’s thesis on the ‘End of History’ proclaimed in 1989 continues to be the most significant statement of the ideology of globalisation. There is no need to go into the problematic, even fraudulent concoction of Hegelian rationalism and the triumph of possessive individualism claimed by Fukuyama. What is important is that the universalisms of the prior period, the truly planetary ethics that in all its different varieties animated the student and black movements, the Third World coalitions behind a New International Economic Order monitored by the UN, and the peace moment finally resonating in Gorbachev’s proposals for a global ‘historic compromise’, all have been abandoned. Fukuyama instead proclaimed the differentiation between states/societies which have reached the finite ‘global’ stage of civilisation (liberal capitalism plus parliamentary democracy); and states ‘mired in history’. Fukuyama, too, recognises common, sovereignty-transcending processes and imperatives, but claims they affect two categories of states differently, indeed defines these two categories—one, the universal homogeneous state of the triumphant West, and two, those states outside the West, not yet included in it but faced with the necessity to adopt the Western package of parliamentary democracy and neo-liberal economics now that the great historical alternatives to it, lastly state socialism, have collapsed.

This discourse constituted the ideological background of the proclamation of the New World Order by Bush Sr., which was the next step from the confrontational ‘freedom’ drive under Reagan and Thatcher, and beyond to the identification of the ‘Axis of Evil’ by Bush, Jr. Whereas Gorbachev still claimed that to obtain the real universality necessary to take up the planetary responsibilities of human survival, the forces of imperialism had to be neutralised; the End of History/Axis of Evil line of thinking on the contrary argues that for the world to reach its definitive form in terms of civilisation, the burden of adaptation is reversed. It is necessary instead to neutralise the states ‘mired in history’ as potential rabble-rousers, the ‘rogue states’ beyond the pale. The normative thrust, too, is entirely reversed compared to the prior period in which Western capitalism found itself embattled. From attacking exploitation, unequal exchange, militarism, imperialism, and cultural degradation with their epicentre in the West, the Fukuyama argument holds that with the end of the Cold War, the preparation for war to defend freedom against dictatorship can shift to policing the remaining pockets of non-integration. This view warrants that while inside the post-historic world, the new norms that the modern world requires, such as peaceful settlement of conflict and other instances of civilisation (including of course, ‘market economy’), have been achieved; these norms do not prevail outside this sphere. The criteria are simple: allowing a free rein to private capital (‘market economy’) and ‘democracy’ (holding elections is the only criterion). In both cases, what is secured through meeting these two criteria, is the legitimate involvement and presence of the West in other societies, economically and politically, suspending their ‘otherness’ in these respects. Crucial, though, is the de-legitimation of existence outside the orbit of the West.

Beginning with the view of the Soviet ‘evil empire’ as a barbarian anomaly fostering terrorism all over the globe, the hegemonic discourse in the West was geared to a normative differentiation between the West itself and the world not conforming to Western norms. The implication of this attitude that we represent civilisation (‘the international community’) whereas the others lead an existence which is historically meaningless and ultimately illegitimate, of course has a long pedigree. It effectively provides the moral grounds for imposing our will without reservations on the natives, which we have first dehumanised, as Toynbee says, by considering them as part of the local ‘flora and fauna’. Of course, German history has added its own gruesome chapter to this de-humanisation of the ‘other’, but it is as important for understanding contemporary world affairs to see that the English-speaking heartland was founded on ideas of a ‘chosen people’ who made short shrift with any native populations they encountered—both on the British Isles and in the lands of overseas settlement (Toynbee, 1935, 1: 211-2, 465).

The morality of the new cold war launched by Thatcher and Reagan was definitely rooted in this preconception. Under Reagan, the tension ignited by his predecessor and his European friends led by Helmut Schmidt, was raised to a new level with declarations by top Reagan advisers such as Richard Pipes that the USSR should change its system or face war. At the same time, under the Reagan Doctrine, counter-guerrilla wars of extreme brutality were launched, of which the one in Mozambique was perhaps the worst of all in terms of killing and maiming, but of which the Afghan jihad against the Communist government and the Soviet occupation meanwhile deserves pride of place in terms of its longer-term political consequences. With US proxies thus encouraged to engage in a systematic slaughter of their kin, a view was fostered that those who do not conform willingly to our norms, are outside civilisation itself; and that one can impose one’s will on them without moral restraint. The proxies of course were mobilised against the authoritarian imposition of the Soviet version of modern rationality, which in the end is only a variety of modernity throughout; they were encouraged to activate any sentiment that could bring their men to fight. As Dick Boer has argued, the USSR’s collapse implied the disappearance of a countermovement against capitalism which yet was part of ‘modernity’—in the sense that it did not reject the insights and achievements of Enlightenment but rather their perversion in late-bourgeois society. Socialism confronted capitalism with its own programme: freedom, equality, and fraternity. Gorbachev’s final attempt to reach out to the West and achieve a historic compromise between capitalism and socialism in light of the threat to humanity's survival on the planet, Boer notes, failed because for the West, confident of its power relative to a weakened adversary, there was no need to accept such a compromise.

Since for the actual countermovement, an appeal to the ideals of the Enlightenment itself has become a totally frustrated enterprise, terrorism is the "solution" to which the "free world", claiming all reason for itself, compels. The opponents of the inhumanity of our "free world" turn into the barbarians we have made out of them: the irrationality of our rationality drives them to madness. And this barbarity is then ascribed to them as their "essence" (Boer, 1991: 18)

When these lines were written, the West had triumphed, but on the fringes of its sphere of influence, with ‘globalisation’ only just offering itself as an option, neo-liberal capitalism was still confronted with the proxies it had recruited in the effort. Of these barbarian proxies, Bin Laden has meanwhile achieved world notoriety, and Boer’s prescient comments throw light on the withdrawal from universalism which characterises the current stage of the Third World revolt and on which the Bin Laden network draws. There were also proxies which remained, as state classes, committed to Western values of private enrichment, instrumental rationality, etc., and they were actually mobilised, qua states, to stem the tide of irrational barbarity rising against the West—Iraq against the Iran of the ayatollahs being the case in point.

In Rufin’s L’Empire et les nouveaux barbares (like Boer’s analysis, of 1991), it is this role of proxy states as buffers against barbarity that is central in the analysis. Rufin sees the ’New World Order’ announced by Bush Sr. after the victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Gulf War, along the lines of the old Roman empire. There is a civilised core, the empire; an outer barbarian arena; and buffer states on the boundary line, the limes. On this frontier, which as we know from other historical empires, is a zone rather than a line, the barbarian forces encounter the limits of the imperial ones. Wars, according to Rufin, are mainly conducted to contest/establish the status of buffer states situated along the limes. In this light, both the war over Kuwait, between the US-led ’empire’ and Iraq, and the war over Kosovo between NATO and rump-Yugoslavia, are examples of such borderline wars in Rufin’s argument. That the ‘empire’ is morally and ethically superior to the barbarians, is a foregone conclusion. This is expressed in many ways, for instance in the unquestioned assumption that it is always the West which sends ‘monitors’ to observe whether elections in non-Western states are held according to the rules. Certainly it would cause a stir if Kampuchean or Zambian observers would appear in Florida to investigate the financing and conditions of, say, the US Presidential elections. Since ‘justice’ likewise can only be a characteristic of the empire and not of the barbarians, it can be applied only in a one-way direction.

The New Aesthetics of Empire and the Defeat of the Left

The imperial theme has been popularised recently in Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), but from this empire, all politics has been removed by the failure to understand the international relations involved, and by the stark absence of any class analysis. In the end, what remains is a literary hyperbole, which obscures the competitive, disruptive aspects of the discipline of capital both on its geopolitical substratum (the rivalries among transnational fractions of the ruling class operating from different states, within and beyond the original heartland); and on the class structure of contemporary capitalism. On this dimension, there is no longer just the straight confrontation between the propertied ruling class and a proletariat, ‘the multitude’ in Hardt and Negri’s parlance; in between, as I argue in chapter 5 of my Transnational Classes and International Relations (1998) there has arisen, in the course of the 20th century, a managerial cadre class with the potential to steer society away from its subordination to capital, if the balance of social forces or the survival conditions of society per se, compel it to do so. The anti-globalisation movement and the wide resonance it has achieved since Seattle have scattered the self-evidence of the global unification of capitalist discipline to a degree which is once again (as happened in the 1930s and 1970s) undermining the loyalty to the ruling class of at least a segment of the cadre.

The question of the legitimacy of war against ‘barbarians’ and against barbarian practices, is of crucial importance for deciding whether the issues raised by the anti-globalisation movement (privatisation of the ‘global commons’, over-consumption, exhaustion of the social and natural substratum of human existence) will be turned into a comprehensive political programme. The origins of the paradox between the purported ethics of contemporary globalisation as the harbinger of freedom and democracy and the reality of criminal coercion, have to be exposed in order not to be caught up in a debate on economics. The pre-emptive wars waged or contemplated against the remaining non-integrated, non-Western societies, wars which in a sense try to violently remove the accumulated contradictions which result from a century of Western involvement, are not just an aberration from what otherwise would be rational ‘global governance’. They are an attempt to aestheticise globalisation as an ethical project for which we must be willing to fight. There is perhaps even an element of mobilising the widespread resistance and disgust provoked by misery and repression per se, against the victims locked in their own miserable and repressive outposts, and so turn war into ‘liberation’ also for us—not unlike German socialists in 1914 were mobilised against the autocracy of the Czar, the French socialists against the authoritarianism of the Reich. Without the ideological component of ‘just war’, the globalisation project will lack the energies it can only draw from a mass base, and the Kosovo war again stands as a measure of how far, if given the impetus of a righteous crusade, the West can penetrate in one relatively minor conflict of this type.

The Western approach, theorised by Fukuyama, and later hardened into Huntington’s clash of civilisations thesis (with its echoes of Carl Schmitt if not of the actual Nazi geopolitical school of Haushofer and Fried), is not for global community but for Western community, with insiders and outsiders, and the right to go to war against the outsiders because they are outsiders is implicit in it. The origins of this go back to the transformation of England from an absolutist monarchy to a capitalist state in the civil war and the Glorious Revolution, when its attitude in world politics shifted from dynastic entanglements to calculated gain (Teschke, 2002). One consequence of English expansion through overseas settlement was the creation, certainly through rivalry and conflict, of a core group of states among whom war was no longer an option—the foedus pacificum of Kant’s peace project, or what I call the Lockean heartland. Kant’s project, like Locke’s, was based on the notion of a social contract—in Kant’s case, one at the international level, among republics, ‘democracies’. In contemporary Western liberal thought, this idea is self-consciously carried forward, as e.g. by John Rawls in Theory of Justice (1973: 11). From that work, it is not difficult to gauge that the just society is the liberal, Western one, so that by implication, there is an outside world where justice is lacking. However, in his later work, as Giesen demonstrates, Rawls also gives his general liberal argument an imperial inflection. In Political Liberalism and an article ‘The Law of Peoples’, both of 1993, Rawls proposes an intermediary zone, a grey area, which may be compared to Rufin’s ‘borderline states’. Thus three concentric circles are delineated: the inner circle of states adhering to political liberalism and justice; a second rung of ‘well-ordered hierarchical regimes’ which are allied to the former; and ‘outlaw regimes’, the ‘rogue states’ of the contemporary period (Giesen, 1999: 44). The three categories are basically defined by their observance of political human rights. The second-circle regimes must minimally respect certain human rights, in addition to being legitimate in the eyes of their own people and behave in a peaceful and non-expansionist way. This distinguishes them from the outlaw regimes. An important criterion is also the respect of private property. Thus a state which does not respect private property is an outlaw regime, whereas a state which for instance violates the freedom of expression or association but respects private property, can belong to the second circle (Giesen, 1999: 46). Rawls then claims the right for the liberal states to ‘punish’ the outlaw regimes by economic measures or by force for their non-observance of rights. Whereas Kant did not recognise the right to intervene militarily, punitive war is a clear option for Rawls. In Rawls’s view, ‘justice’ can only apply to the political sphere (it includes the right to private property, though). The economic sphere on the other hand is neutral, and cannot be understood in terms of justice. Thus while private property is a human right, its consequences for the economy are not within the sphere of human rights.

Rawls’s considerations on the ethics of intervention may be brushed aside as a scholastic exercise which need not detain us too long. But they symbolise, as does his Theory of Justice, the quest for a moral justification of our society as the ultimate achievement in terms of justice and ethics, the need for the aestheticisation of our existence in Western society. Fukuyama specifies the grounds for the illegitimacy of non-Western existence, after which the field is open for the re-making of that part of the world in ‘our’ image—a chorus in which Rawls then becomes only one among many voices. The self-styled ‘international community’ after having denigrated the UN and international law for more than twenty years as part of the neo-liberal counterrevolution, has firmly grasped the exclusive right to force even if this is diluted by dispensations given to, say, Russia in Chechnya, when the tactics of gaining a free hand elsewhere require it. Moral internationalism rather than upholding the rules that alone can prevent or limit war, has become the defining element in the Western consensus.

The question that arises, and with which I conclude, is: Why has the Left as an established political force, lost its bearings, and has it allowed itself to be drawn along into the vortex of imperial globalisation? Clearly, a wide chasm has opened up between the nomads of the anti-globalisation movement and the Left parties within their respective states—the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Communists. I would argue, within the limits of a brief and tentative conclusion, that there are two different reasons for this. One has to do with generations—the anti-globalisation movement (which of course is in reality a true ‘globalisation’ movement) is a youth movement. This generation of students and the young generally, has come of age in the post-cold war context and perceives issues globally, in a world context. That tendency in the youth movement which wants to express itself beyond dancing, and which has a social conscience, articulates its solidarity with the dispossessed in the global context for the simple reason that there are no longer two worlds and one which has not yet made up its mind. Little needs to be said to argue this, because it strikes me as completely self-evident. The preserve of the Third World solidarity committees of the recent past—the Nicaragua and Angola committees, the Vietnam movement etc., etc., has been opened up by capitalist globalisation and a Left consciousness attaches itself no longer to the particular projects of aspiring state classes with or without Soviet support, but straightforwardly, as an opposition in its own right, to the cause of social justice and emancipation, survival and peace on a world scale.

The second reason why the anti-globalisers and the established Left have parted ways allowing the latter to be mopped up by the mobilisation of consent for punitive war, is one of functionality. Indeed the remarkable melt-down of the Left in the case of NATO’s war against Yugoslavia, a process already heralded by the weak response to the Western attack on Iraq in 1991, in my view can only be understood if we analyse the rise of the managerial cadre in advanced capitalist society, which finds its privileged expression in Social Democracy, but even less hampered by tradition, in the various Green formations. The Communists have either given up altogether in the wake of the Soviet collapse, or have survived in name only. As a cadre entrusted with the day-to-day management of politics and administration, the ‘political class’ of each state is an internally cohesive force, and the particular sources of the entitlement to occupy state management posts such as the class struggle of the labour movement, have increasingly been left behind by that part of the cadre which entered politics as representatives of the working class aspirations for socialism.

One aspect of the mental state and practical disposition of the cadre is their capacity to serve under different masters. A manager in the sphere of intellectual activity (and managing knowledge workers or managing the political-administrative sphere are not different here) cannot enter his or her function with a strong commitment to a single world-view. Flexibility and the willingness to apply ideas as if they were ‘tools’, is a precondition for this strand of cadre to function, and the Left in state politics has been trained to do precisely this for the entire post-war period, but increasingly so in the most recent period. Post-modern thought with its awareness of multiple realities and scepticism towards comprehensive theorisations, has emancipatory as well as functional-disciplining effects in this respect. Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge is particularly relevant here, because it makes claims to truth relative, arguing that every system of knowledge defines anew what is true and what is false. Lyotard, with his scepticism towards ‘grand narratives’, in his famous report on higher education writes that ‘the transmission of knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite capable of leading the nation towards its emancipation, but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions’ (Lyotard, 1984: 48).

Such an attitude to knowledge, whilst containing emancipatory elements as well, also dovetails with its commodification and commercialisation, and as Giesen notes, it is this trend which also has penetrated the sphere of ethics. There has occurred a shift to an applied ethics, in which ethical questions are approached eclectically with an eye to their use—ethics are even called ‘variables’, to be handled by experts in ethical questions (Giesen, 1992: 302). ‘Applied ethics’ continues to enjoy considerable success beyond the limits of traditional philosophy.

Having become "experts in ethical questions", the philosophers, happy to be able—finally!—to render service to the collectivity, to be finally useful for something, joyfully apply their analytical tools to moral cases in every field. They teach (in the United States) in schools of medicine, law, journalism, economics, and recently also in political science; they are active in hospitals, corporations, and, as consultants, set up clinics analogous to those of psychologists and psychoanalysts to aid their clients in "thinking" their moral problem (Giesen, 1992: 305).

To perform this function, however, the experts need an ethics that is completely malleable, they cannot be seen to be sticking to one particular position any longer. It is here that post-modernism emerges as the general framework to cover an applied ethics for any situation that may arise (Giesen, 1992: 307). The professional politicians who notwithstanding their historical affiliations with the Left, proved willing to melt into the consensus supporting punitive war against non-compliant outsider states, in my view are subject to the same process of developing the malleable mind without which they would not be able to survive as political cadre in the present global context. The aestheticisation of quasi-imperial world politics is grafted on this instrumentalisation of ethics. Only in this way can the glaring contradictions of humanitarian war, embargo for democracy, etc. be explained. This rise of a neo-liberal cadre especially in the sphere of the former Left, and their take-over of its political formations (New Labour etc.) have created not only the apparatus for the application of the new ethics and its aestheticisation by spin doctors and intellectual experts alike, but also a mass basis—at least as long as the newly emerged anti-globalisation movement will be kept at bay.

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