"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.
