Talking - and writing - about a new
form of war, and new types of warfare, didn't start
recently. Actually we can trace back this debate to the
gulf war of 1991, it accompanied the wars in former
Soviet Union and last but not least those in former
Yugoslavia. Much has been written on "revolution in
military affairs", on weapon technologies, on
historical and sociological aspects regarding the "new"
warfare.
But in doing so, most authors did
hardly get out of mere typology: there is warfare led
by a bunch of warlord militias, as in Somalia and
Afghanistan, and their only objective seems to be a
prolongation of the war, because warlord power stems
from war. There is war leading to nation building as
well as to breaking-up nations, as it is the case with
Armenia and Azerbaijan, or again with Yugoslavia. There
are civil wars and wars involving nations, not to
mention the many undeclared wars of low intensity. And
we observe asymmetric wars, as the one in Palestine, as
the wars waged against Afghanistan, against Iraq, and
the so-called war on terrorism. But we speak of a new
form of war; and we do not mean typology, because the
latter isn't able to go beyond a confusing ensemble of
motivations and legitimations, searching an historical
precedent for every type of war.
The Continuation of Politics
Predominant in all of the debate is an instrumentalist
notion of war, taking for true Clausewitz's famous
dictum: "War is regarded as nothing but the
continuation of politics by other means." One can find
such an instrumentalism on the side of a bellicist left
speaking as advocates of civilisation simultaneously
neglecting the destructive forces operating against the
promised civil liberties and forcing civil society to
militarize its creative potentials. And instrumentalism
is to be found on the side of those believing that it
would be enough to define the condition of war based
upon the categories of political economy and some
analysis of geopolitical interests, in order to
identify imperialist rivals and different strategic
objectives.
We have our doubts, if it may be possible to analyse
current international warfare adequately with such
arguments, let alone resist it.
A different point of view is provided by Michel
Foucault's displacement of Clausewitz. In order to
define the dispositifs of power Foucault writes "that
politics is war continued by other means". Foucault
turns Clausewitz's dictum upside down, describing power
as war. This point of view no longer focuses on the
relation of objectives and means, but on struggles and
relations of power, on lines and dynamisms of social
conflict. War establishes an order.
War establishing order
The contemporary imperial wars are part of the passage
towards the political order of global capitalism, the
sovereign order of Empire. War is neither "means" of
expansion of a constituted order nor of its
restructuring, war is neither roll back nor
containment. War is not the continuation of politics by
other means, it becomes the fundament of politics and
legitimation. War is actually what Toni Negri calls
"guerra ordinativa".
The resurgence of the concept of bellum iustum (the
"just war") leads towards an understanding of this new
form of war. Today the secularized "just war" is a
moment of global politics that bears its legitimation
in itself. Unlike the conflicts of the second half of
the 20th century, the concept of "just war" combines
two elements: the legitimacy of the military apparatus
as ethically grounded - think of the human rights
discourse against rogue states - and the legitimacy
(qua its effectiveness) of the military action to
establish the desired Order and the so-called peace.
The war, just like the enemy, comes to be at once
banalized and absolutized, it comes to be reduced to an
"object of routine police repression" and, at the same
time, presented as an absolute threat to the ethical
order.
The synthesis of both moments creates a continuum
making it impossible to distinguish between police
measure and military action, thus creating a crucial
feature for the world order of Empire. The secularized
"just war" leads to a diffuse but permanent warfare -
the propaganda and the measures in the "war on
terrorism" gives us an impression of it. The war itself
shows no beginning nor end. Waging war against Iraq was
just a stopover in the passage towards a global society
of control wiping off step by step remnants of the old
East-West conflict. Existing war economies are wiped
out, like in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, if they
represent an obstacle for the capitalist accumulation
or the political order of Empire.
Society of control
Waging war means the destruction of societies and the
recomposition of populations, tearing down borders and
creating new ones. The new form of war leads to the
foundation of global mechanisms of control aiming at
the mobility and the productivity of living labour.
Thus the war becomes a central element in the formation
of the currently developing bio-political mode of
production.
At stake is the enforcement of a society of control on
a global scale, and to link single political regimes to
the world order. At stake is the process of capitalist
globalization, and to protect this process against its
own risks and crises. At stake is the real subsumption
of society under capital.
Most governments have passed legislation that enforce
the developing order of war. There is no mass
mobilization setting free enthusiasm for the war like
in the world wars and colonial wars of the last
century. Nevertheless state apparatuses are set up
carefully - think of preparing the army for police
action in several European countries or tracing down
immigrants descending from so-called rogue states. The
figureheads today are secularized versions of "God" and
"My Country", it is a regime of panic integrated by the
war on terrorism that leads to the authoritarian
collectives of today, beyond the vanishing sovereignty
of the nation-state, forcing civil society to gather
around the catastrophic and Manichaean alternative "us"
or "them", "good" or "evil".
Imperialism and Empire
Today we witness the decadence of the nation-form of
sovereignty and the crisis of the institutions of the
nation-state. Nation-states are no longer main actors
on the stage of international politics. Imperial world
order is a stratified system of rule organized along
networks, without any outside or centre. State
apparatuses and nation-form are losing their links and
the codification of national sovereignty given by
international law de facto expires. Yet this decline
does not mean that the nation-state disappears without
a word: we witness the replacement of the centrality of
national sovereignty as it developed in Europe and
spread all over the world by colonialism and
imperialism.
Yet imperialism is not followed by Empire in the sense
of a sequence of ages, both distinctly and positively,
the "Age of Empire" does not simply follow the age of
imperialism. Obviously the United States lead by George
W. Bush Jr. try to pick up the thread of Ronald Reagan
and George Bush Sr., heading for imperialist politics.
The U.S. was, as Hardt and Negri point out, again and
again "tempted to engage in an European-style
imperialism". But the American model of sovereignty
based on "white decolonization" marks nonetheless a
historical difference in contrast to European
nation-state imperialism.
Indeed we should not mix up strategic options of an
administration and their think tanks talking of
"American Empire" and a "New American Century" with the
conditions of world order. The archipelago of Empire
has no monocratic centre, but is characterized by
relations of rivalry confined by the political
requirements of capitalist accumulation on global
scale. The constitutional process of the European
Union, the rivalry of different countries in this
process, and the relations with the United States are
to be seen within the realms of imperial
sovereignty.
However the Bush administration articulates national
interests in waging war against Iraq, it is nor in
command over world order, and thus has to follow its
zigzag path between multilateralism and unilateralism.
There is no chance to reinstall political control by
military means. Such strategic objectives aren't backed
economically considering the internationalization of
capital under U.S. hegemony after world war II and its
crisis starting in the 1970s, and there is - from the
point of view of the ruling class - no national
bourgeoisie that could play an avant-garde role in
global accumulation like the British bourgeoisie did
once. The petrol and military industries won't be able
to play that role.
Against the order of war
To resist the war cannot be identified with taking
sides for one rival party. Anti-militarist politics
will not have to choose imperial from imperialist
strategies, but will resist the logic of warfare, the
regime of panic that is imposed on civil society. Yet
it seems clear that neither pacifism nor NGO-activism
alone will be able to do so. But the demonstrations of
February 15 and other metropolitan actions against the
war in on Iraq showed up the possibilities of leaving
behind some restrictions, like the reference on
nation-states. The authoritarian dispositifs of the
society of control, enforced by the war, are aiming
against the lives and the creativeness of the
multitudes. Resisting it first of all means resisting
global capital and its world order. Thus in effect, we
have to go through Empire, to find not merely
international but trans-national perspectives of
liberation.
