Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2004 17:11:55 -0700 (PDT)
From: andrew robinson <ldxar1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: geopolitics article part 1 - introduction


WITH OR WITHOUT YOU: US Foreign Policy, Domination, Hegemony and Rhizomes of Resistance.
      Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson
This paper is an analysis of developments in world politics since September 11th and in particular, the effects of these developments on global structures of domination and hegemony.  Contrasting hegemony and domination, the authors contend that, while US domination has expanded since September 11th, it has not been accompanied by a growth in hegemony.  Rather, US power is increasingly faced with resistance movements operating on a network model.  These movements can be divided into two broad groups, socio-political movements and ethnopolitical movements.  To suppress both kinds of movements, the US state relies on a binary, repressive mode of identity-construction which divides the world into “them and us”.  This approach is guaranteed to escalate rather than resolve conflict, and is linked to the perpetuation of the world system as an overcoding apparatus.  Its effects include the corrosion of civil and human rights, attacks on the independence of journalists and, most importantly,
 the increasing isolation of the would-be power-holders amid a sea of swarming resistances and uncontrollable spaces and flows.  From “with us or against us”, domination therefore evolves into “with or without you”.  Against this logic, the authors emphasise the potential contained in network forms of social organisation as a basis for constructing resistances to repressive apparatuses and to the world system as a system of global control.
   ________________________________________
 
‘The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your grasp’
       (Princess Leia to Imperial Grand Moff Tarkin, Star Wars 4: A New Hope.)
To what extent has the world really “changed” since September 11th?  On the one hand, the structures of the world system, and the imperial actions of the US and its allies in attempting to control and even colonise “underdeveloped” countries, have continued or even intensified.  But on the other hand, there are certainly differences in the way world politics occurs today, compared to earlier stages of the world system – not least because of the rise of new, network-based forms of social and technological organisation such as the Internet.  This paper is an attempt to engage with these changes and continuities drawing on resources taken from various schools of critical theory and World Systems Theory.  There are three issues explored in this paper. One is the international environment in which foreign policy takes place, the context of corporate neo-liberal “globalisation”.  Another is the decline of American hegemony and the US’s resultant reliance on domination in the world system,
 and the third is the swathe of resistance movements and networks responsible for this decline. 
First there is globalisation. Globalisation is often portrayed in broad terms of cultural and technological change: we share friends from different places, culture, food, resources, we show solidarity with far away peoples. The problem is that not everybody has access to this lovely thing called globalisation. Actually, in certain instances it is a rhetoric used by governments to justify their submission to financial markets. The same governments are challenged by these global flows of capital, technology, information and people. And people might feel their identity threatened by such a process. At the same time globalisation itself directly resuscitates local traditions, it literally thrives on them. In other words, the concept of globalisation is a conflation of two distinct phenomena: the corporate takeover of the world, and a process of fragmentation of national, ethnic and religious identity-communities which is creating a more open social context wherever the corporate
 tentacles have not yet reached.  Whereas the former of these is to be resisted, the latter provides the basis for a transformative politics, and the trick is not to try stopping this force but to use it as a resource.  This has been the practice of global resistance movements, grass roots social movement organisations and social networks against governments and international institutions. As a result of such activity, neo-liberal governments and institutions face a counter-hegemonic account of globalisation, to which they have responded in a confused and often contradictory way. In other words, there is resistance against governments, against international institutions.
      The resistance to the US state and its neo-liberal allies involves several very broad groups of challengers. Firstly, there are ethno-religious movements, based on the defence of fixed identities against the spread of American power.  The network that attacked the Twin Towers on September 11th is one example of such a movement. However, there are also resistance groups mobilised to oppose the US military interventions, to oppose particular instances of opperssion or even to oppose capitalist “globalisation” itself. Contrary to appearances, changes in the world system since September the 11th have not empowered the position of the United States in global politics. Far from showing strength, the waves of violence unleashed by the US and its allies through the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is in fact a reaction to the breakdown of American global hegemony and a strategy based on partial domination rather than hegemony. Theoretically, this paper is informed by Antonio Gramsci,
 Slavoj Žižek, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, using their concepts of hegemony, violence/powerlessness, war/nonwar and closure/openness respectively. In particular, we examine the stages and changes in identity construction, the use of terrorism and axis of evil discourses. Identity construction revolves around issues not simply concerning the enemy, which need to be considered, but more importantly the evident shift in American identity as far as their engagement with the rest of the world is concerned. Shifting from ‘carefree’ hegemon to a victimised and ‘wronged’ country, the American Administration then transforms itself into the party that strikes back. The discourse operates as pretext for a generalised closure of space, both within western societies (e.g. attacks on civil liberties) and in the world system (e.g. the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq). However, this is starting to break down, a process exemplified in the spread of what Deleuze terms rhizomatic forms of social
 organisation. The interest then lies in identifying the transformation of American foreign policy discourse and identity in response to network forms of resistance, both by anti-war coalitions and movements and ‘terrorism’, which not surprisingly follows similar lines of development and organisation.
Between domination and hegemony: the vicissitudes of the world system
Conceived in Gramscian terms, hegemony refers to a relation in which a leading or “directive” group is able to influence others to adopt its conception of the world by means such as cultural influence. In contrast, a relation of domination exists when a ruling group is able to maintain control only by suppressing the intellectual and ethico-political development of subordinates (either through transformist control or through violence). Admittedly, America’s hegemony has always been problematic and fragmentary, with local appropriations of American symbolism creating hybrid forms which undermine official US goals1.  However, this tenuous hegemony seems recently to have collapsed in much of the world (perhaps because of the loss of the US position in the Cold war binary). As a result, the American state has attempted repeatedly to assert its control by means of direct domination. Paradoxically, such methods have been effective only in further undermining attempts to build hegemony. 
      There is a tendency in some strands of international relations scholarship to identify global influence strongly with military power. However, to conceive a relation of suppression through brute force as if it were a form of substantial influence us mistaken. The resort to brute force signifies the breakdown of communicative power and the replacement of effective subsumption with violent subordination. As Zizek puts it in a similar context, ‘recall the logic of paternal authority: the moment a father takes control and displays his full power….we necessarily perceive this display of impotent rage- an index of its very opposite’2. Likewise, America displays its “total” power only as an index of her underlying weakness, its inability to control the suppressed groups held down within the system it controls.  Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that one perform a thought-experiment: imagine a state which is so powerful that it does not feel the need to punish – not because it has stamped
 out all deviance, but because it feels so secure that it can afford to be magnanimous towards those who defy it.  If such a state is impossible to imagine, this is because the strength of states as agents of domination is precisely founded on their libidinal/identitarian weakness.  They conceal their own inability to express the universality they claim by excluding others and performing a ritualistic violence of acting-out.
      Perhaps we should clarify a little here. Effective power apparatuses operate through their ability to overcode (Deleuze’s term) or subsume (Marx’s term) social processes, identities and differentiations occurring in everyday life. A power-holding group which is able to articulate widespread beliefs, desires and identities to its worldview and project is able to establish itself in epochal terms as a leading force. This process of sublimation is often violent – Marx (Capital) discusses the Highland clearances as an example of real subsumption – and its net effect is to produce a system in which external elements are reduced to the status of elements internal to the system. IN this sense, the system can construct itself as all-controlling. All the various instances of desire, identity, belief, etc are constructed as if they were elements within a single totality, “arborescent” or “striated” in Deleuze’s terms, like the branches coming from the main trunk of a tree. However, such
 an apparatus is necessarily haunted by the possible emergence of “lines of flight” which take its elements outside the framework it constitutes. The elements which escape the structure have a different structure – less arborescent than rhizomatic, emerging through underground networks connected horizontally and lacking a hierarchic centre. The system’s resort to violence is an attempt to crush various rhizomatic and quasi-rhizomatic elements, which tend to escape it. 
      When Zizek terms al-Qaeda ‘the ultimate rhizomatic machine, omnipresent, yet with no clear territorial base’3, he exaggerates a little: al-Qaeda is based on on rigid categories of identity and exclusion, and also has a formal leadership hierarchy. However, his basic point is valid: its operation is effective largely because it moves outside the framework established by the global power system. Writing in Time Magazine, Phillip Bobbit makes the point very clearly. ‘Al-Qaeda is a new and profoundly dangerous kind of organisation – a “virtual state”, borderless but global in scope’4. Arguments like these are not new, having previously been made about social movements more broadly5.   It may be that al-Qaeda is a special instance of a change in the structures of global power with wide-ranging implications.
      John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt have already published extensively on the future of conflict and network forms of social organisation. Particularly relevant is how the structure of the Internet itself  (a global network with no central authority) has offered another experience of governance (no governance), time and space (compression), ideology (freedom of information and access to it), identity (multiplicity) and fundamentally an opposition to surveillance and control, boundaries and apparatuses. In the final analysis, new information age ideologies could be easily arguing for a transfer of virtual social and political structures to real life world, reversing for once the existing process of imitating real life in cyberspace. The form of the Internet itself is message, a symbolic challenge to dominant patterns of hierarchical structures of governance. 
      Apart from this systemic change aiding rhizomatic forms of organisation, the whole system of economic, political and social control is in question. Authors such as Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein use the images of core and periphery or metropolis and satellite to represent a particular arborescent-striated organisation of global economic space. Control by the core states, and by America as the core of the core, produced phenomena of subordination, dependency and underdevelopment in peripheral areas. The world system is an overcoding apparatus, as is clearly demonstrated in the case-studies drawn together by EvanWatkins6.  Everyday economic practices are drawn into and/or excluded from the ‘world economy’ in such a way as to suck resources into the core and to make incorporation into the world system a precondition for international recognition. And when the economics of a country are good and ‘every day exchanges’ with the core are productive, then the country’s
 political credentials are not in question. Survival in a peripheral context often depends, however, on escaping this context of subordination, and the studies of “underdeveloped” countries often demonstrate the existence of elaborate, more or less rhizomatic networks constructed outside official channels. Consequently, the threat is always present that such rhizomes will operate as the basis for a fundamental challenge to the world system itself, causing the system to fall back on violence in an attempt to destroy what Chomsky calls “the threat of a good example”: the possibility of an escape from the global system which could trigger the end for this system’s illusory inevitability. 
      Most commentators are unrecalcitrant in identifying with the statist side in such conflicts. Bobbit, for instance, makes excuses for the ongoing destruction of what little remains of American democracy as a way to ‘protect’ civil liberties from external threats7. This is a classic example of the authoritarianism of a discourse which insists on retaining the master-signifier even when this signifier is collapsing, and which therefore endorses violent acting-out by dominant groups determined to retain their control. In the present context such attitudes are extremely dangerous. In fact, so pervasive is the instability of any arborescent appendage that its advocates are always clamouring for crackdowns of one sort or another and they are paradoxically a permanent threat to the freedom they pretend to be defending. Al-Qaeda is a product of some combination of western violence against Muslims and American funding of fundamentalist groups to fight its last great ‘Evil’, communism.
 More widely, the rhizomatic potentialities of a future non-hierarchic world. It is no wonder that they are a source of threat to those whose commitments are structured around the positivist valuation of machines of control.
      The construction of official discourse – the “axis of evil”, the reactive misrepresentation of attacks on civil liberties as the “protection” of liberty is built around precisely this kind of valuation of closure. The only factor uniting the “axis of evil” (two of which were at war twenty years ago) is the incompletion of their subsumption into the world system. At the same time, one finds in official discourse a process of metonymical slippage between different instances of elements escaping control, linking terrorism, immigration, crime, protest, cultural otherness and the myriad resistances to “globalisation”8. As Deleuze and Guattari (following Virilio) remark, ‘this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but… operates against the “unspecified enemy”, domestic or foreign’, and thereby constructs a situation of ‘organized insecurity’ and ‘programmed catastrophe’9.  Ideological beliefs and values are a fall back position when there are unresolved problems in social
 relationships. Ideology need not be an issue when there is a searching analysis of relationship problems.
      Against the threats to centralised control, one finds a tendency to seek reassurance from anxiety by pursuing ever-greater closure of space. Openness is seen as space for the enemy, and any open space is indeed a space in which rhizomes can flourish. On the other hand, closure is seen as safety. The system itself does not need openness because its values are taken to be fixed and obvious. In such official discourse the repetition of themes widespread in the various movements Guattari terms “microfascist”, and all the core features of a reactionary and liberticidal ideology10.
      

		
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