„Trojan Horse“ or „Post-Modern Prince“
The ‘many’ in a planetary society: auxiliaries of the ‘empire’ or agency for a historical alternative
This paper discusses the trans-national social movement networks which have more sprung up than emerged in the late 1990s. This is done in a perspective focused upon the real tension between the deconstruction of opposition cultures which had been on-going since the late 1970s and the emergence of an alternative political agency on the level of the new planetary configuration of power. Conceived before September 11th 2001, it still insists on carefully exploring the potential of such networks to produce an alternative legitimate source of planetary order, as well as the foreseeable limitations and hindrances to its effectiveness in bringing forth the main lines of a globalisation process ‘from below’ (Brecher et al. 1999, Mies 2001) as an alternative to the specific combination of new patterns of global capital accumulation (cf. Aglietta 2000), a new push of ‘global business regulation’ (Drahos/Braithwaite 2000), and a new ‘global polity’ as on object of trans-national struggles, as it has become globally dominant since the neo-liberal turn in Western politics historically linked with the names of Thatcher and Reagan.
1. Historical specificity of present globalisation
Present ‘globalisation’ is different from the ‘globality’ characteristic of human exchange and communication processes since the dawn of history. It is separated from them by the great historical break which has set off modern capitalist accumulation from all pre-modern models of the economy, by the transition from market exchange as an opportunity to capitalist exchange as a necessity, as a compulsory operation (cf. Meiksins Wood 2002). It is also clearly specific with regard to the global reach of the bourgeoisie predicted in the Communist Manifesto: the ‘centralisation’ of the means of production and of property „in a few hands“ has not simply and in a linear way continued beyond the internal homogenisation of the nation states (cf. MEW 4, 466f.), nor has it really lead to ‘political centralisation’ (cf. ib.). Instead of a terminal confrontation with a globally footloose, uprooted proletarian class (ib., 473) national bourgeoisies have lead the world into a series of hegemony wars between leading powers in which they have successfully mobilised their respective proletarian classes against each other (cf. Wolf 2000). ‘Globalisation’ as a catchword for the ‘new times’ which have been brought about by the neo-liberal political turn of the late 1970s also differs profoundly from the logic of the ‘partition of the world’ characteristic for the classical ‘age of imperialism’ described by Hobson and Hilferding which has culminated in the Great War of 1914-1918, as „a war on the division of the world, on the distribution and redistribution of colonies, of ‘spheres of influence’ of finance capital etc.“ (LW 21, 194). The de-colonisation processes since 1945 have not abolished dependency from hegemonic and metropolitan countries, but they have certainly brought an end to the politically guaranteed monopolies of the respective ‘motherlands’ with regard to ‘their colonies’. Trans-national companies as ‘global players’ are regularly present and active within all major ‘poles’ of the present world market, the US (with NAFTA), the EU (with candidate states and EEA) and the far more loosely coherent Asian space with Japan, the ASEAN states, and China as its major sub-areas. Capital flows have been effectively globalised via the immediately global financial markets grouping around ‘Wall Street’ as its US based super-centre, with the ‘City of London’, ‘Nikkei’, ‘Hanseng’ or ‘Frankfurt’ as effective sub-centres. The breaking apart of the world into separate trade blocks struggling for ‘autarcy’ has ceased to be an accessible option. And yet all these specific qualities and innovations do not leave the historical limitations of the capitalist accumulation process as such behind: It is bringing about a new phase of capitalist development and of international hierarchy, and no immediate perspective of transcending it. Globalised network Capitalism under U.S. hegemony may serve as a sufficiently descriptive working title. The still more specific debate on the political forms characteristic for this new constellation of power, of domination, and of exploitation has found a political focus and a theoretical arena in the recent debate on empire and the multitude, initiated by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt (2000). In the debate on the present reality and future potential of trans-national social movement networks both problematic will have to be kept present as an unavoidable background: We shall have to relate it to the characteristics of globalized network capitalism as well as to the new forms of global ‘polity’..
2. ‘Movement trans-nationality’ as a new paradigm moving beyond traditional internationalism
Recently, Perry Anderson (2002) has proposed a historical perspective on ‘internationalism’ as a social movement issue. It is certainly helpful, to put present developments into a historical perspective comprising the ‘longue durée’ developments of several centuries. And it is specifically helpful to remind us about the historical links existing between 19th century labour movement internationalism and enlightenment cosmopolitanism, as well as pointing out the characteristic difference in the class basis of the 1st International in comparison to that of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. And yet, this broader historical perspective should not lead us to underestimate the deep historical break in practices of ‘internationalism’ linked to the stalinisation of the Soviet Union and the creation of the post-Second-World-War Soviet block, in which ‘proletarian internationalism’ has been degraded to be a cover for hegemonic interventionism (as in Prague in 1968) or for sectarian in-fighting between Maoists, Trotskyites, ‘Guevarists’, ‘Revisionists’ and Stalinists within the broader social movements of the 1970s. Neither should it blind us for the specific innovations of the spontaneous ‘alternative internationalism’ characteristic for the new social movements which has been carrying youth protest against the American war in Vietnam around the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, becoming the real carrying force for ‘Third-Worldism’ in the leading capitalist countries, and extending its solidarity beyond the demarcation lines of the Cold war in the European peace movement of the 1980s. Present trans-national social movement networks in their actual practice seem to be clearly aware of both points, carefully avoiding sectarian bids for hegemony or dependence on party or state structures. They presuppose the basically new historical fact of easy and cheap global communication and transport, and exploit it strategically – in a historical situation that gives a new type of part-time activist a lot of global problems to communicate and to act about. In so doing they form a kind of ‘backside’ of globalised network Capitalism in its is bringing forth of a renewed and reinforced institutional and organizational network of regulation which transcends the traditional political forms of the nation-state.
To understand more precisely what is at stake in the struggles of trans-national networks like Jubilee 2000, ATTAC or Peoples’ Global Action, to name only some examples of the more characteristic types on the sides of new trans-national social movement networks (cf. Wolf 2001) it will be necessary to analyse the politico-juridical and institutional processes of the ‘new world order’ recurrently claimed to have been instituted since 1989 in which these movements are deploying their initiatives. It seems promising to start this debate form the recent discussions on a new imperial order (or ‘Imperial Right’ as it has originally been called in a difficult ‘Hegelese’ by Negri and Hardt 2000) initiated, as it were, at the cross-roads of Anglo-Saxon and continental European debates, and clearly open for new interventions from other intellectual arenas.
The debate on ‘empire’ can be used to produce a broader intellectual framework capable of integrating contrary and variegated trends and tendencies: Whereas U.S. hegemony is partly implemented via the spreading of U.S. models of political practice as normative yard-sticks of ’good governance’ (‘local social capital’, ‘third sector’, ‘private-public-partnership’), old and new social movements have invested in the arena of trans-national consensus building (especially in the process of global UN conferences opened by the Earth Summit of Rio which will hopefully not come to an end with the 2nd Earth Summit in Johannesburg this year) and the differentiated trans-nationalisation of their own organizations, partly accompanying the events of the UN process, the summit meetings punctuating the work of the trans-national co-ordination of ‘global business regulation’ on a global (G 7/8, WTO, IMF, World Bank) as well as on a macro-regional scale (EU, NAFTA) or referring back to historical networks of states (Commonwealth, Bandung Non-Aligned Movement). The same can be said for semi-institutionalised regular trans-national business interest representative meetings, like the World Economic Forum, started in Davos, or the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). Such meetings have emerged as a locus for a new type of trans-national strategic planning (‘governance’). They have been, however, – since their very beginnings – also been used as an occasion for counter-mobilisation and alternative communication events. This embattled development of communication occasions and exchange habits via trans-national fora and arenas, have brought forth a thin layer of semi-professional new movement ‘trans-nationalists’, who are embodying and representing new embattled subjectivities of the many. This overall communicative and conflictive development has been partly used by dominant economic and political powers to reinforce their own hegemony, by using organisations and their public impact for their attempts at reproducing the existing relations of hegemony (CONGO-UNO-, Earth-Summits-NGO, WB-NGO institutionalisation of subalternate dialogue and selective co-operation). At the same time, however, even the selectively co-opted networks have contributed to using these events as occasions and arenas for publicly visible practices of protest and communication of alternative voices, with their demands and counter-proposals. Other networks, excluded from or actively avoiding co-optation, have been developing their own arenas, events, institutionalised ‘communication hubs’ (like the Amsterdam ‘Trans-national Institute’), which have found a provisional common high point in the „World Social Forum“, organised on a yearly basis at Porto Alegre in Brazil.
As it is the very forms of communication and agency themselves which are at stake in these trans-national struggles, I propose to analyse them under the category of trans-national ‘embattled subjectivities’ in the making.
3. The anchoring of trans-national networks
In contrast to a romantic imagery of ‘roots’ which has been revived in the turn towards a problematic quest for collective identity of the new social movements since the 1970s, the relation between networking beyond local, regional, national or macro-regional networking activities which tend to link distant places in ‘real time’ and individual, group or community activities which are locally bound in time, could more adequately be described by the concept of ‘anchoring’. Trans-national social movement networks do exist and insure the continuity of their existence by ever and again mobilising ‘grass roots’ support and activism on a local level, within national and regional societies. The imagery of the ‘grass roots’ has to be stripped of its inherent romantic bias towards ‘origins’, ‘foundations’, ‘spontaneity’ and ‘organic growth’, before serving as a tool for developing an adequate conceptual tool for thinking the politics of networking in general (cf. Wolf 2001b), and, more specifically, its ‘rhizomatic’ variety (cf. Deleuze/Guattari) which is conceiving a type of networking avoiding dependency, domination and control, giving each and every participant an equal right of initiative and, therefore, an equal opportunity for shaping the configurations resulting from the network process.
Specifically concerning practices and strategies of trans-national networking, such an approach presupposes that it is possible, and successfully realised, to give each individual, each specific group and each local community a kind of self-carrying motive for making global problems the object of its own local activity. This ‘taking over’ of such motives for acting globally as a local actor cannot by-pass the individual judgement on its pertinence and motivating force, or, eventually, its modification and re-combination in the activities of participating individuals, groups, or communities – and it has to be perpetually renewed. This excludes, at least to a large extent, the bureaucratisation or routinisation of ‘fidelity’ stabilising practices.
The realities of globalisation, in its differentiated impacts on locally and temporally individualised ‘life-worlds’ is continuously putting existing social movement organizations on all levels and in all political arenas before a difficult choice: the choice between an integration of trans-national issues into their own agenda (as it were, following the development of those trans-national networks from above, and a refusal of this dimension in the defence of established patterns of local, regional, and national politics). On a strategic level, there does not seem to be any real choice – as the refusal to act up to globalisation and the decision to concentrate on the older arenas of politics seems to be paramount, in the long-term, with choosing defeat, or at least increasing loss of relevance. On a more tactical level there can be no schematic, generalising answer to this kind of problem. It would be sheer folly, e.g., to drop the ‘French exception’, in order to go over immediately for fighting for a fair regulation of a kind of trade in cultural products which does not destroy the local, regional, national or ‘civilisational’ underpinnings of cultural creativity and communication. On the other hand, there seems to be no way of accepting xenophobic closure against immigration in the name of the ‘unadulterated’ reproduction of traditional local communities, or of blocking the influx of scientific discoveries in the name of its incompatibility with traditional world-views.
If the strategic orientation of social movements towards a practical critique of existing structures of domination in a cosmopolitan or internationalist direction were clear enough, it should be relatively easy to accept each other’s specific tactical choices as related to a distinctive situation. The idea opting for a controlled deceleration of further globalisation processes as such has an evident charm as a tool for building compromise between different sensibilities and interests and can, therefore, function as a ‘transitional demand’. It would, however, possibly have the side-effect of further hindering urgent advances in key areas like the control of climatically effective gases. The strategic orientation in favour of an ‘alternative globalisation’ is a must for a growing political capacity of trans-national social movement networks – even though it will, in concrete cases, include the danger of indirectly, ‘ideologically’, contributing to a weakening of existing defensive positions against the impact of capitalist globalisation, which still rely on traditional ideas of nationalism, regionalism or localism.
4. Trans-national agency
Trans-national social movement networks are presently in the process of producing a new kind of ‘practical sense’ (Bourdieu) in the many and variegated individuals actively participating in them. In this respect, they can be seen as a legitimate heir of the youth internationalism of the 1960s which began by the international impact of the hip-generation and the civil rights movement spreading from the US and extended to a world wide movement of Youth revolt spreading from Berkeley via Paris and Prague to Beijing. Coming to public media knowledge since Seattle 1999 (and therefore gaining an increased self-reflexive capacity) the trans-national social movement networks are thereby creating first elements of trans-nationalised common subjectivity capable of common agency in spite of enormous cultural and linguistic differences, as well as polarising economic and social conditions.
This process is accompanied by the consolidation of another change in the social basis of the participating movements which can be illustrated by comparing the old historical types of ‘internationalism’ (Anderson) with the emerging new type of trans-national agency: The 1st International has been relying upon many-faceted networks of trans-nationally mobile and socially rooted artisans, who self-consciously possessed a high degree of specialised qualification and capacity to act on their own, and the 2nd and 3rd International were anchored in political and trade union organisations of largely immobile and socially uprooted proletarians with a relatively low degree of individual specialised qualification and capacity to act. In contrast to both the present trans-national networks are relying in an important way on variegated networks of highly mobile, self-managing labourers (cf. Martens et al. 2001), without a clearly defined social hegemony: The role of small peasants’ movements’ networks and of women’s networks is certainly no less pronounced. The importance of some kind of ‘generational distinctionism’, which makes the broad basis of the movements to which the networks refer back for mobilisation and discussion a clearly focused youth movement should not be underestimated, either.
5. Alternative perspectives of trans-national social movement networks
The alternative perspectives of the trans-national social movement networks will be determined by ‘local’ developments. I.e., the alternative of my title question will be decided by the way in which existing national, regional and local social movement patterns will be able to articulate and to occupy the dimensions of trans-national, macro-regional and global politics within their own strategies of opposition and transformation. Only in so far, as this will be achieved, these networks will be able to consolidate with a clear strategic perspective as how to immunise them against all kinds of co-option strategies from above. This will have to be realised under very different socio-economic, national or civilisational conditions by different, and yet converging tactics. In order to develop alternative forms of effective trans-national agency the social movements will have to opt for strengthening their capacity to act via trans-national networks, on the one hand, trying to service and to by-pass the agendas and fora of trans-national communication and ‘governance’ of global network Capitalism, on the other.
This will have to be achieved, as it were, under heavy ideological and organisational ‘counter-fire’ (Bourdieu), by which the main – public as well as private – agencies of global network Capitalism are trying to succeed in a strategy of dividing these very movements (or at least their networks or their semi-professional representatives) into co-optable and un-tractable elements: into those who will help to improve the quality of trans-national governance, while maintaining structures of domination and hegemony, and those who will be singled out as objects of repression by the emerging trans-national networks of ‘counter-insurgency’.
Trying to anticipate who will be on which side of such a dividing line imposed from above would be a strategic error, however, on the side of alternative and opposition movements. The point rather is to refuse and to prevent this division. The recent history of new social movement international solidarity practices can provide some interesting models for producing helpful orientations – like e.g. the solidarity from below against cold war ideological divide practised by the European peace movement in its 1980s mobilisation. In contrast to the short 20th century, in which the social movements have missed practically no chance of subdividing themselves, special efforts should be directed to avoiding that the inevitable differences and dividing lines between melioristic, reformist, transformist, revolutionary, or utopian perspectives degenerate into irreversible splits. The chances for this seem to be better this time, as it can be expected that a strong reformism may serve as a potentially hegemonic point of juncture, instead of the immediately ‘revolutionist’ position which had to held it in the ‘night’ of the short 20th century – i.e. after the political catastrophe of older labour movement reformism in the face of the Great War of 1914.
Such a strong reformism will have to take a radically critical stance that neither jumps to leftist or utopian conclusions, nor refrains from addressing all of the questions put upon the agenda of global politics by the material reality of the global problems humankind is presently facing, likewise the problems created by the 1990s push in ‘globalisation’ of the neoliberal type, as by the underlying dynamics of ‘global problems’ which have come to the fore in the 1990s: hunger, ecological crisis, social injustice, gender discrimination and war. Such a hegemonic juncture will have to be established and reinforced by using all possible links between strategic transformation projects and concrete reform initiatives, i.e. between projects of overcoming present structures of domination and initiatives to bring about perceptible improvements in the everyday-life of its activists and of those they are trying to represent politically.
It would be an illusion to think that the new trans-national social movements’ networks would build such a strategic position alone. They will not simply push aside existing institutions, governments, trade unions or political parties. As it looks after careful examination of their present state of development, it would, however, be a still more blinding illusion to think that these existing institutions alone will be able to live up to the challenges humankind is facing today, without relying in part on the new kind of intelligence and of agency the embattled subjectivities of these networks of the ‘many’ will be able to contribute.
Literature
(These reflections are based on a historical comparison of global and EU trans-national social movements’ networks, especially in the 1990s; for reasons of dateline the literature will be provided by e-mail – from: fow@snafu.de)
