The International Political Thought of Carl Schmitt: Terror, Liberal ...

158 D. Zolo
world order, that is, a ‘universal enduring peace’ allowing for the normal operation
of the market economy. The Empire performs the function of ‘international
policing’, possibly by means of war, and prospectively even neutral judicial
tasks. Imperial power is even appealed to by subjects because of its ability to
settle conflicts from a universal, that is basically impartial, standpoint. Significantly
– it is an insightful remark of Hardt and Negri – after a long eclipse the
theory of bellum justum, which is a medieval, typically universalist and imperial
doctrine, has flourished again in English-speaking culture since the 1990s.
However, it would be wrong to think that Empire – or its central expanding
core – is constituted by the United States and its closest Western allies. Neither
the United States nor any other nation state, Hardt and Negri insist, ‘can today
form the centre of an imperialist project’ (2000: 15). Global Empire is something
completely other than classical imperialism, and it would be a serious
theoretical mistake to confuse the two.
This is a very intricate point from both a theoretical and a political point of
view, and has raised a wide debate. It has been argued, and I personally share
this view, that in Hardt and Negri’s book ‘Empire’ seems to fade into a sort of
‘category of the spirit’: it is present everywhere because it coincides with the
new global dimension. But, some have objected, if everything is imperial,
nothing is imperial. How do we identify supranational subjects that bear imperial
interests and aspirations? Against whom do we enact anti-imperialist critique
and resistance? Excluding the political and military apparatuses of great powers,
first of all the United States, who plays an imperial role (Negri and Zolo 2002:
8–19)?
Yet another aspect of Hardt and Negri’s position has been criticised. It seems
dependent on the ‘ontology’ underlying their analysis: the dialectics of history,
in the meaning characteristic of Hegelian Marxism and Leninism. According to
Hardt and Negri, global Empire represents a positive victory over the Westphalian
system of sovereign states. Having put an end to states and their nationalism,
Empire has also ended colonialism and classical imperialism and opened
up a cosmopolitan perspective that should be welcomed.
In their view, any attempt to reassert the role of nation-states in opposition to
the present imperial constitution of the world would express a ‘false and
harmful’ ideology. The philosophy of the anti-globalisation movement and all
forms of naturalist environmentalism and localism must therefore be rejected as
primitive and anti-dialectical positions, or in other words as substantially ‘reactionary’.
Communists – as Hardt and Negri declare themselves to be – are universalist,
cosmopolitan, ‘catholic’ by vocation: their horizon is that of the whole
of mankind, of ‘generic human nature’, as Marx wrote. In the last century the
working masses relied on the internationalisation of political and social relations.
Today the ‘global’ powers of Empire should be controlled but not demolished:
the imperial constitution is to be preserved and directed towards
non-capitalist goals. For Hardt and Negri, while it is true that policing technologies
are the ‘hard core’ of the imperial order, this order has nothing to do with
the practices of dictatorship and totalitarianism of the last century.