[Marxism] Empire, legitimation crisis and rule of law

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Recently I have been reading some more of Dick Barnet's works
(coincidentally, just when I ordered the books, he died, much to my regret,
and I'll never be able to ask him some questions I had). Barnet wasn't a
Marxist, but a spiritual man, a social scientist and a radical visionary
with an enormous memory for detail.

What makes his eclectic approach interesting to me is that he was able to
detect and forecast political trends and languages ten or twenty years
before they became apparent or popularly recognised. And then the
interesting question is how he did that, what experiences were behind that.
He also had a remarkable "feel" for American politics, acquired presumably
through long experience. At the moment I am reading "The Roots of War; The
Men and Institutions behind U.S. Foreign Policy" (1972). Dick comments there
that:

"The British Empire was the "White Man's Burden" imposed by the stern hand
of history. "Empire is congenial enough to the Englishman's temperament",
George Unwin wrote during World War I, "but it is repugnant to his political
conscienceIn order that he may be reconciled to it, it must seem to be
imposed upon him by necessity, as a duty. Fate and metaphysical aid must
seem to have crowned him." In every century, powerful nations have
reluctantly "come of age", playing out their imperial destiny by carrying on
a mission civilisatrice on the land of some weaker neighbour.

"To call the ideology which undergirds the American Empire hypocrisy,
however, would be to miss the point. The American imperial creed can be
understood only by taking the official rationale for expansionism literally.
The United States, Secretary of State Dean Rusk noted sadly, is ""criticised
not for sacrificing our national interests to international interests but
for endeavouring to impose the international interest upon other nations."
The imperial creed rests on a theory of law-making. According to the
strident globalists, like Johnson, and the muted globalists, like Nixon, the
goal of U.S. foreign policy is to bring about a world increasingly subject
to the rule of law.

"But it is the United States which must "organize the peace", to use
Secretary of State Rusk's words. The United States imposes the
"international interest" by setting the ground rules for economic
development and military deployment acrosss the planet. Thus the United
States sets rules for Soviet behaviour in Cuba, Brazilian behavour in
Brazil, Vietnamese behaviour in Vietnam. Cold War policy is expressed by a
series of directives on such extraterritorial matters as whether Britain may
trade with Cuba or the government of British Guiana may have a Marxist
dentist to run it. Cicero's definition of the early Roman empire was
remarkably similar. It was the domain over which Rome enjoyed the legal
right to enforce the law." (Richard J., Barnet, The Roots of War, Pelican
1973, p. 21).

Previously I have cited Conoleeza Rice's rejection of the analogy with the
Roman empire. Rice says, "I wouldn't accept the comparison to the Roman
Empire, of course, because the United States has no imperial ambitions."
Interestingly, Rice emphasises that there was an "alliance of states that
were on the right side of history after World War II, the countries that
dedicated themselves to values -- human values of democracy and freedom of
speech and freedom of religion and prosperity for people based on human
dignity.... [if] the United States is the most powerful state within that
alliance[, ...] we see this, really, as an opportunity for states that share
values to have an opportunity to bring those values to other parts of the
world where they are not yet -- have not yet taken hold."
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030731-7.html

This fits rather well with Dick Barnet's description, except that Dick talks
specifically about "the rule of law", whereas Rice only mentions "values".
It is obvious why the concept of "values" substitutes for "rule of law"
because the rule of law is increasingly difficult to enforce, and
increasingly flouted (the war against Iraq is a case in point, although
Wolfowitz claims that in the technical fine print of legal procedure it was
not an illegal war).

Nowadays there are over 200 million crime victim reports in the world per
year, while the incidence of reported crime in the world has at least
doubled and probably closer to trebled since the 1970s. Those facts could be
read in different ways of course; if more people are appealing to the law
than before, you might argue that the law is more successful than it was
before.

But although we might quibble about nuances and formulations, I think to a
great extent it is valid to speak of a moral crisis which is real and not
imaginary, of which criminality is only the starkest indicator. So the
neoconservative ideology is responding to something real, even if you don't
agree with the analysis made, or the response offered.

The moral crisis extends to discussions about geopolitics: the argument is
that the old rules are really rendered obsolete and that is why they cannot
be adhered to. Some quotes concerning the Westphalian vision of the world
order:

In 1998 Javier Solana (then NATO Secretary General) suggested "humanity
and democracy [were] two principles essentially irrelevant to the original
Westphalian order" and that "the Westphalian system had its limits. For one,
the principle of sovereignty it relied on also produced the basis for
rivalry, not community of states; exclusion, not integration."
http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/1998/s981112a.htm

In 2001, Joschka Fischer (German Minister of Foreign Affairs) argued the
states system set up by Westphalia was obsolete: "The core of the concept of
Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European
balance-of-power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states
that had emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a rejection
which took the form of closer meshing of vital interests and the transfer of
nation-state sovereign rights to supranational European institutions."
http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/www/en/eu_politik/ausgabe_archiv?suche=1&archiv_id=1027&bereich_id=4&type_id=3

In 2003, Zbigniew Brzezinski framed the problem as follows: "And what is
sovereignity in this day and age ? Sovereignity is a concept, but it's a
relative concept. If there was a provisional government of Iraq, we could
give it symbolic sovereignity and it would help it to gain legitimacy,
thereby reducing the need for an assertive occupation."
http://www.csis.org/features/031003_brzezinski.pdf

The Trilateral Commission report states: "The Westphalian order is in
transition. Indeed, Carl Bildt suggests that the world may be at the outset
of nothing less than a Reformation. Yet time has telescoped; we are likely
to see the kinds of changes that took centuries from Martin Luther until the
end of the Thirty Years War taking place across mere decades today. The
pervasive sense of insecurity is real, as real as the need for new
responses, new institutions, and new ideas. (...) The original question
posed for this task force was the changing norms governing the legitimate
use of force. (...)  each author found it very difficult to address the
legitimate use of force without a wider examination of the threats we face
to national and international security. That question, in turn, highlighted
the extent to which the definition of security itself is up for grabs at a
time of profound change in the international system.
http://www.trilateral.org/projwork/tfrsums/tfr58.htm

The bottom line is really that the moral crisis, or the crisis of
legitimation, calls into question what use of force is legitimate as such:
ideologically, as the Trilateral Commission states, "the definition of
security" is "up for grabs". That is why I will be interested in future to
read China Miéville's book "Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of
International Law" (Historical Materialism Book Series, 6).

Jurriaan









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