We live in the best of times and the worst of times in which to think about globalisation. The recent neo-colonial punitive raid into Mesopotamia is both symptomatic of globalisation, and a contradiction of it; symptomatic at the level of discourse, one could say, but contradictory at the level of agency.
This war was legitimated, in the rhetorics of George Bush and Tony Blair, in terms derived from the apparently universalising vocabulary of international law and the discourse of human rights. In this formulation, "we" were in Iraq to enforce UN SCR 1441 and to "disarm" Saddam Hussein. "We" were in Iraq to "liberate" the Iraqi people, who have suffered under the Ba'ath yoke for 30 years. "We" were in Iraq to bring "democracy" to those same people. This is an example of what Noam Chomsky, one of the 1999 Amnesty Oxford lecturers, has sardonically dubbed the "new military humanism" - in truth, the latest version of the White Man's Burden or the mission civilisatrice. The problem is that only two state agents, the US and the UK, were really prosecuting the war. This reminds us that what such rhetorics and projects have always presupposed, certainly since the "scramble for Africa" after the 1885 Berlin Conference, is the West as what Edward Said has called a "meta-subject", capable of delivering History to those regions of the planet on which it focuses its awesomely powerful attentions, or taking it away when diverted. The question therefore is: what if the peoples to whom the benefits of democracy, human rights and the free market are being brought (setting aside the question of whether these really are the motives for war) don't actually want them?
In 1999, the theme of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures was globalisation and rights, and the speakers included Susan George, Noam Chomsky, Homi Bhabha, Joseph Stiglitz and Kwame Anthony Appiah, with respondents including Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty. The most pertinent essays in Matthew Gibney's volume are those by George, Chomsky and Appiah. George and Chomsky, in particular, address the blindness in much Western discourse to economic rights: it is all very well to insist on the people of impoverished countries having various legal rights, but this is often to neglect their total lack of the material means to acquire, use or benefit from such measures. Chomsky powerfully exposes the degree to which the Western powers are themselves seriously in breach of the provisions of the UN Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Antonio Negri, by contrast, is a writer whose rights have been taken away from him. Negri is the intellectual force behind autonomism, a branch of Italian Marxism that veers philosophically towards anarchism, and is the inspiration for the Black Bloc, one of the most militant anti- globalisation groups. Serving a jail sentence for his alleged involvement in the kidnapping and assassination by the Italian Red Brigades of Aldo Moro in 1979, Negri crucially bases his Marxism on a reading of the Grundrisse, the extraordinary set of notebooks and drafts for Marx's entire mature project on politics, economics and law of which Capital was the incomplete result.
In 2000, Negri, with Michael Hardt, published Empire, a massive and ambitious synthesis of philosophy, political theory, cultural and sociological ideas that sought to define the emerging system of world governance. Hardt and Negri argued that what we are seeing is not simply US imperialism, but empire, a new form of global sovereignty. Empire is not territorialised, as imperialism was in the past, in any one nation-state, but is a fluid and amorphous mode of rule, operating through a variety of agencies, of which the last superpower is only one.
Negri's new book, Time for Revolution, is a densely theoretical treatise. It offers a reading and modification of Marx's conception of time, which, Negri argues, needs to be adjusted under the conditions of "real subsumption" that characterise empire; and a disquisition on the "multitude", Negri's abstract formulation for the masses that now are in opposition to empire.
This work, then, stands as a setting forth of some of the philosophical underpinnings of Empire, to which a sequel is apparently forthcoming.
It is thus important and valuable, but there is more to be learnt from the discrete analyses in the Amnesty Lectures, certainly in the light of current events, than from the Borgesian labyrinths and over-totalisations of Negri's work.
Globalizing Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1999 Edited by Matthew J. Gibney Oxford University Press, 271pp, £10.99
Time for Revolution By Antonio Negri, translated by Matteo Mandarini Continuum, 298pp, £16.99
Conor Mc Carthy teaches English at NUI Maynooth. His Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992 was published by Four Courts Press in 2000