Ronnie D. Lipschutz

The Clash of Governmentalities:

The Fall of the UN Republic and America's Reach for Imperium

"At the beginning of the 21st century," the history books of the future may record, "the United States made its bid for Imperium. The attacks of September 11, 2001 brought home to Washington, DC the very real risks of a largely self-regulating global market system, including both the disaffection it generated and the openings it provided to those disaffected. In the wake of September 11th, Washington has been putting in place a new global system in which the United States is not only hegemonic but also establishes rules that will bind all other countries. Within Imperium, international law is unnecessary because there is no longer an international system or global republic, and there are no sovereign territories. This essay is intended more as a provocation than a systematic analysis of a process underway. It raises questions about the policies, methods, and intentions of the United States and argues that the bid for Imperium is connected with the processes of globalization and the vulnerabilities that it has created. The self-disciplining structure of global neo-liberal governmentality has failed and, to remedy this, the Bush Administration is seeking to re-establish sovereignty abroad and, perhaps, a police state at home.

--George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States, Sept. 2002--

The anniversaries of Al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington, DC, and the launching of America’s "War on Terrorism," has been the occasion for innumerable reviews and retrospectives about "What happened?" "How has the world changed?" and "Why do they hate us so?" Bracketed by the growing tide of war rhetoric flowing out of the White House and Pentagon, aided and abetted by10 Downing Street, and the growing probability of an attack on Iraq by the end of 2002, much attention is now focused on the question of "What comes after that?" Discussions of Empire, motivated by the eponymous book of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), as well as analyses in the British press (Freedland, 2002) and the pro-consular musings of a growing number of political pundits (e.g., DeSouza, 2002), seem to point toward the shape of things to come. What has not been examined closely in these discussions are the broader historical and geopolitical contexts within which the American War on Terrorism and crusade against "evil," long personified in the person of Saddam Hussein, have (re)emerged, and how the unilateralist behavior of the Bush Administration has been immanent within U.S. foreign policy, the Republican Party, and the neo-liberal globalization of the 1980s and 1990s. An investigation of these latter factors is my objective in this essay.

There is a temptation to see both events and responses through the lens of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1995), notwithstanding repeated assurances by those in power that such a clash is not pending (see p. 31 of The National Security Strategy). There is an almost straight line between the territorialist geopolitical theories of the first half of the 20^th century (Lipschutz, 1989) and Huntington’s apocalyptic musings, but these are relevant, at most, between territorially discrete entities, and not within Imperium. The United States may well end up waging war on Islam, but the tendencies to violence and the competing modes of world order emerging out of both the West and the Islamic world have less to do with conflicts of religion, ideology or culture, I would argue, than inherent contradictions within the American-dominated system of neo-liberal governmentality.

Specifically, the Empire of globalization, described by Hardt and Negri (2000), is one largely based on the notion of individual self-discipline or, in Karl Polanyi’s (2002) famous term, "self-regulating markets." This is not to say that regulation is absent; rather, it is embedded in the ideological system in such a way as to seem absent. What was evident prior to September 11, 2001, but only made clear on that day, is that an arrangement of this type is inherently unstable not only in terms of markets but also self-discipline, for it requires that everyone behave so as to maintain both function and stability and to believe that the system generates "good" outcomes (Lipschutz, 2000: ch. 7). Whatever human nature might be, being "good" is difficult when there is no God, Sovereign or Police to keep individuals to the straight and narrow. Thus, the response of the United States has been to transform a system of global discipline based on the appearance of self-regulated behavior, toward one more dependent on the overt display, deployment, and employment of military force and police power to keep populations and individuals in line. The result is a universalized social space, governed by the United States, which I call "Imperium."

In the process of transition from neo-liberal Empire to disciplinary Imperium, one as yet little noted casualty has been the "UN Republic." While this was never a republic in the classical sense of the term, and certainly nothing like Kant’s vision of a perpetual peace of republics, the UN system did possess several noteworthy republican attributes. These included equal representation through the practice of "one-state, one-vote," the methodological individualism inherent in the principle of state sovereignty, and multilaterialism implied by collective decision-making and collective security. Admittedly, all three were more of a theoretical nature than actual practices, but when do political systems ever match fully their ideological foundations or operating principles? These republican characteristics long rankled the United States, notwithstanding its central role in the founding of the UN and its many agencies, and they have been under attack ever since 1945. Nonetheless, recent trends in U.S. foreign policy constitute a debilitating attack on the UN Republic from which it will be hard put to recover.

In this essay, I examine the new American Imperium as a form of governmentality and biopolitics, and suggest some ways of thinking about what comes next. I begin with a section on definitions: what do I mean in my use of terms such as governmentality, empire and imperium? I then turn to a brief historical exegesis of the failures of neo-liberal discipline, especially as revealed by the events of September 11, 2001. In the third section of the paper, I describe how the unilateralist tendencies of the George W. Bush Administration have long been present in American politics, but have been muted in the interests of economic expansion, the Cold War and, more recently, global neo-liberalism. Finally, I illustrate how Washington’s moves toward a war with Iraq, in concert with its increasingly unilateralist stance, point toward an effort to use the UN Republic as a source of global legitimacy for the new American Imperium while, at the same time, destroying it.

Governmentality, as Michel Foucault put it, "has as its purpose not the action of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc." (1991:100; see also Dean, 1999: ch. 1). Governmentality is about the management of populations, about ensuring and maintaining the "right disposition of things" of that which is being governed or ruled. Anything which challenges this disposition is to be absorbed; anything which disrupts it is to be eliminated. Foucault’s notion of governmentality is associated with the practice of bio-politics which, according to Mitchell Dean (1999:99), "is concerned with matters of life and death, with birth and propagation, with health and illness, both physical and mental, and with the processes that sustain or retard the optimization of the life of a population."

Bio-politics must then also concern the social, cultural, environmental, economic and geographic conditions under which humans live, procreate, become ill, maintain health or become healthy, and die. From this perspective bio-politics is concerned with the family, with housing, living and working conditions, with what we call "lifestyle," with public health issues, patterns of migration, levels of economic growth and the standards of living. It is concerned with the bio-sphere in which humans dwell (Dean, 1999:99).

The biopolitical management of human populations and their environments is the task of the myriad of governmental and international agencies, public and private associations, and even non-governmental organizations and corporations that are so ubiquitous under neo-liberal globalization. Each of these has its own instrumental function as well as general normative objectives, and each produces and reproduces neo-liberal governmentality. The objective is production of a "population" that is homogenous, manageable, and disciplined. Within this population, each individual is encouraged to consume as a means of differentiation and individualization, but diversity is articulated through the market, rather than culture or politics.

This is not to say that these myriad elements of governmentality are in coherence in either their activities or objectives; contradictions and oppositions are rife. All are, however, engaged in what Kanishka Jaysuriya (2001) and others (Gill, 1995, 2000) have described as the instantiation of a global "economic constitutionalism." As Jaysuriya puts it, "Economic constitutionalism refers to the attempt to treat the market as a constitutional order with its own rules, procedures, and institutions that operate to protect the market order from political interference" (2001:452). This also describes, in essence, the Empire of Hardt and Negri (2000), a market order that is political at its core yet apolitical in its operation. In my view, however, a better term for this system is "Republic," insofar as it is a constitutional order that has been notionally ratified by the states who are its members.

While the UN Republic has been in existence for more than 50 years, it was only after 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that it was in a position to fulfill its early promise. It is ironic, then, that the 1991 Gulf War, which brought together a coalition of some 40 states to protect the Republic’s foundational principle of state sovereignty—a principle already greatly devalued during the Cold War—it also set the stage for the fall of the Republic. Even before 1991, analysts were already discussing the "erosion of sovereignty," the porosity of borders, and the growing irrelevance of the nation-state, without any clear notion of what might come next (see, e.g., Rosenau, 1990).

It was already clear at that point that the international state system was diverging considerably from the idealized Westphalian model, but there was a powerful resistance, especially among academics, to any notions of "post-international" politics (Mearsheimer, 1990). The principles and practices of neo-liberal globalization, which came to stand as both explanation and consequence of this change, were well-entrenched by 1991; it took only the apparent disappearance of the "security dilemma" to allow neo-liberalism to expand into a world-encompassing system, as it were (Lipschutz, 2000: ch. 3), lionized by those who saw this as "the end of history" and all that. Who could resist the end of ideology?

Of course, power did not disappear, and we might wonder whether the UN Republic ever had a chance. But the "political constitutionalism" of the Republic was taken seriously, especially by transnational movements acting on behalf of human rights and challenging the governmentality of neo-liberal globalization. Ironically, perhaps, the anti-globalization movement stood up for the one principle it generally professed to oppose—national sovereignty—while the globalizers argued that individual countries should be left to pursue their own cultural "preferences" for low wages, long hours, and high levels of pollution. All of this remains to be sorted out in future histories of the 1990s. But one might well argue that it was the republican desire to do away with power that made it possible for American power to disempower the Republic.

The concept of "Imperium," as I use it here, connotes a pluralistic system of political units—including not only states but also economic and social entities—under the rule of a single center of instrumental power (Shaw, 2000). Imperium, like Empire, is bound together through an integrated global network of accumulation and exchange, but governmentality emanates from the center. In this sense, Imperium has certain attributes of the sovereignty that, according to Foucault (1991), disappeared some centuries ago. As we shall see, Imperium dispenses with certain elements of neo-liberal governmentality, especially multilateral governance, while asserting greater control over others. It adds a level of rule over already-existing governmentality, which defines in overt terms what is permitted and what is not.

Historically, empires have never encompassed the entire world and, when several empires were present, they usually coexisted in uneasy relations of both competition and collaboration. The Roman Empire may have been a singular exception in terms of domination of its "world system," but we must recognize that there were other world systems and empires to be found beyond Rome’s farthest borderlands. Imperium covers the entire world, and The National Security Strategy makes clear that there is no part of the world that does not have an effect on it. As the document puts it, "To contend with uncertainty and to meet the many security challenges we face, the United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for the long-distance deployment of U.S. forces" (p. 29).

Ultimately, the Roman Empire faced greater challenges from internal threats than external ones, and its Western half fell not to a competing empire but tribal invasions and internal divisions; as The National Security Strategy puts it, "The war on terrorism is not a clash of civilizations. It does, however, reveal the clash inside a civilization, a battle for the future of the Muslim world" (p. 31). The parallel between Rome and the new American Imperium is only a rough one, at best, and I use the term Imperium as much for reasons of convenience as significance, believing that what we are seeing is a new form of political arrangement for which we do not yet have appropriate terminology.

Governmentality poses its own set of conceptual difficulties where power, agency, and structure are concerned, yet it alerts us to the complexities and nuances of rule and rules under a liberal order. What normally attracts the greatest scholarly and public attention is the overt display of the coercive power and influence, in the form of military force, economic sanctions, threats, coercion, and direct intervention. Such overt exercises of power indicate the failure of normal power relations inherent in neo-liberalism, which are disciplinary. Actors are socialized to behave according to certain tenets of "normality" and "propriety," and thereby produce and reproduce both their identities and the "normal" conditions under which such behavior takes place. Deviance is permitted, up to a point, but it is also actively policed and disciplined in order to reinforce concepts and practices of normality (Lipschutz, 2000: ch. 7). It is in this sense, as Foucault puts it (1980:109-33), that we are the products of power circulating through society in capillary fashion.

Power is, therefore, not exercised in an overt or quantifiable form in this conceptualization; governmentality relies, at most, the display, rather than the exercise, of coercive power Order is maintained through the self-disciplining of behavior, on the one hand, and the policing function of surveillance and law, on the other. Together, these constrain practices within a "zone of stability," or "normality." Power is manifest through the discourses that naturalize normality, and which are hegemonic and products of power. It is only when normality is disrupted or strongly resisted that more instrumental forms of power—force and coercion—become manifest. The attacks on New York and Washington, DC disrupted the governmental regime associated with neo-liberal normality in a way that had not happened before. Only then was instrumental power deployed by the United States, against Afghanistan, as more embedded forms of power and discipline failed to constrain organizations such as Al Qaeda.

This is not the place to expound in detail on the principles and practices of neo-liberal globalization—or, for that matter, to get bogged down in debates about definitions of globalization and whether it is new or old. Suffice it to say that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparently successful conclusion of the Gulf War in 1991 created something of a strategic policy crisis for the United States. The rationale for America’s baroque military system rested on the existence of an identifiable and powerful enemy state; in the absence of such an opponent, not only was strategy undone, the very need for an expansive military came into question. For both political and economic reasons, such self-interrogation was ideologically destabilizing; the consequences of systematically reducing support for the military were made all too clear when George H.W. Bush lost his bid for re-election in 1992, in part because of the depth of recession in California, where budget cuts had their strongest impact. Efforts to shift the armed forces’ mission away from war and toward peacemaking and policing only highlighted further the problem of an underemployed military.

Sensitive to the lessons taught by Bush senior’s failure, and burned by the debacle in Somalia, Bill Clinton preferred to focus on economic matters. Content to give priority to neo-liberal integration and the construction of the economic constitutionalism of the global market order, his administration downplayed military issues as much as possible. This is why strategic policy appeared so adrift and ad hoc during the 1990s. With a military configured for war in Europe, and highly resistant to all efforts at reform or restructuring, it was easier to posit more Gulf-type wars as the threat of the future, and to focus on ways to fight those wars with a minimum of casualties.

The Clinton Administration’s approach to the global market order was, by no means, laissez faire—it was interventionist to an extreme degree—but it did rely heavily on an ideology of deregulation and "self-regulation." The former involved the shifting of regulatory authority from the national to the international level; the latter, to greater reliance on corporate good behavior, culminating in the UN’s "Global Compact" (the brainchild of John G. Ruggie, a multilateralist if ever there was one; see Ruggie, 2002). Inasmuch as the possibilities for state surveillance and enforcement were constrained at the international level, the market order relied, to a considerable degree, on the good faith and moral probity of both producers and consumers, a reliance whose emptiness has lately been revealed.

The very notion of self-regulation demand self-discipline. That is, if regulation involves restrictions or limits on certain types of practices, especially those that are seen to affect or injure others who do not benefit from those practices, "self-regulation" implies the placing of limits by the actor on her/his/its own activities. (This is not, we see, the same as Polanyi’s explanation of the fantasy of "self-regulating" markets which, in their idealized form, are homeostatic mechanisms based on flows of gold among countries.) Because of the nature of regulation in a neo-liberal market order, therefore, the proper functioning of that order requires that actors be self-disciplined. This is no easy task when greed and appetite are also basic to the growth and success of that order.

Self-discipline serves two purposes. First, it ensures that actors will not egregiously violate rules, gain unfair advantage and dispose others to do the same; this eliminates the threat of collusion discussed by Adam Smith. Second, self-discipline instills in actors a form of mutual faith; they believe in the fairness of the market order so long as everyone is bound by the same rules. As Bush told Wall Street, "there is no capitalism without conscience; there is no wealth without character." Still, if everyone else cheats, you’d be a fool not to do the same, even if it does erode faith in the system and leads to its gradual collapse.

As I suggested above, the ideological and material foundations of the neo-liberal order create certain other contradictions that also tend in the direction of instability. It is good to consume, but it is not good to consume too much; it is good to be self-interested, but not good to be self-absorbed; it is good to be free, but not too free. As the market colonizes new frontiers and commodification is extended to all aspects of daily life, the values and institutions that stabilize society come to be seen as obstacles to both growth and the liberty to consume. The very notion of consumer "choice" and "freedom" encourages a kind of libertinism that eats away at the very system which encourages high levels of consumption and individual self-absorption as necessary to its survival. This is one reason why free marketeers and cultural conservatives are often at odds with each other.

But the inherent fragility of the self-disciplining neo-liberal market extends further than ideology and consumption, for its survival depends on actors not to put the channels, technologies, and ideologies that foster growth to nefarious or disruptive ends. As many security analysts have observed, the very tools that help to make neo-liberalism so successful—air travel, communications, free flows of capital and goods, technological innovation—can also be manipulated to damage it. During the 1990s, there was considerable concern that criminals and terrorists would find ways of disrupting the neo-liberal market order. Criminal organizations undermined faith in the system by degrading its virtue and dirtying its money, but they did not do so in order to destroy faith or infrastructure—that would kill the golden goose. Terrorists, by contrast, could destroy both by using both, although no one quite know how this might happen.

An awareness of this vulnerability was evident, although rarely articulated, in the many studies of terrorism published during the 1990s. All sorts of threats were discussed (Lipschutz, 1999), but there seemed to be no way to address them. Attacks against the American military and embassies suggested that more security, in the form of walls, barriers, and policing, were necessary, but these hardly tested systemic vulnerability. The "discipline problem," if we can call it that, was understood in terms of security, as something that could be addressed through the application of counter-terrorist tactics. As is common in such analyses, a structural problem was mistaken for and transformed into an agent-centered one: stop the bad guys. Inasmuch as elimination of the structural problem would require significant social reorganization at major economic cost and, indeed, would probably signal the end of the global neo-liberal regime, it was not a tenable solution. Instead, the vulnerabilities of the neo-liberal market order could be avoided, it was believed, by containing or destroying evil people and organizations.

The events of September 11, 2001 illustrated the contradictions and flaws in these beliefs. Al Qaeda and its operatives utilized precisely the same methods and techniques to plan and execute their attacks that would be used by any corporate executive investing in a project in a foreign country and traveling there to inspect the property. But whereas previous actions aimed at American targets either failed (e.g., the first World Trade Center bombing) or had little impact on the market order (e.g., Khobar Tower, embassies, U.S.S. Cole), the destruction of the Twin Towers shook faith in that order, as evidenced in the further and continuing weakness of a global economy already heading downward. If ordinary people could be vaporized while engaged in normal activities that had nothing to do with the structure of the neo-liberal market order, how could faith be sustained or foundations protected? Who was safe? Who would be next?

It is something of an error to call the attacks an "intelligence failure." Foresight and information might have stopped these particular attacks, but they could never eliminate the structural vulnerabilities of the neo-liberal market order. It is a technologically-complex system, composed of innumerable networks of communication and flows and intricately-organized institutions of production, trade, and consumption. The material infrastructure is fragile but resilient: breakdowns are common but repairs are swift and there is considerable redundancy. The cognitive infrastructure, however, is less reliable, dependent as it is on a myriad of individuals (members of a "population") who, as Hobbes pointed out, value their lives above all else. If they do not feel safe within that order, they will reduce their participation in it in order to protect themselves.

Imperium was immanent in neo-liberal globalization, but its manifestation was not an inevitable corollary. The structural preconditions for Imperium have been in place for some time; indeed, the so-called American Empire has been a staple of the Left for decades, but the two are not the same. A social and cognitive crisis was required to instantiate these immanent structures, and that was provided by the attacks on New York and Washington. It seems safe to say that, had there been a Gore Administration in the White House, the American response to the attacks would have been much more multilateral; certainly, the unilateralism of the Bush White House was not present among the Democrats. But, due to the intricacies of the American electoral and judicial systems, we have instead an Administration with a go-it-alone U.S. foreign policy and conditions that make it possible to strong-arm allies and coerce enemies, to a degree far greater than in the past.

Unilateralism is nothing new in American foreign policy (and it is not the same as isolationism). It has been there since at least the end of World War Two, when the U.S. still held a monopoly on atomic weapons. While the UN was organized to give primacy to the five permanent members of the Security Council, there was little question that Franklin Roosevelt saw the other four falling into step behind the United States. The prosecution of the Cold War necessitated a greater degree of multilateralism than might otherwise have been likely, but there are many examples of unilateral American action during those 45 years, as in the case of the Korean War and the various invasions of small countries. Multilateralism was always more of an expedient than a principle, as was especially evident in the burgeoning number of international treaties and conventions, particularly in the area of trade and arms control, as well as human rights and environment. Most of these were regarded as having no particular importance for the United States—trade agreements excepted—but a few were thought by some to be too restrictive.

Unilateralism has often been confused with isolationism. Advocates of the latter believed that the United State should remain aloof from affairs outside of the Western Hemisphere (the Monroe Doctrine), although even the most ardent of unilateralists believed that the fate of the world economy was of signal interest to the United States. Until the early 1960s, the Republican Party was dominated by internationalists, the isolationists having been defeated in 1952. But Richard Nixon narrowly lost the Presidential election of 1960 and, in 1964, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination. Goldwater was the flag bearer for a new form of conservatism that had been bubbling up for years within the Right Wing of the Party. He was a unilateralist par excellence, hated Eisenhower and the UN, and seemed only too ready to wage nuclear war on the USSR and its allies. Defeated in a landslide by Lyndon Johnson, it took another 10 years for the unilateralists to capture the Republican Party, in 1976, and the Presidency, in 1980.

The Bush Administration entered office with a unilateralist agenda already in hand, put there by Washington’s conservative think tanks. That agenda was not a new one, as we shall see below, but was an element of the trench warfare between the Clinton White House and the Republican-dominated Congress during the 1990s. There are too many competing views and philosophies within the Bush Administration to say that any single one is dominant—which is why there have been so many zigs and zags along the road to Baghdad—but the primary source of George W. Bush’s overall approach to governing is Ronald Reagan, and not George Senior. In fact, George H.W. Bush is seen by this Administration as a failure, despite the success of the Gulf War. George Senior failed to get himself re-elected, a signal sign of failure and handed the White House over to Bill Clinton for the next two terms.

Under Reagan, the post-1948 tradition of a bipartisan approach to foreign policy—always more myth than actual practice—was done away with. Reagan deliberately utilized foreign policy—remember the "Evil Empire?"—for domestic political purposes. Blaming Jimmy Carter for his supposed appeasement of the Soviet Union and underfunding of the military—both largely the work Republican Administrations—Reagan used the Soviet threat to pillory Carter and Congress. The Democrats fell into line and, after Reagan’s landslide victory over Walter Mondale in 1984, they rolled over and played dead. Even with a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, Reagan was able to get almost everything he wanted, in no small part through playing the Soviet card. It was only after the accession of Gorbachev to the Party Chairmanship of the CPSU that Reagan began, ever so slowly, to go "soft." Hard right conservatives were not at all happy with this change, or with George Bush Senior, who proved even softer.

Although Bush Senior was an ardent Cold Warrior, Reagan’s style of politics was not his; it was too Western and populist. Even though he had lived in Texas since the 1960s, Bush Senior was never a real Texan, preferring a much more East Coast Republican internationalist and bipartisan line, especially as war loomed in 1990. But, while he won the Gulf War in 1991, he lost the election in 1992. The American voter does not really understand multilateralism or the world economy, and the only type of foreign policy that has an impact on the electorate is one based on fear. For the current President Bush, therefore, fear is the means of holding together a fractious Republican Party and scaring the voter into supporting him. Keep that coalition together, and many things become possible. Lose it, and lose both Congress and a second term.

The present Bush Administration models itself, consequently, on the first term of the Reagan Presidency, when it was at its hardest. Initially, the new Enemy for Bush Junior was the very multilateralism favored by the both the elder Bush and Bill Clinton. In today’s world, multilateralism means compromise and, at times, diplomacy demands a disregard for morality. Problems must be discussed and solutions negotiated. It’s easier and more expedient to act alone. With the preponderance of military power, others can be forced to behave as the United States wants them to. And morality can trump diplomacy.

The strong religious current running through the Administration and the Republican Party demands a moralistic approach to international politics. It is, perhaps, a bit ironic that a Christian-Jewish coalition plays such a central role, given fundamental differences in doctrine and dogma. Again, what brings conservative Jews and Christians together in the United States is not foreign policy but, rather, the domestic "culture war." The Apocalypse so eagerly anticipated by fundamentalist Christians is of little interest to conservative Jews, outside of the support it generates for Israel. It is opposition to cultural and social issues—abortion, homosexuality, media, liberals—that gives them common cause. Morality abroad, they seem to believe, will generate the conditions required to impose morality at home.

Interestingly, one of the events that energized the conservative unilateralists in the early 1960s and has been invoked recently as an historical precedent—the Cuban Missile Crisis (CMC)—had nothing to do with multilateralism at all. The CMC is conventionally seen as the successful resolution of an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Atmospheric Test Ban was signed in 1963, and a number of strategic and East-West treaties followed over the next dozen or so years. For the anti-communist Right, however, the resolution of the CMC was a shameful surrender to Communism, one that had to be redeemed in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. The United States had allowed itself to be boxed in by a strategic inferior, was compelled to compromise over Cuba and was coerced into removing the Jupiter missiles from Turkey. This, argued the unilateralists, must never happen again.

The obstacles to avoiding a repeat of the CMC were, from the conservative view, both the SALT and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaties concluded during the Nixon and Kissinger Administration. The former treaties put some limits on offensive weapons, the latter on defense of land-based strategic missile forces. Arms control advocates claimed that the ABM Treaty eliminated a source of strategic instability and that SALT was the first step toward much greater reductions in nuclear weapons. In any case, they argued, a comprehensive ballistic missile defense (BMD) would cost a fortune and never function as intended. Neither argument prevented Ronald Reagan, with the help of Edward Teller, from envisioning the Strategic Defense Initiative, meant to render nuclear missiles "impotent and obsolete." Twenty years later, with a different name, SDI still lives.

From the unilateralist point of view, the problem has never been whether BMD will work as intended but whether it can play a role in nuclear compellance and coercion of America’s enemies. Here, the role of BMD is psychological rather than physical. With the USSR at nuclear parity, the technological feasibility of missile defense mattered should war come, but it was the possibility that a viable system might be developed that mattered more. Since one could never be sure that the system would not work as advertised, one could not to afford the risk of challenging it (that this still invokes deterrence seems not to be recognized). Therefore, went the reasoning, the Kremlin would not threaten the White House with war. Had such a system been in place in 1962, claimed the unilateralists, the United States, then being in a superior strategic position, could have bullied the Soviet Union into backing down. Indeed, the Soviets would never have dared to put missiles in Cuba in the first place, being all too aware of their strategic uselessness.

Once the USSR disappeared, replaced by a Russian state barely able to maintain strategic parity, much less strategic readiness, the unilateralist argument for BMD became even stronger. Today, the United States has the military power to overcome any potential enemy, but it has no protection against the missiles such an enemy might launch. (Deterrence seems to play no significant role in preventing such a suicidal launch, it would seem; some people with missiles are crazy and are, therefore, not subject to the logic of deterrence.) In the event of a confrontation with a missile-armed opponent, would it not be preferable to be able to destroy them during flight, so that the President need not have second thoughts about sacrificing New York for Baghdad or Teheran or Pyongyang? BMD renders self-deterrence impotent and obsolete, and appears to make the United States invulnerable to blackmail. The Cuban Missile Crisis can never happen again—or so goes the thinking.

Other international treaties and conventions also constrain America’s freedom to act as it wishes and, consequently, the Bush Administration has made it policy to defect from or repudiate any agreements that impose either domestic or foreign constraints (as illustrated by the recent dismissal of the negotiations over a Biological Weapons Convention Protocol and the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol). In the view of the White House, the United States offers solutions to all the world’s problems—to be found either in military action or unrestricted economic growth—so there is no reason to accept constraints or limits on America’s freedom to act alone. Multilateralism of the conventional sort is nice, but it’s not necessary, especially now that the United States is so much more powerful than anyone else. As President Bush puts it in The National Security Strategy, "the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world…. The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission" (pp. ii, iii).

I would suggest that this unilateralism is of a special form, one not seen during earlier Presidential administrations. It is not just that the United States will act alone in international matters, as might be the case under a true balance of power system. Rather, it is that the United States views its interests as the world’s interests, and it will override the interests of others if those interests are not consonant with U.S. interests. If Europe does not act as the United States wishes it to, it can be ignored. If NATO is not reconfigured to fit American strategies, it is useless. And if regimes are not obedient to American dictates, they are a threat to "world"—read "American" security—and unilateral intervention will follow. As the National Security Strategy puts it, "The United States possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world. Sustained by faith in the principles of liberty, and the value of a free society, this position comes with unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity. The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom" (p. 1).

In his address to the UN General Assembly on September 12, 2002, President Bush threw down a gauntlet—one repeated in subsequent weeks—admonishing the leaders there assembled that the UN could either act or become "irrelevant," it could prove itself worthy of its history by supporting the use of force against Iraq or suffer the fate of the League of Nations by dithering. In effect, the President told the UN that the United States does not regard it as an autonomous institution: either it follows U.S. dictates or it loses its legitimacy and it will be ignored by Washington. This is a choice without a difference.

While it is too soon to predict the longer-term implications of these moves, the coup against the UN Republic has progressed quite far. As I noted earlier, this Republic has never been very robust, and it has never been able to do much to implement more than the most basic of its founding principles. Nonetheless, the UN has been fundamentally multilateralist and it has struggled to replace the rule of force with the rule of law. For a time, during the 1990s, it appeared as though the institution might be making progress in this direction, as fitful as that was. The Bush Administration has been doing all it can to obstruct any further moves in this direction.

The UN has been a long-standing bete noir of American unilateralists (in my home town of Santa Cruz, we still see a sign, driven around town on the back of a truck, urging the United States to "get out of the UN"). Because of the UN’s republican principles, the United States frequently found itself on the losing side of General Assembly votes. A substantial fraction of funding for the UN and its agencies was provided by Washington, about which many members of Congress were never been very enthusiastic, but which provided leverage for various reforms undertaken by the Secretary General. With the rise to power of neo-liberal financial governance, the UN has been coopted increasingly by multinational capital and international financial institutions. The UN seems more to endorse what is has been decided by the United States than to decide whether it is appropriate to endorse what the U.S. wants.

As if to add insult to injury, following his speech, Bush lost no time in demanding that the U.S. Congress pass a similar statement of support so as to put pressure on the Security Council to pass a resolution authorizing military action. Some commentators observed that Bush’s demand was more than just a symbolic one: Congress has become the de facto world "legislature," whose writ is to be followed by the second house, the assemblies of the UN. Bush has made it clear that, whatever comes out of New York or, for that matter, down from Capitol Hill, the invasion will take place. Nothing the Iraqis might offer the UN will dissuade the White House; the war will come. And, as each of the Permanent Members of the UNSC gradually moves toward acquiescence with American plans, the UN becomes more and more of a cats paw. There will be, in the final analysis, no negotiating or compromise with either the Iraqi government or the Security Council.

The Bush Administration, in other words, sees the UN as irrelevant to its policies and plans. Like the Pope, the UN has no troops and no weapons; unlike the Pope, it lacks the hundreds of millions of believers that support the Church. The UN provides a forum for those regimes and actors who Bush and his advisors detest and believe to be inimical to U.S. security and prosperity. It talks and takes forever to act. The UN may possess moral authority, but it is an authority rooted in practical realism—diplomats have to talk if they do not have the capacity to fight. To Washington, this is amoral, if not immoral. In a world seen in stark terms, black and white, good and evil, the compromises necessary to UN diplomacy are viewed as the moral equivalent of terrorism.

In point of fact, the coup against the UN Republic may be over. This coup has been as much an artifact of U.S. domestic politics as international affairs because, in Imperium, there is no inside and outside; everything is domestic. There is no "international law," there is only Imperial diktat. All law, such as it is, emanates from the center of power which, in this instance, is Washington. Imperium can, further, decide how it wishes to address issues and problems formerly dealt with through treaties, conferences, and cooperation, and is perfectly free to defy and deny any agreements it finds not to its tastes.

Finally, within the spatial confines Imperium there is no such a thing as national sovereignty as we have understood it in the past: all political entities are subject to the discretion of Rome, as it were. And, sovereignty has been redefined: rather than a state’s right to protect itself, it has become the state’s obligation to protect the system—this is the implication of various pronouncements emerging from Washington. Governments, moreover, are subject to vetting by the White House and those that refuse to accept Imperial diktat are subject to "regime change." Baghdad’s sin is that its refusal to acknowledge American hegemony is not so much a threat to global or U.S. security as it is a challenge to the very foundations of Imperium. The White House reserves the right to decide what constitutes an acceptable and legitimate government and to change those regimes that defy it and Imperium. As articulated in the National Security Strategy,

In building a balance of power that favors freedom, the United States is guided by the conviction that all nations have important responsibilities. Nations that enjoy freedom must actively fight terror. Nations that depend on international stability must help prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Nations that seek international aid must govern themselves wisely, so that aid is well spent. For freedom to thrive, accountability must be expected and required (p. iv).

The security of Imperium has more to do with management than coercion, more to do with the creation of populations than the destruction of people. The neo-liberal market order backed by the UN Republic comprised a form of governmentality whose shortcomings became only too evident on September 11, 2001. The relative freedom on offer during the 1990s, captured in the widely-touted libertarianism of the Internet, proved dangerous to that market order. The very same technologies and practices that gave bankers and capital liberty to roam the world were also available to criminals and terrorists, and the latter took full advantage of them.

During the 1990s, the "Washington consensus" envisioned the spread of democracy and capitalism as the solution to the world’s troubles; today, notwithstanding President Bush’s soothing words, American policymakers are more interested in regimes that can maintain domestic order. For the United States, neo-liberal governmentality, reliant as it has been on a high degree of individual self-discipline, cannot provide the safety and confidence necessary to maintain required public support for neo-liberal constitutionalism. What is required is a compliant population accepting of the benefits of global capitalism and cowed by threats of physical punishment. Governments unwilling or unable to police within their borders cannot, according to the new line of thinking, be left to their own devices. The United States must supply the training, equipment, and oversight to ensure that local forces are up to the job. And, if governments refuse, Washington will see to the job. Thus will Imperium be secured and imperial governmentality assured.

To see how this process works, one could do worse that go back and view the fourth and fifth of George Lucas’s Star Wars series—the two films that come first in the temporal order of his imagined universe. In that far away universe, a power-hungry Senator devises a plan to subvert the Republic by concocting, first, a phantom enemy—the trading planet of Naboo—and, then, an army of cloned soldiers who are meant to actualize the Republic’s enemies. While the plot is rather convoluted, it seems to auger the defeat of a purely imaginary enemy as a move toward the crowning of an Emperor. The Republic basically endorses its own liquidation in order to protect galactic civilization. Should the UN endorse the American plan to attack Iraq, it may well suffer the same fate. Even if it does not, the governmentality of Imperium will see to the task.