Obama: Less Imperialist, More Imperial

Yesterday, on a warm summer evening in Berlin and in front of a crowd of 200,000, Barack Obama delivered what was expected to be the most important foreign policy speech of his presidential candidacy. Falling somewhat short of his usual oratorical brilliance, he proposed both America's return to the world, and the world's reopening of itself to America. It was first and foremost a pledge to repair much of the damage done by the neocons. Less a real ‘break' with the past, and more a second shot at a stalled project interrupted by the series of events which followed 9/11.

The primary aim of both yesterday's speech, as well as his entire world tour, was two-fold. Firstly, despite a new ‘hawkishness' particularly in relation to Iran, he has been re-emphasising his distance from the unilateralist neoconservativism of the Bush administration (hence the location of yesterday's speech in the heart of ‘Old Europe'). And secondly, he has been attempting to demonstrate to American voters that he would actually be able to bring about the (increasingly moderate) changes he is promising.

His reputation as the ‘change' candidate has long been established, and so the second of these two objectives is by far the most important. In striving for its achievement, he has tried to show that he already has the sympathetic ear of other statesmen and women. He hoped to illustrate they think his plans workable. In this sense, whilst Nouri al-Malaki's quasi-endorsement of his Iraq withdrawal plans was an enormous coup, Angela Merkel's unwillingness to commit to further increasing troop deployments to Afghanistan beyond current commitments was a (somewhat less significant) blow.

Of course, even if yesterday's foreign policy speech had been more precise in its pledges - or had extended beyond the mere 30 minutes it took to hold - it would unlikely be possible to properly predict what an Obama presidency would mean in the realm of international relations, or for the global political economy. There is, as ever, the possibility that if elected he may renege on specific pledges. The comments made in February by a senior Obama staffer about his anti-free trade stance being mostly campaign rhetoric did not develop into a fully-fledged ‘NAFTA-gate', but it rightly raised concerns. Moreover, how much of what he would actually like to do he would ultimately be able to see through will largely depend on the balance of forces in Washington (as well as broader world events) if and when he is elected. The presidential election coincides with elections to the House of Representatives, as well as Senate and gubernatorial elections in many states, leaving this question wide open.

So speculation on what an Obama presidency would mean is obviously still just that: speculation. However, a quick glance at both Bush's 29% job approval ratings in the US - as well as, well, general world opinion - makes it clear that ‘change' is something rather a lot of us are interested in at the moment. As such, it is well worth starting to think about how any space his potential election might open up could be used to push things a little further than can be expected from the Office of the President of the United States. The fact that he yesterday appeared to be offering little more than undoing some of the mess created by the neoconservatives makes this all the more urgent.

Concretely, he yesterday appealed for Europe to stand with America in opposing Iran's "nuclear ambitions", for the building of a "global partnership" to dismantle terrorist networks, for Europe to recognise the stake it has in ensuring NATO's mission in Afghanistan is a success, to support those who have "marched and bled for democracy" in Lebanon, and to "come together to save this planet" from climate change. He also mentioned a series of challenges with which the world was presented: ensuring human rights in Burma, Iran and Zimbabwe; ending child poverty in Bangladesh; rejecting torture in favour of the rule of law; welcoming migration; and banishing "the scourge of AIDS in our time". "No one nation, no matter how large or powerful, can defeat such challenges alone," he declared. "Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice, and a global commitment to progress."

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, what Obama promised yesterday, and indeed has been promising all along, is a second attempt at a project interrupted by the Bush administration, and the events which followed September 11 2001 in particular. But what was that project?

With the publication of their book Empire, in 2000, Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri and American literature professor Michael Hardt attempted to give it a name. Written in the period following the end of the last Persian Gulf War and before the war in Kosovo began, they declared that the age of imperialism was over. It had been replaced by a system of rule in which nation-states were no longer able to effectively project their own sovereignty beyond their national borders. Nor did they even fully maintain it within them. Rather, it had been transferred to the global level.

Empire named an emerging networked form of global governance. It included nation-states, multinational corporations, big NGOs, and international organisations such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, NATO and the UN. It was both the response of global capital to the struggles of workers, students and others during the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as itself creating conditions in which the ‘multitude' - the name they gave to the new global working class, which was very broadly conceived - could thrive.

The book's authors are Marxists. And just as Marx had celebrated the revolutionary nature of capitalism, in the mid-nineteenth century, while appealing to the workers of the world to unite against it, Hardt and Negri displayed a similar ambivalence towards Empire. On the one hand, it represented the perfection of the relationships of exploitation which have always characterised capitalism: the need for the vast majority of humanity to sell its time on the market, producing things it will not own, in order to survive. (Empire supposedly thrived by both rendering productive all of social life, as well as encompassing the whole globe within a single logic of rule.) Yet on the other, it stood for the breaking down of divisions (the nation state) between humanity and showed the potential for it to harness its own collective intelligence.

When the book was first published, it appeared to set out brilliantly (despite some shortcomings not particularly relevant here) the ongoing processes of globalisation which at the time appeared unstoppable. Its description of the multitude as a decentralised, diverse, horizontal and networked body with undefined boundaries did not simply set out the transformation of the industrial working class into something much more amporphous. It also, with prescience, described much which was new about the global ‘movement of movements' which emerged on the streets of Seattle against the WTO Ministerial in 1999.

But history does not always unfold neatly along a foreseeable linear path. The years which followed the publication of Empire saw the emergence of a new trajectory. Whatever the complexity of the motivating factors behind the US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, they have widely been regarded as a regression to forms of imperialism characteristic of the early twentieth century. Not least because of the choice of language of many of the interventions' proponents.

There are few today who would deny that these operations have been disasters. What Obama proposed yesterday was something like a resurrection of the project of Empire. Much of what he said will have been met with support around the world: the rebuilding of transatlantic alliances, the strengthening of international institutions, winding down the war in Iraq, and increasing the ‘fairness' of free trade. And indeed (and this was astonishingly explicit): A greater recognition of the limited capacity for the US to ‘go it alone' in what Bush Senior once, on September 11 1990, called the ‘New World Order'.

Obama, of course, is the lesser evil. His presidency would, most importantly, very likely take the edge off the global ‘war on terror'. This in turn could well open room, in the US and beyond, for the left to busy itself with something other than fending off a farcical imitation of early imperialist projects. But setting the world back on track towards something along the lines of what Hardt and Negri called Empire has everything to do with perfecting techniques of exploitation and a (very sophisticated) restructuring of the mechanisms which keep this set up in place. Our best ‘hope' for ‘change we can believe in' which could come out of an Obama presidency is a resurgence of the multitudinous ‘movement of movements' which began blossoming the last time around.

Ben Trott. Berlin, 25 July 2008.

Ben Trott writes for various publications and is a PhD candidate based in Berlin. He is an editor of Turbulence: Ideas for movement www.turbulence.org.uk and Associate Editor (Global Justice Movement) of the forthcoming International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 - Present (Blackwell: 2009)