‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’, Prince Tancredi, in Il Gattopardo (1958),

Giuseppe T. di Lampedusa.

‘Empires everywhere, it seems, are on the move again’, writes Alison Caddick in Arena Magazine 96. That ‘big old world’ is still at it, and still guided by ‘hubristic notions of progress and supremacist nationalism’. Globalisation and global warming provide a new theatre for the old brutes, who continue to hog the centre stage as of right, shouting the old slogans louder than those quieter, smaller actors who have increasingly come out from the wings to occupy United Nations space: minorities, dwarf-nations and states like Singapore and East Timor, no-hope out-backs like Tibet, edge-lands like West Papua, reanimated fossils like Scotland and the Basque country.

For God’s sake — what can such pip-squeaks expect, in a globality so evidently configured by and for the big lads? As Caddick puts it, the reborn superpowers naturally seek to maintain ‘a way of life built on unsustainable economic and environmental assumptions … [and] cultural mores associated with the spread of a contagious form of high-tech capitalism’. When it suits them they are entitled to ‘put the clock back’, as Umberto Eco puts it in his new book of that title, with votes where possible (as in India), or by authoritarian means if not (as in China). What they really count on, she suggests, is popular feeling: ‘an exercise of power over actions and desire’, furnished of course by what Eco describes so accurately as ‘media populism’. The proverbial ‘small guy’ (and small nation-state) has no real option but to tag along and make the best of it. Tiddle-pots may sometimes choose sides, but are not allowed a side of their own.

Nor should they have that option, on one influential interpretation of events. The matter has been debated recently in Foreign Affairs, following Jerry Muller’s article in their March–April 2008 issue ‘Us and Them’. In the current issue the question is summed up by none other than Condoleeza Rice. Entitled (yep) ‘The New American Realism’, George Dubya’s Secretary of State is kind enough to add an explanatory subtitle: ‘Rethinking the National Interest’. In years to come (whoever wins in November) the latter must go on being guided by ‘this uniquely American realism’. Unique? It looks awfully like the Great-Chinese and Great-Russian realism that recent events have disclosed. After Iraq and Afghanistan have come Tibet and Georgia. ‘Responsibility’ accompanies ‘stability’ in all these national-interest justifications. Globalisation is fine, but cannot be allowed to upset things.

An academic team has been assembled to back Rice up. Their aim is reinforcement of centre-stage, loud-voice nationalism: ‘responsible’ big-lad politics, in fact. The vanguard is a Harvard–UCLA Sturmabteilung captained by Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein, co-authors of No More States? Globalization, National Self-determination and Terrorism (2006). Their message is that ‘apostles of national-self-determination would do well to consider a still more important trend: the return to bigness in the international system’ (Foreign Affairs, vol. 87 no. 4). Some idea of what this implies can be glimpsed in another astonishing essay from the same issue: C. Fred Bergsten’s ‘A Partnership of Equals’, which entreats Chinese leaders to stop being so modest, and turn into international Big Lads with whom Condoleeza can make deals, even alliances. Hey, Beijing, stoke up all that hubris and supremacism, time you joined the club: didn’t you know that economic power entitles you to being a bigness-bully?

Not so long ago, I doubt if Foreign Affairs could have published such rantings. But now there’s something in the air, as Caddick recognises. In the mill-race of globalisation, the previously unthinkable now gets tossed up like this almost every day, casually claiming normality: back-room fantasies, foregrounded as ‘speculation’. The deeper moving impulse behind the No More States? team is simply Great-American nationalism, more often glimpsed in weekend drag these days, as ‘neoconservatism’. However, McCain and Palin are working on a full dress musical revival for the coming Presidential elections.

Naturally, returning to bigness can be seen as favoring the old baton-wielder, the United States of America. But the point is, the latter is also favored by the new conjuncture. As Caddick puts it: ‘The strongest element in this depressing scenario is a common interest shared by these competing empires’. It’s what they jointly perceive as stability and continuity, and holding the clock hands firmly back. Condoleeza Rice’s ‘realism’ is simply an acknowledgement that, good as it was being the superpower, this couldn’t go on for ever. However, much may yet be saved via formal or tacit understandings among suitable ‘equals’. The resultant common interest leaves enough space (for example) to Barack Obama’s notion of the United States returning to ‘inspire’ the globe and renew the leadership beacon. ‘Hegemony’ is the new buzzword here: a fuzzy concoction counting on small fry to colonise themselves, by seeking guidance, collegiate support, orientation conferences and so on.

But surely Caddick’s analysis may be interpreted as pointing also to something more significant, way beyond such compromises. A growing number of people and states in the new global times have no wish to hegemonise themselves, do not long for an eventide beacon, or thirst for inspiration from the City on the Hill. ‘For God’s sake, leave us alone!’ may convey their attitude more accurately. I think quite a few of them resent having been made to feel, six months in advance, that an election where they have no say is, none the less, important enough to make them take sides. This isn’t internationalism. It’s more like unilateralism off its hinges, still pretending to be the only show in town. That there’s more than one unilateralist around — a unilateralist gang, as it were — is no consolation: the streets are even less safe than before.

So what’s the answer? In the decorous language of international relations it’s called ‘multilateralism’ — coined in French, not by chance, as le multilatéralisme. Small guys can defend themselves only by sticking together, and working out their own common interests as a kind of trade union. In the appropriate wider sense, democracy and equality are on their side, not with the City-on-the-Hill kids. The latter want protection money and obeisance (for which of course neoliberalism was the ideal missionary church). Multilateralism calls for something different: initially more modest but ultimately stronger, and more durable.

As for the big-lad populations, I quoted the most famous elegy for a dying culture above, from Colquhoun’s 1960 translation of The Leopard. But the original was slightly more eloquent: what Tancredi said was ‘bisogna che tutto cambi’ — everything, every single thing, has to change. I doubt if Count Lampedusa was looking ahead to globalisation, in 1958, but that’s how it has turned out: like it or not, ‘everything’ and everyone has got involved. And for that very reason, more breathing-space is urgently needed to make the global deal more tolerable. No doubt this is true for big-shot masses as well — but then, that’s the real point: it’s their problem, not ours. They are just nation-states like the rest us, if somewhat weighed down by their ridiculous scale. Would a short cure of ‘isolationism’ really be all that bad?

‘Globalisation’, by contrast, has to mean more differentiation, and substantial rather than formal respect for diversity. This is why Kevin Rudd’s theme of ‘middle-range’ policy and ambition could be so important. He has returned to the idea often enough, since his Lowy Institute address in 2007, and it must be hoped he really means it. David McKnight commented on the trend, pointing out how it represents a rejection not just of neoliberal mania but of the latter’s intellectual basis in the earlier work of Friedrich von Hayek. We may be entering an ideal, and rather prolonged, moment for movement in that direction. Having been disabused of state-led, short-cut socialism in 1989, electorates have now been even more thoroughly disenchanted by the collapse of its contrary, the weird right-wing ‘historical materialism’ of marketolatry and deregulated enterprise. Hayek always urged the Right to imitate the Left in seizing and publicising power, and was rewarded with disastrous success in the 1990s. However, part of that mimesis has continued on into its latter days: the ideological foundering of the Right has now followed (and may well exceed) that of the Cold War Left.

We don’t know how long this disarray will last. In his history of the 1929 Great Crash, J. K. Galbraith points out that about five years passed after the worst moment in 1931–32. Not until 1938 can one find ‘the leaders of the original shock troops (of the New Deal) polishing up speeches on the virtues of the free enterprise system’, satisfied that all that was possible on the public side had been done. George Soros thinks we are not yet at the worst point of system failure. But whoever is right on this, it seems reasonable to hope that, this time round, the disorientation is more fertile.

Rudd’s government had the good fortune to take office in its early phases — the contrary of Brown’s faltering Labour Party regime in Britain, originally set up all too close to the ’90s high tide of neo-liberal exaggeration and optimism. Carried forward on the latter, Blair and Brown felt compelled to focus on the futile business of remaining ‘Great’: the tradition of a once major state that finds it very hard to embrace middle-range identity and aspirations. Instead, it has clung to a Special Relationship that was in truth concealed prostration and camp-following. In other words, the United Kingdom. has consistently chosen the opposite of Rudd’s proposed modesty and co-operative initiatives.

And yet — ‘Never has there been a better opportunity to strike a new social contract between private capital and the people’, wrote Scottish commentator Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald recently (21 September). British Labour seems incapable of making the case. Is there any hope that Australian Labor can do better? ‘Looking at the wreckage wrought by unrestrained greed during the boom years (Macwhirter continues) this should be a great time for a social democratic party like Labour — an opportunity to reaffirm its fundamental values. The people who should be on the defensive are the free-market Conservatives and their friends in the City who have brought us to this state thanks to their bonus culture and predatory lending. All those neo-liberal nostrums about the evils of government intervention have been swept aside as financiers fall over themselves to get state subsidies … ’ Socialism for the banks, as it were, in the service of saving face — Britain’s ‘world role’ — and keeping up with Caddick’s empires on the rebound.

Isn’t this also a new context for the argument on republicanism? Now that a convinced republican has become leader of the Liberals, the case is bound to be re-opened anyway. But the wider republican tradition has always been about more than doing away with monarchy: it embodies a positive drive as well — the reconstitution of collective will and ambition, a reformation of identity and belonging. As Caddick put it, in ordinary (‘middle-range’) states, ‘for ordinary people the struggle and strategy will have to take a different form …’ one that no longer denies ‘more subterranean channels of cultural identity and social meaning’. Wasn’t that a part of Rudd’s great apology to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, and of the extraordinary emotion it generated? She’s right: the well-springs are there, and calling for more than exploded formulae and time-worn rules.

Tom Nairn is research professor at the Globalism Institute at RMIT University.

Aeneas was praying and holding on the altar
When the prophetess started to speak: ‘Blood relations of Gods,
Trojan, son of Anchises, the way down to Avernus is easy.
Day and night black Pluto’s door stands open.
But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,
This is the real task and the real undertaking.’

‘The Golden Bough’, from Virgil’s Aeneid,
trans. Seamus Heaney, in Opened Ground: Poems 1966-96

Demons of yesteryear

As Brendan O’Leary has pointed out in an earlier contribution to OpenDemocracy (18 September), one of the key features of 11 September is that no-one claimed responsibility for the atrocities. They were an ontological statement, rather than propaganda of the deed for a particular nation, or an oppressed class. The world was meant to stand revealed by them: ‘reality’ perceived as God’s ultimate struggle against Satan, exemplified by the martyr-hijackers. In such a cosmic fantasmagoria, a new world war is nothing. The bigger the Satan, the harder will he eventually fall. The perpetrators must have calculated they could hardly fail, in a society already so strongly inclined towards belief in UFOs, moral absolutes and the Christian version of ‘fundamentalism’.

Yet fail they will, for perfectly mundane (and of course profane) reasons having little to do with the atavistic theology of either side. O’Leary is surely right to call for normality: ‘Be normal … think about being normal as a way of standing up for yourself and your values’. Keep your head, in other words. The object of the criminals was socio-cultural decapitation. They will not be allowed to get away with it.

But one should also observe how the silence O’Leary underlines is connected to another absentee from the excitable massed choruses of post-11 September: nationalism, as an attribute of the motivation of the terrorist enemy. In my view the two silences are intimately related. In fact it is possible to argue that one explains the other. The atrocities in New York and Washingtom can also be seen as standing for a new strain of nationalism — an ‘ethno-cosmic’ liberation movement, as it were, so grandiloquent in its goal as to require no apology or explanation. No ‘responsibility’ need be claimed for the Creator’s will: it has simply to be made manifest. However, over-reach also implies futility: blood relations ‘of Gods’ do not exist, and no actual nation is either divine or ‘chosen’.

Less than a decade ago, most ills of humanity and of the coming century were being laid at the door of a more conventional ‘nationalism’. Bosnias were seen coming everywhere, unless Reason (in the Atlantic-Trademark sense) prevailed. Rationality was then thought to be taking up a new logo — ‘globalisation’ — while selfish ethnicity was perceived as getting in its way. For years, no op-ed page was complete without this daily dose of spectral anarchy and pandemonium.

Now the tune has abruptly altered. I suspect most people would be quite happy to have the demons of yesteryear back, rather than these Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There was plenty of real anarchy and pandemonium in the 1990s, as the post-Cold war thaw got under way. It would be shameful to excuse or exonerate any of the ensuing disasters. However, a decade later, it should be acknowledged that many of these disasters have either been resolved, or are on the way towards an answer. The fact is (for example) that at the end of an awful ten years, Milosevic is in gaol in The Hague, while Mladic and Karadzic are on the run in the hills of Serb Bosnia; democratic peace of a sort seems to be holding in Northern Ireland; East Timor is independent; democratic South Africa may be on the way to becoming the continent’s first great success story; Iran is evolving steadily away from the theocracy of the 1980s — and so on.

Exit to the underworld

Actual democratic nationalism leads to actual solutions, in other words, even if these are clumsy, painful and approximate. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ was a particularly noxious side-effect of that kind. Terroristic actions were often involved, and the cumulative ‘body-count’ far exceeded that of 11 September. But none of it meant ‘the end of the world’. An abyss separates it from 11 September, which was intended to signal just that. Humanity was being called through ‘Black Pluto’s door’ into an antique Underworld of theocratic absolutes and paranoid finality. The saintly criminals were seeking to provoke a ‘War against Terrorism’, which would inevitably employ counter-terrorism as one of its tactics, thus setting up an indefinite spiral of outrages. God’s will can then emerge from the ruins. It would be a pity to oblige them.

As Virgil’s prophetess said, strip-cartoon apocalypse is the easy bit: for that, her dark door does indeed stand ever open. The information technology linked to globalisation makes it more visible, and even more ‘inviting’ (at least in the sense of imaginable). It encourages an inebriation of the collective soul, much in evidence right after the events. The harder part is finding one’s way back into the ‘upper air’ of normality, where the majority can reassert their non-apocalyptic visions of the future.

Yet I doubt if this will prove so difficult. It is simply not the case that any mysterious ‘Clash of Civilisations’ is at work behind this crisis, rooted in immemorially divergent values or world-views. I suspect that something more like the exact opposite may be true. These hooligans of the Absolute were compelled to act because they (or those behind them) know that there is, in the ‘globalising’ world, a steadily advancing majority against fundamentalist or spirit-world politics. Unless they strike now, it will soon be too late. The genesis of 11 September lay in mounting despair, rather than conviction of real political or social victory.

The crux of their dilemma lies in the Middle East. This is the zone in which secular nationalism has worked least well, for a particular combination of social and longer-range historical reasons. The inverse of that failure has been that a pre-modern religious Weltanschauung got promoted into the breach: Islam, linked in collective recollection to a distant era of Arab conquest and supremacy, became the stand-in for both democracy and a positive form of civic nationalism. The fall-back upon this ersatz concoction has been a misfortune for the Muslim faith as well as the rest of us, the infidels. It promised earthly Heaven to the former and humiliating defeat for the latter. Neither delusion has the slightest chance of realisation. But they have already generated vast mayhem on their way to failure.

In his moving account of The Arab Predicament (1992) Fouad Ajami concludes bitterly that:

It is easy to judge but hard to understand the ghosts with which people and societies battle, the wounds and memories that drive them to do what they do … The renaissance of civilizations is used as a weapon because so many in the Muslim world and the Third World as a whole feel they live in a world constructed and maintained by others.

Nation-states have been the main instrument of the real battle, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century democratic nationalism has become its commanding credo. These are the effective means by which people and societies are coming to live in a world ‘constructed and maintained’ by themselves. Civic globalisation stands for the achievement and consolidation of that movement, not for its dissolution.

By far the best overview of its impact upon the Middle East is the one given by Roger Owen in State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Middle East (2000). Owen’s study originally came out in 1992, but his second edition contains a new closing section on ‘The Remaking of the Middle Eastern Environment after the Gulf War’. This makes it startlingly clear why the Wahhabites and al-Qa’eda had to undertake some highly visible counter-action: they are on the retreat everywhere — even in the Afghan redoubt and the Saudi-Arabian citadel. He observes:

In a global economy with a well-educated middle class and virtually open access to information from abroad, it does not seem likely that (the region’s) stick and carrot approach to political management can be maintained indefinitely. Sooner or later, issues which have always been implicit in both religious and secular discourse will be made increasingly explicit. These include notions of citizenship, the rule of law, religious toleration and a regime legitimacy that comes not from appeals to security, ideology or achievement but from popular representation and a consensus among the nation at large.

All this is death and anathema to God-struck super-nationalists like Osama bin Laden. However, the influence of such ideas might be stayed, or even turned, if a suitably aggressive Western crusade could be provoked — a palpably Satanic onslaught which might drive the emergent middle class back into the fundamentalist fold. I agree with Fred Halliday’s account of US imperialism: compared to its European predecessors, muddled (and sometimes well-meaning) hesitancy has been its keynote, rather than the Captain America portrayed in so many left-wing diatribes (Observer, 16 September, ‘No Man is an Island’). This must have worried the Islamicists too. Their foe was falling down on the job, and needed some stiffening. Would a few thousand deaths in the heartland do the trick?

In short, the murderous onslaught of 11 September was aimed most significantly at the people of the Middle East themselves. The American and other victims in New York and Washington were made sacrificial lambs for a reconquest of Muslim opinion. From Nigeria to Indonesia, the latter accounts for something like a third of the world. Particularly in the United Kingdom, people are familiar with the concept of ‘democratic deficit’. But there is also such a thing as ‘nationalism-deficit’ — and this same part of the world has suffered from a devastating combination of both. Mundane if mistaken calculation suggested to the perpetrators that big numbers could compensate for these structural failings. Properly led, might they not still ‘bring down’ Godless capitalism, via prolonged and brutal struggle? After all, Muslim insurgency had witnessed Godless communism collapsing in the 1980s (and played a minor part in its fall).

It beats me why anyone should expect anything better from a character like Osama bin Laden. He may look like old images of Jesus Christ, but is the seventeenth son of a crooked construction tycoon. No-one who has encountered him saw a hawk of the desert — rather, a soft-handed fixer and couch ideologist. His slaughter funds flowed from an odious version of Arabian state-fostered capitalism, not from Heaven’s will. Presumably the unfortunates who committed suicide on 11 September believed in the Heavenly vision; whether their backers and organisers did, only time will show — and I presume this would be best shown in a court-room, before the steady gaze of humanity at large. Dubious acts of vengeance in remote corners of Asia will not achieve it. What we do know is that the ‘counter-crusaders’ want to restore or impose conservative theocracy, male-authoritarian hierarchy, the supposed warrior-virtues of antiquity, and sharia law.

Retracing the steps

The great, liberating thaw of modernity will never be turned back by such acts of despair. Another interesting contribution to OpenDemocracy’s debate described the affirmation of American nationalism which has followed 11 September. John Down drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles, reflecting as he travelled on the ‘civic religion’ of a stricken country, and its response to ‘violation by an unseen evil’. I am ashamed to see how bargain-basement anti-Americanism has surfaced in some analyses; but what accounts like Down’s reveal is surely a kind of grandeur — a solidity and humanity of outraged reaction, made up of new vulnerability, determination, and a sense of everyday sacredness. He does end up fearful of the immense power behind such displays, in case it ‘leads the US further down the path of retribution that may well sow the seeds of a future terrorism’.

But since he wrote, these fears have not materialised, though of course they still could. A powerful response was in order after 11 September. It is needed here as it was after the Srebrenica massacre, or after Pinochet’s murderous coup in Chile a quarter of a century ago. However, very many voices have insisted, in the United States itself as well as amongst its allies, that justice is the only true response. After all, it has come (or is coming) in these other two cases. To strike back at once is a natural impulse. But it is surely more important that justice should be inexorable, final, and public. No preposterous ‘War against Terrorism’ could achieve anything like this. It will do little but cast all the proverbial black cats into one indiscriminate bag in a darkened room, and (as Down dreads) provoke further atrocities.

What the extra-American world must fear is not rhetoric of US nationalism but the debility of the American civil state. The constitution linked to their ‘civic religion’ is a crumbling anachronism, as last year’s Presidential election demonstrated. Some sense of proportion must be retained here, I agree: Old Glory is less of an archaism than the United Kingdom, for instance, or the nostalgic debris of Saudi fundamentalism. Still, both George W. Bush’s position and his Texan machismo depend upon it, and might in the event of further disasters attempt to prop themselves up by mobilising appeals to the holy-smoke Christian conservatism which it also embodies.

This is another reason why defence of the positive side of ‘globalisation’ should not be an American prerogative. In an early contribution to the Open Democracy forum David Held called for a new international body dealing with terrorist outrages, ‘modelled on the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals’ and under UN control (14 September). The idea has been amplified by a further essay with Mary Kaldor, ‘New War, New Justice’ (27 September). They argue that this new body should be ‘an International Court (where) the terrorists must be treated as criminals and not military adversaries’.

In one sense, few would dissent while thinking of this example of ‘terrorism’. But we already have International Tribunals like The Hague, which could surely be adapted to the case at issue. The trouble is that any sweeping new formula takes us straight back to the black cats in the dark room. For instance, would the US Air Force’s mistaken strike at a Sudanese medical laboratory have qualified for a Court appearance? Should the Real IRA bombers of Omagh go there, rather than to courts in Dublin or Belfast? What about the Palestinian human bombs who preceded the 11 September atrocities? And the Israeli counter-terror meted out in retaliation? Tempting as the concept of a single new institutional riposte undoubtedly is, it may be over-influenced by the climate of the moment — the feeling that ‘September 11th is a defining moment for humankind’, as Held originally wrote.

But it was not. A miserable old world near the end of its tether was hitting back, using new technology to amplify a brazenly antediluvian message. The new world — currently paraphrased as Held and Kaldor’s ‘globalisation’ — should not think in terms of short-cuts and overpowering ripostes. Time is on its side, recession or not. That is, the combined forces of development, democracy and secular nationhood are on its side — much more evidently than over the decades of Cold War which concluded in the 1980s.

For example, as far as the mundane configuration behind these bombings are concerned, every news reader and TV viewer over the entire globe has known for decades what the ‘real problem’ is: Palestine. The general malaise of the Middle East, and by extension of other Muslim-majority polities, has been consistently focussed on and envenomed by the incurable abcess of the Israeli–PLO conflict. The Arab failures Fouad Ajami mourns, and the ‘general tone of bitterness and despair’ described by Owen, have in practice constantly returned to and fed off this particularly disgraceful stalemate. There have been of course plenty of other big regional problems as well: the Iran–Iraq war, Kuwait, Kurdistan, the Sudanese civil war, and now the downfall of the Afghan state. But none with the staying power and sheer ideological resonance of the Palestinian war.

It represents an impasse of nationalisms, to which the sole solution will be the formation of a viable, secular and democratic Palestinian state. American power has both imposed and fuelled the conflict, and yet has shrunk from imposing the solution (out of the motives Fred Halliday describes). Yet such an advance was overwhelmingly in its own long-term interest, as well as that of Palestinian Arabs and everyone else (except the Holy Warriors). Had it been achieved sooner, it is doubtful whether the September assaults would ever have happened. Nobody wants a new world order regulated by a US gendarme, but there are other ways of achieving peace. What is at issue here is a poisonous remnant of the old world order, festering on into the more liberal age of globalisation. An acceptable nation-state remains the only way forward.

The current issue of New Left Review (No. 10, July–August) is devoted mainly to Palestine, and Perry Anderson’s ‘Scurrying Towards Bethlehem’ is still another overview and set of proposals for Palestinian nationhood. Writing not long before the September attacks, Anderson concluded that ‘The dismal political history of the Arab world over the last half century gives little reason for thinking (a solution) is likely in the short-run’. He saw small chance then of the Bush Presidency shifting its stance, or of ‘the larger submission of the Middle East’ ceasing to prolong the West Bank paralysis. But since 11 September, something of a new start has been forced. Colin Powell’s State Department has found it intolerable to preside over another round of the interminable feud, while simultaneously struggling to concert its new anti-terrorist strategy. Is there no hope at all of this in turn leading to a more permanent answer?

The general point here is that a meaningful response to Holy Terror lies upon this plane: real undertakings in the upper air of a nation-state world, which is still striving for traditional goals upon the more fluid and ‘liberating’ terrain of the global market-place. As for the latter, the solid will go on melting into air, and bear the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour away with it. Its single unconscionable freedom — Free Trade, however naked and shameless — will continue to nestle, settle and establish connections everywhere, creating still more massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together, and despite itself enforcing the social and political constitutions required by the new empire of civil society. But the true ‘sorcerer of modernity’ conjures up the power of future worlds, not the nether worlds of antique faith and superstition.

Tom Nairn is Professor of Nationalism and Cultural Diversity at RMIT. His most recent book is After Britain.

This move to open power in the aftermath of the terrorist attack marks a new stage in a process of global extension of its explicit power and of the institutions — overwhelmingly the semi-open market — upon which they are based. The Gulf War was an intervention into a dispute wholly contained within the Arab world for the purposes of guaranteeing a compliant oil producer — that ‘Nintendo’ war, whose casualties John Pilger reminds us of, spawned the Iraq sanctions and the immense sufferings of the Iraqi population. The signing of the GATT and the establishment of the WTO exposed the South to Northern economic power in a way that spawned the Zapatista uprising and the new global movement that sprang from it. Prior to that the Carter government — as former advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski now admits — established and funded the mujhadeen before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and was intended to provoke just such a move (Nouvel Observateur 15.01.98). That act not only destroyed what had been a modernising society and launched upon the seas the asylum seekers our Navy is now firing upon, it created much of the extra capacity for the renewed global heroin trade — a crop the US encouraged the muj’ to develop as a funding base. Militant Islam was selectively encouraged by the US, but also served as a conduit for and expression of the rage felt by the Arab world and central Asia at the endless manipulations to which it had been subject by the West. With the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and the attack, it all came together in a double fireball. Such a movement — combining ‘national’ rage with a religious calling out and networks of money and power — has expanded far beyond the root causes which gave it a start. Militant religion has become a mode of production for suicide warriors. Initial grievances about international relations, Palestine and Iraq have given way to the pure desire to land a blow on the enemy, to take revenge for being no more than a target in the Nintendo conflict. As has been noted, the attack on the Twin Towers was a very late skirmish in the Gulf War. That such a movement began as a reaction to the same global racket which also spawned the new global movement (sometimes called anti-globalisation movement) has been used by the Right to portray the opponents of the US as a single entity. The reverse is the case — expanding US power is a single entity which attracts the resistance of groups with totally opposed worldviews.

That the Twin Towers and Pentagon attack was evil and ruthless goes without saying. Yet the political uses to which it has been put are manifold. The Right, both in the US and here, has sought to label the very act of reflecting upon global power as an act of ‘blaming the victim’ and US culture — as Ray Nichols notes — has slipped over into an unabashed triumphalism, endorsed by the President. The attack on civil liberties is occurring on multiple fronts. As Damien Lawson and Nehal Bhuta note, much of it over here was prepared for by the mockery the government made of separation of powers and rights during the Tampa affair. The process of extending executive power into every sphere of life can now continue. Since the overall cultural and political effect of an expanding market is to make executive power into the only type of state power that is real (the strong leader, the no-nonsense government) crises such as war-scares cut with the grain of the age.

Parallel to the attack on such civil liberties as exist is an attempt to conscript the public emotions in the interests of foreign policy. For many, such sympathy as one had for the victims of the attack and their relatives became increasingly tinged by bitterness that the lives of those living in New York came to be valued more highly de facto than the nameless, numberless dead of the South. But as with the death of Princess Diana — which acted as a dress rehearsal for this sort of thing — reason and emotion came to be deemed mutually exclusive, and cleaving to the former an act of disloyalty. The implicit proposition — that the degree of one’s sympathy should be influenced by the spectacular character of the event or the number of cable channels covering it — is truly immoral. Nevertheless, it has become the official attitude. As Douglas McQueen-Thomson notes this is a war as constituted in language as any war that ever occurred, yet to ask the question of what a ‘war on terrorism’ really means is to invite the charge of ‘appeaser’. The idea is meaningless and the fact that various government and military figures talking about it being a ten, thirty or hundred years’ war indicates its true character. It is a blank cheque that the US and its closest allies — our government included — are writing themselves to give US power an unlimited pretext to abuse the sovereignty of other peoples in the name of protecting its own. It is a unilateral abolition of other people’s borders at the same time as one’s own are made into fortress walls. Our government is also dipping its toe in this water with the manufactured refugee ‘crisis’. Fortress Australia is being sandbagged with places such as Nauru whose independence has been de facto abolished using the leverage of their bankruptcy. The US has now abandoned any distinction between private terror organisations and the states within which they are located, yet this too will be selective. Pakistan continues to host Kashmiri terrorists, autonomous Kosovo, Albanian ones. Both may go quiet for a while, but only as a tactical maneouvre. The ruling as to who is in and out of the war will be as capricious and partial as the old freedom fighter–terrorist distinction.

The shocking nature of the Twin Towers attack has given the exercise of American power a new domestic strength. A peace movement has begun, but many middle of the road liberals who would support, say, an end to sanctions against Iraq, will find themselves lining up with the US government. As Kimberley Serca notes, the most high profile ‘left’ figure to line up with US power has been Christopher Hitchens who has figured the Taliban–bin Laden nexus as ‘Islamic fascists’ in a conscious recall of the popular front of the 1930s, but he is only the most eloquent of many who would have a similar disposition. Nor can one retreat into any easy blanket pacifism on this issue. Mohammed Atta and his cohorts were clearly acting as a self-contained group who had planned the attack over several years. Yet it also seems likely that they were partially funded and mentored by bin Laden’s Al-Qaida group — and it is clear that Al-Qaida is thoroughly intertwined with the Taliban — one of bin Laden’s wives is the daughter of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Now that bin Laden has replied to US actions with the promise of new attacks on the US mainland and a call to the Muslim world to launch war on the US, there is clearly scope for some legitimised US action. One could put it another way — the US now has the sovereign enemy it needed for a war. It may soon have many others.

The moral impossibility of supporting the war as it is being conducted is clear, even for those of us who are not pacifists. The bombing of civilian populations is unacceptable in any circumstances other than as defence against total attack by a whole sovereign power and this has clearly not occurred in the case of desperate Afghanistan. The Taliban’s hosting of bin Laden would have given the US the right to call on a UN force to bring him to an international court of justice — had, as Andy Butfoy notes, the US not embarked on an unprecedented effort to destroy international authority in recent months and years — but it no more sanctions an attack on the whole society than would Cuban exile raids on Havana give Castro an excuse to strike at the United States.

The issues of ‘host’, ‘sponsorship’ and ‘territory’ are far more complex than it would be convenient for the US government to admit. Yet looking at the still smoking hole in Manhattan and a city whose communal life has become dominated by funerals the question comes back at the nascent peace movement: what is to be done about terror?

The question cannot be ducked but that does not mean it needs to be accepted in those terms, either in principle or in practice. Principle first. The current and ongoing role of the US in the global South makes it morally impossible to line up with. Palestine and Iraq are the two causes which serve as the pretext for bin Laden’s activities, yet the more serious crime has been the US government’s active and zealous enforcement of the IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs and the WTO provisions which allow for the transfer of wealth from South to North. The human cost of this process in unnecessary suffering and cultural destruction over the last twenty years dwarfs anything thrown up by the fascism, Nazism, Stalinism or first-wave colonialism in the rest of the twentieth century. It is done by bankers and bureaucrats who are explicitly aware of its human cost. It is presented as an inevitable consequence of development and globalisation, but there are humane alternatives available, even within the development paradigm — most notably a global protection of labour rights to organise and global support of convivial technology and financing (small-scale banking) — so the moral–political choice is real. The dead are not shot or exploded, they die — as did most of those in the Gulag — through overwork, malnutrition and preventable disease. The universality of the neoliberal market gulag — it will take anyone as raw material — obscures the common roots it has with the more explicit tyrannies. The horror of the Twin Towers attack and the fact that its agents were devoted believers in a premodern form of religion that had nothing to say about this dimension of America’s global role has led many commentators to call criticism of the US hackneyed or irrelevant — as if it were a fashion for less volatile times. The role of the US does not in any way justify the Twin Towers attack or anything like it by any organisation, but that is not at issue. The issue is whether the Left can morally line up with the state, as the British Left could in September 1939. The answer here is that, unequivocally, it cannot.

The dilemma of the American Left in these circumstances is similar to the dilemma of an anti-Nazi German in WW2. In retrospect resistance to one’s own government was the only moral course of action — at ground zero, facing the British, French and Soviets without illusion of their magnanimity would have made this course of action somewhat less shiningly clear. As the US gets deeper into the war and the possibility of uprising in Pakistan or elsewhere, or the use of chemical or biological weapons, or a dozen other scenarios become more plausible, the dilemma for the American peace movement will deepen. But here the practical buttresses the principle. There is no path to security for the US public through the war on terrorism.

The degree to which the American attack on central Asia will destabilise various Arab regimes is unknowable. At the end of WW2 Orwell argued that a third world war would be preferable to a nuclear stalemate, as the latter would cement a power system that could last indefinitely. The prospect of Arab uprising in a number of states is looked upon by many with a similar uneasy ambivalence, since the alternative is virtually uncontested US power with the tang of easy victory in its nostrils. Yet the record of the sort of groups that could make such an uprising, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, are blood-chilling (as it should be noted is the virulent anti-semitism and Hitler-worship which disfigures some of the Arab press). But such groups will be rubbing their hands with delight as the US pushes increasing numbers of Arab and central Asian peoples to a fundamental solidarity.

For Australians the call to solidarity with the US comes on several grounds — that the states of the world have to defend themselves against free-floating terror; that bin Laden and his organisation want to dominate the world and impose a particular form of shar’ia; that solidarity should be based on cultural and historical connection. The last of these has no validity whatsoever — since there is no sign that the US would come unequivocally to our aid in the face of threats to us from any other powers. One week after the Howard Government signed a blank cheque of support to the US government, Congress signed its own blank cheque — in the form of an unprecedentedly huge amount of subsidies to American farmers. This further example of free trade globally/protect locally is a measure of our special relationship.

Nor has the second of these propositions been established. Bin Laden has expressed a desire to destroy America, but mainly because America is — as he sees it — actively humiliating and oppressing the Muslim world. His concerns are overwhelmingly with the ‘purity’ of that world. Those who align themselves unquestioningly with the US will unnecessarily make themselves a target. Australia’s relative insignificance should, in this respect, be a source of security, not talked away.

But it is the first of these propositions — lining up with the state (or a coalition of states) against free-floating terror — that is the skein from which power and positions are currently unravelling. The ‘war on terror’ has thematised the big T, the twentieth century’s shadow, as its enduring enemy yet it is, as always, unlicensed terror that is subject to eradication. Alluding to some of the themes explored here by Angela Mitropoulos we can say that it is not violence itself but legitimacy, sovereignty that is in question.

Terror — not merely violence — is central to the question of the state and power. Violence is graded and allocated to citizens to varying degrees from sport to self-defence to private security. Civil life is contoured with different degrees of violence. Terror is held to be the preserve of the state alone. Private use of it tears a hole in the fabric of power and the rip can extend indefinitely. Though bound up with warfare from the earliest times, modern terror begins when the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations — the scorched earth policy of Roman, Tartar, Inca and Conquistador alike — shifts to the killing of randomly chosen representatives of a social group. The technique comes to fruition in the European empires (Captain Arthur Phillip’s capture and execution of six Aborigines, rather than an entire group, as punishment for raids for example). Terror installs death and power at the heart of life, rather than simply killing. The terrifying Other is then permanently at home in the psyche of the terrorised, and autonomously polices them. What came to be called terrorism in the nineteenth century — especially as practised by Russian radicals — we now know as assassination, since the principal target was the Tsar. He was targetted not merely as the symbolic personification of the state, but as its actual keystone, whose shattering would cause a collapse of the whole structure.

The intertwining of unlicensed terror and technology pushed the activity into the centre of Western political life and fears — as measured by two classics of turn of the century literature, Conrad’s Secret Agent and Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men. (The use of dynamite to dispatch one Tsar and US President McKinley so shocked its inventor Alfred Nobel that he invented the peace prize to make amends.) Terror thus haunted the imagination of civil society as the other side of technology — even though the actual risk it presented was vanishingly small. Three innovations transformed it into a weapon of unparalleled effectiveness. In 1916 IRA leader Michael Collins moved from a guerrilla strategy to one of urban terror in which enemy figures targetted were not the leaders — whose identity and sense of self was bound up with enforcing British rule — but the small-fry. British informers, sycophants and camp followers were killed for no reason other than being who they were — for precisely the fact that their particular death would make little real difference. Terror was thus pushed towards a general condition. Anyone pro-British was a combatant. Collins’s strategy was the template for modern terror and of such success that one of the next innovators took the names of the IRA leader as a codename — Michael for Yitzak Shamir. Shamir, with Menachim Begin, developed a strategy of outrage with the Irgun and the Lehi groups during the fight to establish Israel in 1948, employing not only ethnic cleansing (the massacre of the Palestinian village of Dair Yassen) but also excluded middle — the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, UN negotiator for the mandate — the extension of the definition of combatants (the dead in the blown-up King David Hotel included numerous non-military stenographers and office staff) and the pornography of death (the execution/murder of two British sergeants was filmed and the film delivered to Mandate authorities). The tactics outraged the mainstream Zionist armed group the Haganah, and they exterminated most such groups. To little effect — the British quit the mandate before a two-state solution could be negotiated, which had been the Irgun’s aim. Begin’s insight was that terror could live off the horror of its friends as much as its enemies — that it relentlessly and irresistably shifts the ground of politics, that anyone ruthless and desperate enough to use it will be rewarded — in Ireland and Israel’s case with statehood. When George Habash and Wadi Hadid of the PFLP defined all Israelis as combatants by virtue of their nationhood and the Japanese Red Army put this into practice at Lod Airport they effectively completed terror’s universalisation.

A grisly history, yet mild compared with the history of state terror — whether Red or White in 1917, the Nazis at Guernica, or the bombing of Cambodia. Non-state terror looms large on the social psychological horizon because it is purely rogue — not only is it unattached to any form of other power, it is resorted to when that power seems most absent, when the enemy seems all powerful. The attack on the Twin Towers took terror further into the territory of everyday life by its use of spectacle and icons. The venerable avant-guardist Karl-Heinze Stockhausen called it the ultimate piece of performance art. He was saying honestly what media outlets were acknowledging through their acts. Three days after the event, the US government had to ask the networks to stop playing the multiply angled footage of the event.

People can’t look at terror, but they can’t look away from it. It achieves the total presence in an enemy society, that the enemy assumes in the society of the terrorist. It turns everyday life against itself and reminds people that they are, at the bottom of it all, pure carbon to be blown apart at the will of the Other. The state’s great propaganda victory of this century has been to convince people that terror in uniform is not terror at all.

For the most part, this judgement has hinged upon the bombing of civilian populations. Prior to the 1930s this act was seen as the ultimate barbarity of the burgeoning doctrine of ‘total war’. Hitler’s use of it in Spain and Mussolini’s in Ethiopia deepened that identification, but it was also used by the British in Afghanistan, of all places. Churchill, who had been an enthusiastic proponent of both civilian bombing and the use of gas was the prime mover behind Britain’s WW2 practice of carpet bombing whole cities. At the time it was a major moral issue, with many Americans arguing that the practice rendered the UK morally equivalent to the Nazis, and obliged people of conscience to become conscientious objectors. Dozens of war movies have normalised the strategy as part of a general reinterpretation of the war as a crusade against the Holocaust —falsely of course. About the only part of the Nazi empire the Allies didn’t bomb was the rail lines to the camps. The WW2 model has served as the ground for the moral division between state and non-state terror ever since. The victims of terror fade to invisibility beneath the shadow of the bombers. I suspect I am not the only one who has had dismaying conversations with good-hearted friends willing to see ordinary Afghan people blown to pieces in their name — in order to make the world a place where civilians are not exposed to random airborne death.

The terror unleashed on 11 September has been as effective as any in history because of the unprecedented degree to which people’s lives are dependent on the technologies which have been turned against them. Whatever governments may say people know that hypermodernity is inherently indefensible. The current anthrax scare in the US is an indication of the widespread awareness that a further attack may produce casualties of five rather than four figures. Echoing a theme picked up by Paul James, it is the new willingness of people to achieve such destruction with their own bodies that makes most vulnerable the uniquely disembodied power structures of contemporary globalisation. And any attempt to lock down global society in the manner in which Israel is locked down would slow the velocity of global capitalism to a degree disastrous to its smooth working. As John Hinkson notes, the current set up is balanced precariously on hitherto unimaginable systemic risk, as expressed in contemporary insurance and banking funds. Confidence is as much a target as buildings.

The people of the United States wonder if life will ever be normal again. Yet for many across the world the presence of sudden death — albeit in a less spectacular form — is normality, and it was surely a part of the terrorists’ intention to bring this fact home to the American people.

The people they purport to avenge — the Palestinians and Iraqis — face a more mundane but no less lethal annihilation. When a globalising power has the capacity to visit such annihilation on people, such totalitarian destruction, it produces total opposition — those who believe they have no choice but to die fighting in order to live. Thirty years ago Arab resistance was expressed through the movements of nationalism and Marxism. Both these have been supplanted by a militant form of Islam which offers a transcendental, a spiritual, grounding for struggle that those other movements could only partially achieve. Thirty years ago suicide bombers were a rarity — now there are hundreds. Push hard enough and there will be suicide societies whose resistance is total. A form of Islam may steel such people for certain death, but that is not so different from the many people who have faced virtually certain death because they felt that they had no alternative that would still allow them to be a human being. The Vietcong are one example; the British crews of WW2 bomber command — the first suicide bombers, with virtually no chance of surviving a tour of duty — are another. Refusing to endorse someone’s ruthless disdain for the innocent is one thing; to believe, as many conservative pundits believe, that analysing the motives and contexts from which such people work is tantamount to dishonouring the dead is foolishness distilled. As Geoff Sharp notes, the fundamentalism of the terrorists has been called out by a fundamentalism inherent in the US version of globalisation itself — the relentless manner in which it seeks to make over all existing ways of life in its own image under the brand of ‘choice’.

The need to guard the security of hi-tech globalisation has made it inevitable that the liberal political sphere would come under pressure sooner or later. Attempts to extinguish it altogether will be a feature of the years to come, especially if the conflicts now occurring slide towards a more comprehensive global war. The peace movement that has now begun across the world has sprung in part from the global social movement that has rocked the cities of the world from Seattle to Melbourne to Genoa. In Australia it has also had confluence from the refugee action movement, to create a broad campaign based on expanding the principle that recent events have been only the most visible aspect of a rising global conflict. Such a conflict will only be resolved through genuine global justice, which will only come from a global movement above and beyond the official national and international bodies. Whatever is to come will be determined in part by our resolute actions, and anything is possible. We cannot know whether the best or the worst, reconciliation or destruction, will occur, but we can say for certain that whatever it is, it will be mutual.

Guy Rundle is co-editor of Arena Magazine.

In the US capital a national cathedral, technically Episcopalian, sits close by the heart of the secular state. In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the twin towers it was the site of a cultural mobilisation.

Everyone was there. In the very early morning, Australian time, the service was relayed by the BBC. It commenced by those present joining in a deeply resonant hymn:

O God our help in ages past
Our hope for years to come
Our shelter from the stormy blast
And our eternal home.

In the first half of the service there were readings by Jewish, Muslim and Christian figures. The cultural diversity of the United States was being actively recognised as mourning was grafted to combative resolution. All that was set within the generous spirit of the universal ideals which those great religions can invoke.

In this context these human ideals spoke to self-recognition. That is, to the self-understanding of a people who, believing that they live by these values, were now reaching out for a sense of common purpose which could sustain them in a protracted struggle. They were people who, taking for granted that this was a simple matter of the violation of their way of life, cried out for justice.

As the service ended and religious devotion receded before a return to the mundane world, those present joined again, this time in a hymn whose role was predominantly secular. With the same fervour as they appealed to the God of their ‘eternal home’, they now intoned ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. It was penned in 1861, during the American civil war, its author being inspired by the sight of soldiers at drill.

So much for a certain fusion of religious commitment, cultural diversity and state policies directed towards the mobilisation of the will and conscience of the nation.

In the more mundane world of imperial power, its complement is the rhetoric of freedom. This rhetoric taps back into the notion of freedom of conscience, which is so central to a universalising ethic. But in the Bush version, freedom of choice is the main accent. The choices, moreover, are material ones: choices in the market, consumption choices, all set within a crudely materialist vision of life and ratified by the rhetoric of democracy. But about that, there is no real choice on offer. The issue of how we are to be governed, to what ends, and with what consequences for the other peoples of the world, is yet to move to the centre of public conscience. Ideal values sanctify a wider culture of crude materialism and self-gratification which ignores its consequences in the wider world.

After the break-up of colonialism, after fifty years of Cold War, the nations which see themselves as developed, along with transnational corporations and global networks of high-tech and financial personnel, have consolidated a new inequality. More significantly, that inequality carries with it a deeper impoverishment of ways of living among both rich and poor.

It calls us to an order of life which has nothing in common with the framing values of the great religions or the generous humanism of certain secular currents in modernity. It proclaims their values, yet via the freedom of conscience, free choice in the market place and thimble illusion, it actually undermines them.

In the developed heartlands, masses of people are deeply confused and increasingly desperate. Many turn to the needle, a few to the bomb. Among the ‘less developed’ societies the situation is more urgently tragic. It is not merely that many millions are in dire want or ravaged by epidemics for which the only remedies are at ruling market prices. Whole economies, with their traditional ways of life, are being sucked dry by the exploitative ravages of one particular version of globalisation. That is to say, this present version of globalisation is structured to the advantage of the new rich, set within the new economy.

Equally important is the way in which life is conducted within newly ascendant social forms; these, by lending a distant and abstract quality to the fate of others, reinforce the certitudes that bind the new elites to their own primarily secular version of fundamentalism.

George Bush is probably only half right. A ‘war’ could go on for many years. But what kind of war will this be? When the small numbers he seeks to exterminate merge with whole populations, just where is the enemy? What will be the target? If a high-tech onslaught is directed against a whole population which cannot hit back in the same mode, would that be an act of war? Wouldn’t massacre be a more apt description? And would others, fearing the same fate, be likely to hit back by every possible means?

The problem with descriptions like ‘war’ and ‘terrorism’ is that they focus attention only on the surface phenomena of world politics and global change. They obscure the vast transition taking place in the ways of life of peoples all over the world. The world of intellectually grounded high tech, and of image-mediated sociality at a distance is reaching out to absorb and undermine an older world of labour, community and mutual presence. Within this epochal transformation the forms of conflict also change. War begins to transmute into massacre; the sense of outraged oppression can readily move on towards cataclysmic acts of terror against civilian populations.

The crucial issue is to begin to clarify and act within a perspective which challenges both fundamentalisms. We need an approach that challenges the dominance of the universal market as it now reaches out to transform every sphere of life. Similarly, it is an approach which challenges its counterpart: the bitterly outraged way of understanding which, because it invests itself in a just God, can act with a total self-righteousness which excludes any deeper reflection. It is this response which feeds the epithets ‘terrorist’ and ‘fanactic’, so that the labels help to obscure the underlying social transformation and the new roots of ignorance and oppression.

This transformation cannot be reduced to the interplay of economic interests. These interests should be seen as secondary, in spite of their enormous pull and pressure, both in the reconstruction of work and in extending the reach of the global market.

While this whole process of the re-ordering of social life is widely understood as the triumph of capitalism, it is also a shift in the priority of different forms of social life: of different ways of being present to and absent from others. It is a shift in the social bond, mediated in the first instance by the given powers of our species — to touch, to see and to speak with others in the flesh; in the second instance, as mediated by abstract technologies, the remaking of our very being, whether by the chip, the gene or the technological reconstruction of life more generally, we pass over into a world of mere interconnection.

These are issues which go far beyond conventional notions of class, status and power as the elements of social structures. They point to the ways in which the power of the intellect, expressed in abstract ways of addressing both the material and social world, are displacing the work of the hand and our immediate presence to each other, in the flesh.

In the short run this accelerating shift in the mode of human existence is often outside the realm of the public imagination. Within the corporate world, among the intellectually trained personnel, and within the realm of government, it is as if the basic arrangements of modernity have remained unchanged. They appear merely to have been supercharged so that the world of capital has now directly encompassed the work of the intellect. It is even as if a universalised mode of being is in prospect. The promise is that limitations of consumption, of gender, even of mortality can be overcome, if not quite today then by way of a treadmill of tomorrows.

This basic transition could not proceed without a radical shift in the social role of intellectual work. The predominance of the technosciences and their direct incorporation by commodity exchange is the central feature in the universalising outreach market. Throughout the modern period it expanded within and was limited to a degree by encompassing values. At first by Christian values; later they were joined by the humanist currents which branched out from Christian orthodoxies. Yet now, as the market reframes every sphere of life, previous boundaries are erased. Embedded as life is in the assumptions of a universal market, there is no ready place for a different perspective to stand.

Instead, perhaps for a whole generation to come, a new fetishism is set in place. It is a fundamentalism that carries a transcendental attitude and practice both secular and radically imperative. It presents itself to its carriers everywhere as inevitable, yet increasingly it stirs an inarticulate malaise. Just what does the future hold for our children and for us?

This sense of foreboding arises from the new reality in which, far more than ever before, life is carried on at two levels. On the one hand there is the world of the intellectually related practice, carried on at a distance. It is a world which celebrates its own ascendancy and has only the most limited insight into that other ‘less developed’ world with which it co-exists and from which it seeks to take its departure.

How long will it take to bring these issues into the realm of active public discussion? Is it conceivable that one generation will be sufficient time for the public conscience to respond to the challenge which now faces us as a species? The United States may have been the specific target of this attack, but the whole way of living that the market spawns is at issue.

After modernity the role of religion is a far more residual aspect of such a way of life. While it speaks with the voice of a universal ethic, it does not actively address the root cause, in our times, of the violation of that ethic — the greed, the individualism, the proclivity to treat our fellow beings as objects integral with the structure and mode of operation of a market. The recent gathering at the national cathedral in Washington was a case in point. Its essence was to join the precepts of a universal ethic to the battle hymn of the republic of greed. Yet the citizens of the United States, even some of its leaders, are far from seeing or intending this conjunction. Within their immediate circles of life they are insulated from the broader consequences of their way of life. They have yet to pause and ask themselves whether, in some way, they may have contributed to the onslaught which has wounded them so deeply. When that time comes, recognition of the harsh reality of the republic of greed will be the real test of their deeper values.

The over-riding impulse to now wage war should not, however, obscure the fact that for millennia,the great religions have been a primary source of efforts to interpret our being and to generalise ethical norms which might guide common life. Although compromised through history by their conjunction with the powers, in general terms they signify the need for institutions which can stand back from the pressures of everyday life and call people to an interpretive overview.

They are an expression of the role of the interpretive, as distinct from the technoscientific intellectual in his or her relation to the pulse of everyday life. For the present the latter is captive to a market-driven fundamentalism.

The humanities, meanwhile, are both under intense pressure within their institutions and characteristically driven by the narrowing impulse of the career, rather than by ‘the calling’ to contribute to an overview.

Yet the resources to call for a different way forward than the strike and counter-strike of fundamentalism, remain strong. Given a build-up of demand from an insistent public, yes, a ‘peace movement’ in the immediate circumstances is an urgent first step. But more than that is required. The United Nations as currently corralled by the United States will not do. What is needed is a movement with roots in every country among the many millions of people ready to stand up and act for truth and reconciliation. This will require exceptional dedication and prolonged endeavour. The interchange which embraced the elementally opposed groupings in post-apartheid South Africa is something of a model. Any passage to a shared truth, then on to reconciliation and even to justice as well would be long and difficult. Yet the minimum demand must be that the two fundamentalisms sit down among the growing number of responsible people. That is to say, citizens of every country who see that for the common good, the wider understanding of the roots of the new inequality is the urgent problem.

The world of extended interchange and interconnection has been an indispensable feature of every civilisation, just as the parochial worlds of direct presence in which people conduct much of their daily lives have been. When the relation between these forms of life is undergoing a basic change, public awareness is slow to respond to the need for radically new perspectives. Now, when the tragedy and the suddenness of the twin towers has awakened people to what could become their common fate, the time remains to think and to act differently.

Geoff Sharp is Arena Publications General Editor.

‘In Genoa, we have seen the end of political mediation between institutions and movements’, wrote Luca Casarina in Il Manifesto. Casarina, spokesperson of the north-eastern social centres and part of the Genoa Social Forum, was referring to talks held prior to the protests between the GSF and the government, after which it was assumed that the police would not use extreme, let alone lethal, force. Afterwards, around thirty protesters were in intensive care, and one was dead. Throughout Europe, both before and after the protests, people were hunted down and arrested, or simply beaten, on suspicion of being part of the anti-G8 demonstrations. Casarina later described those talks as a ‘trap’ — the mirage of a space in which negotiations on the limits of engagement might occur and bind the participants, the existence of, as he terms it, a ‘pact’. In announcing the end of mediation, Casarina could (perhaps should) have been speaking of a moment that has occurred at each successive anti-summit protest since the J18 protests against the G8 Summit in 1998. The phrase ‘since Genoa’ signals ‘the end of mediation’ made irrefutable, experienced as a shared event — even as it was a long time, perhaps a century, in the making.

Civil society

In another register, the end of mediation is also the end of ‘civil society’, where ‘civil society’ is defined as the terrain upon which the relations between the state and ‘its’ populations are mediated through various institutional forms: unions, parties, and so on. But mediation, in order to be other than simulation presupposes an effectively sovereign state; one that is capable of mediating between and irreducible to the institutions of ‘civil society’ — hence the motif of the state as ‘umpire’. A sovereign state is one which stands above and outside the divisions of ‘civil society’, composed in turn of fixed, caste-like identities — and for a time, capital and labour composed as identities — whom the sovereign bestows with privileges, or not. In other words, a sovereign state has its subjects. It is monarchical in form and derivation: power is organised hierarchically. This ‘over and above’ capital, then, is the precondition of civil society and thereby the possibility of mediation.

Today there is much talk about ‘the decline of sovereignty’, of the supposed inability of the (nation-)state to counter the interests of something called global capital, as if there is no other way for the (nation-)state to exist and exert its power other than in a sovereign fashion, above all (and) outside of capital, as a distinct subject. This supposes that the absence of sovereign power is the absence of state power per se.

The reverse is the case. The decline of sovereignty implies a state that is emphatically repressive and whose power proceeds and is organised immanently, as morality rather than politics. This is why, for instance, in Genoa, Seattle and Melbourne, any reputed negotiations between protesters and the state could never arrive at something like a ‘pact’, but were a prelude to the use of batons, tear gas and bullets. To put it another way: the ‘social pact’ gives way to ‘mutual obligation’ — a one-way, moralising edict that seeks to re-establish immanent control (i.e. self-policing) of dissent while licensing state violence as virtuous.

The republican state takes its cue from the emergence of the ‘free labourer’ and the techniques of control that are adequate to it, such as the internalisation of the command to work as an ‘ethic’. There is no such thing as a fully accomplished form of the republican state — it is unstable, oscillating between sovereignty and democracy, or majestic sovereignty and announcements of the ‘sovereignty’ of ‘the people’. Its juridical constituents are, initially, subjects without subjection and, increasingly, citizens inscribed with rights and duties. The economic analogue of citizenship is none other than the commodity, where equality and difference are expressed in quantitative terms. Citizenship relegates qualitative differences to the private realm of ‘taste’, just as the market does.

Simulations

Attempts to revive sovereignty, mediation and the institutions of civil society, in the absence of their ability to deliver something like an actual ‘pact’, results in a decidedly one-sided restoration. The power of the sovereign to be above the law becomes the sovereign exemption as norm, in other words, the abolition of the rule of law. (Hence the conduct of border policing, the camps and migration policy generally). Attempts at mediation between institutions and movements give effect only to control and the re-emergence of mediation in a ghoulish manner.

And so, PR companies are hired by the World Economic Forum (and the G8) to demand that protesters ‘not use violence’ while the government drafts a bill that would legalise the use of the military in situations of civil conflict (and the Carabinieri shoot to kill). Interestingly, the Dutch police are organising an international conference entitled, ‘Global Civil Society, Maintaining Public Order’ at which police from Australia, the US and Europe will — it is advertised — sit down with invited ‘representatives’ of ‘the global civil society’ to plan what is required to maintain global order. This is how ‘civil society’ exists today: as an invitation-only simulation in the service of ‘law and order’.

Exodus

Struggle by no means disappears merely because long-standing figurations do. It reappears in ways that are more adequate, or simply as experiments in new ways of effectiveness. In a situation which promises only repression what is at stake is the displacement of the question of figuration (the fixed form of the subject as a discrete entity) by the question of mobility and of escape. The question of ‘who’ is replaced by the question of ‘how’ or, as graffiti on Crown Casino declared, ‘How we struggle is the struggle’.

These new possibilities were manifested during the S11 events in Melbourne. Far from being a simple doctrinal difference during S11 between the Leninists of the Alliance (since reformed into the Socialist Alliance for electoral purposes) and others in the Autonomous Web of Liberation, the difference between ‘who’ and ‘how’ was always based on the prior question of composition and determined by it. The former tried to accomplish a passage from Keatingesque corporatism to sovereignty, a recombination of the Many (redefined as discrete subjectivities) into the One, chiefly through the drafting of programmes and demands. The latter maintained a strict indifference to doctrinal disputes that might give effect to the assertion of univocality, of hierarchy and therefore of the possibility of mediation. ‘Dessert capital, dessert the state’ was much more than an incitement to cream-pie the powerful. Organisational forms, strategies also, are not a matter of planning or the force of will, but of composition — organisational forms are passages from this point.

Globalisation

There is no ‘anti-globalisation movement’ that assembled to protest at S11 (or at the other summit protests) — no movement, singular; and barely anything resembling a movement that is anti-globalist in political perspective. Instead there were different networks, groups and sometimes just groups of friends who gathered to protest for various, often contrary, reasons. Moreover, the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ was a fiction assembled on the terrain of mediation. Whether announced by determined anti-globalist lobbyists such as the International Forum on Globalisation, or repeated by archaic opportunists such as the International Socialist Organisation, the ‘anti-globalisation’ label was a necessary moment in asserting that one was at the helm of said movement and could therefore speak (to the media) and mediate on its behalf. Without a label that made it seem as if there was one set of aims shared by protesters, any claims to mediation would fall flat. The lobbyists would not be granted a seat at the table, as it were; and the Leninists could not assert their claim to be the vanguard of something that, prior to S11, they had related to only in its most mediated (or better: televisual) forms.

It should be no surprise, then, that some are confused by the fact that the no border networks emerged in Australia at S11. When Paul James writes, in response to three articles which seek to critique the very notion and practice of migration controls, that he agrees with ‘the anti-globalist critique of capitalism’, and wishes to ‘turn that critique back on the no border advocates’, I admit to being a little confused as to his assumption that either Maksimovic (Arena Magazine No. 52), Bhuta and Costello (Arena Magazine No. 53) or my piece in the ‘Rogue States’ reader is anti-globalist. He could not have been more mistaken.

As regards form, if not always content, the anti-summit protests were globalised and globalising protests, occurring on the terrain of a global circulation of struggles and precepts that is unprecedented in scope and magnitude. Moreover, pro-migration actions have always been a significant part of the anti-summit protests, at both anti-WEF protests (in 1999 in the EU and Melbourne in 2000), and at both anti-G8 protests (J18 in 1998 and Genoa in 2001). The exception to this is Seattle and the anti-WTO protests, where it was more a case of the overwhelming resources brought to bear, with the alliance between Ralph Nader and Patrick Buchanan given more credit than the politics of the anti-sweatshop and anti-third world debt campaigners without whom there would have been no blockade. But this should be a source of amusement rather than an uncritical repetition. Why would anyone in the US complain about the supposed decline of ‘American sovereignty’? For my part, I have never been persuaded that a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of the nation is not an updated version of national socialism, reconfigured in the manner of Patrick Buchanan (or Pauline Hanson) as a multicultural defence of the inherent separateness of authentic ‘cultures’ — that is as an upbeat global apartheid.

Civilisation

‘Civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ are two sides of the same construct, the vocabulary of an initial encounter and conflict between empires and what remained ‘outside’ but was in the process of being colonised by them. In time, this distinction was replaced by that of ‘third’ and ‘first’ worlds, no longer an outside of empires but a geopolitical distinction created by a bipolar war that was proxied onto and constitutive of the ‘third world’. This war was, in the main, conducted over the seizure and flows of a globally produced surplus. Here, the ‘third world’ becomes characterised by a permanent state of war, a ‘barbarism’ that was the necessary and inseparable counterpart of civilisation. The civilisation of the ‘first world’ was funded on the basis of this distinction, allowing for an increasing level of debt and the deferral of debt repayments so as to fund the results of mediation, of civil society.

But today, the distinction between ‘third’ and ‘first’ worlds has been traversed by decades of struggle marked by the globalisation of nation-states as a prelude to the enclosure of land and an accompanying, unprecedented flight from the ‘third’ to the ‘first’ world. In other words, the distinction was traversed by the globalisation of wage labour, where capital was subsequently globalised not as a subject, but as an intrinsic element of sociality, as the means by which people are related to each other and to life itself.

Fortresses

What is usually defined as the globalisation of capital (which in institutional terms consists of the first tentative formation of only some of the apparatuses of a global state) is a response to this globalisation of labour that was unleashed by the end of the Cold War. Since 1989, there have been attempts to secure a level of political, military, juridical and, not least, moral authority that corresponds to, and is capable of delimiting and conditioning the movements of people. In particular, this is a question of ensuring that people move only as labour, as commodities on the world (labour) market; and by implication that if they do not they are ‘excluded’ as ‘surplus populations’. So, far from being a mere instance of hypocrisy, the paradoxical deregulation of capital movements and the re-regulation of the movements of people since the early 1990s is an abiding mark of the peculiarity of the commodity called labour-power. This is why, contrary to a rather naive view of border controls, the border is both porous and exclusionary at the same time. Likewise immigration controls recreate the segmentations of the global labour market in the face of a globalised proletariat that, unlike every other commodity, strives toward equality as a political rather than a merely quantifiable concept. Likewise, they reinstate the principle that movement must be the movement of commodities (or capital), conducted as tourism, ‘guest work’ and the like. In this, the boundaries of citizenship serve to actively create the lowest rungs of the labour market as well as to establish the concentration camps where those deemed ‘surplus’ to production are relegated, whether in Australia or in Pakistan, and always treated as deserters. Today, it is a stark choice, but hardly an abstract one: either open the borders or resort to more lethal, exceptional means to halt the movements of people as human beings.

Neo-liberalism does not have a vision of a borderless world. It has a vision of a world that is capitalist, where borders exist or do not at those points where they are necessary. If Microsoft deploys images of a borderless world, it does so in order to take up desires that already exist, with a twist: the concealment of bodies. Therefore, fortresses are the order of the day — from ‘Fortress Australia’ to the barbed wire citadels of the various summit meetings. What is at stake here is whether or not bodies might be arranged or move as something other than factors of production or commodities in circulation, as something more and other than things. ‘Since Genoa’, and ‘since the Tampa’. Now this is the question.

Angela Mitropoulos is a Melbourne-based writer and activist.

What is missing from the current critique of Australia’s border policies is an affirmation of people’s freedom of movement. Distinctions between ‘non-genuine’ and ‘bona fide’ refugees, much like the arbitrary dichotomy between those who arrive by boat or air, are made in order to reinforce a sense of security. Clinging to this distinction signals that our borders are worth protecting and that the people allowed in are worthy. In other words, we are discerning, we have standards for how much and precisely what kind of suffering we expect people to have gone through in order to seek asylum. If you just work for slave wages and in slave conditions (the infamous case being that of Nike workers in Indonesia), that just doesn’t cut the mustard.

The absurdity of fearing the incursion of Australia’s borders by ‘floods’ of ‘boat people’ seems to escape many, considering the whole country is an island and only the determined few are able to cross quite often dangerous seas — there were over 350 deaths off the coast last year.

At its core, the plight of asylum seekers is not separable from the issue of the artificiality and arbitrariness of borders. Whilst the nation-state is a historically recent phenomenon, and whilst pretty much everyone on the Left considers themselves to be internationalist, few are prepared to argue the case for the abolition of borders. Of course that is the ideal, they would argue, but ‘the people’ (always rhetorically invoked and nationally constructed) aren’t ‘ready’ to hear of it.

And yet, never before has there been so much evidence of capital’s need to draw the lines that guard the rich from the poor, of the segregation of everyone according to their economic status. We are consistently told that globalisation is inevitable and yet, somehow, the equally inevitable response of people to resist its effects, to break out of the ghettos it creates, is considered criminal. Hence a person’s very existence can be branded ‘illegal’.

The extent of the exploitation of labour in most countries is well documented, as is capital’s penchant for threatening to relocate, thus providing the perfect excuse for governments to drive down wages, cut business taxation and weaken environmental standards. Borders present the only way this strategy is tenable, for if workers could move from country to country, choosing where and how they live and work, no one would be willing to settle for $2 per hour. At the moment, it is only the most desperate and needy that risk their lives attempting to cross borders, but as the disparity between rich and poor grows, more and more people will be left with nothing to lose.

So the borders between rich and poor are zealously guarded, resulting most recently in the tripling of the defence budget allocated to coastal guards around Australia. Richer countries have always regulated the flow of asylum seekers and determined the basis for legitimacy of claims for refuge, largely through being the principal financial backers and main policy makers of the UN’s High Commission on Refugees. In this way, they have ensured that many asylum seekers spend years inside transit camps on the border of or inside the country they are fleeing, and anyone with less than full legal citizenship rights is available for dangerous and underpaid work (www.antimedia.net/xborder/). The recent advent of the concept of a ‘safe third country’, which allows asylum seekers to be forcibly returned to a country they passed though on their way to their eventual destination, results in their being shuffled from country to country until they are eventually deported back to where they fled from.

And yet, if you are a citizen of the European Union, you can move freely through that part of the world without ever having to show your papers — evidence that borders are not simply being policed out of a sentimental attachment to nationalism, even if that is professed as their raison d’être. Borders within countries, on the other hand, are becoming more and more conspicuous. In places like the Philippines, China, Mexico and Indonesia where the so called free-trade zones operate, with zero taxation and dirt cheap rent, the people who work inside them are often locked in fortresses guarded by the army and exempt from the few rights the laws of the land might give them, as Naomi Klein shows in No Logo. Free-trade zones are a ghetto within a ghetto, and their inhabitants have no rights to speak of. It is not only the developing countries that are undergoing this segregation process. Over the last fifty years in the United States there has been an open-secret workforce of chambermaids, kitchen cooks and waterboys who have sustained that country’s restaurant and hotel service industry. Without access to any form of government benefits, denied the right to organise or formal certification, these people have lived in a world of borders inside the ‘land of the free’ for years.

Therefore, any discussion of a struggle for global justice has to include the demand for freedom of movement for all people. This demand has already been raised elsewhere, with many European groups banding together under the banner of the No Border Network and working on projects aimed at combatting the hegemony of borders. Regular border camps are held on the EU’s land borders to help asylum seekers cross the border. In the United States, New York’s Ya Basta! collective is organising a People’s Caravan to cross the ‘imaginary line’ at the Canadian–US border at Cornwall. The caravan will eventually end up at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec, where the next round of discussions regarding the Free Trade of the Americas Area agreement is scheduled to occur.

Whilst the processes of globalisation and neo-liberalisation continue to impoverish the poor and benefit the rich, asylum seekers are and will continue to be at the forefront of this struggle. They are resisting with the only thing they have left: their lives. Whilst it may be impossible for us to literally help them cross the border here in Australia, what we can do is fight for the right of those who come — regardless of any distinctions the government may care to make — to remain.

Andrea Maksimovic is a member of No One Is Illegal, a group dedicated to challenging cultural assumptions about all types of migrants, and, through action, fighting for their full rights

Drinking a cup of justice … And Justice can taste outstanding.

Advertisement for fairly traded gourmet coffee

A growing number of consumer products in core regions of the global economy are designed and marketed to placate the conscience of the uncomfortable consumer. Everything from ethical mutual funds, to coffee beans, to Nike’s ‘no harm clothing’, are presented as part of ‘alternative’ consumption practices that minimise the exploitation of a globalised economy, and promote principles of ‘fair trade’. Following the wave of ‘environmentally friendly’ products, some fair-trade advocates predict a trend towards greater consumer demand for products produced under fair conditions.

The Fair Trade Federation claims that this provides ‘one of the best alternative models for economically just and sustainable development’. Others suggest that fair trade is simply a marketing coup that has captured a conscientious yuppy consumer niche. One Canadian writer, for example, described the growth of ‘Third World chic’ and alternative trade organisations (ATOs) with utter resignation: ‘Maybe it’s true that the best the world’s poor can hope for is better pimps for their products’.

But can we afford to be so dismissive — especially in an age where neo-liberal globalisation remains largely unchallenged, consumerism prevails as a dominant source of identities, and lifestyle politics stands out as the most prevalent contemporary form of North American resistance?

This article attempts to move beyond totalising cynicism, as well as unbridled optimism, towards a more nuanced understanding of fair trade. I explore the contradictions and paradoxes of using consumer practices to build bridges of socio-economic solidarity across core and periphery. More specifically, I want to determine how fair-trade discourse constructs understandings of development, consumerism, and global justice.

A critical but sympathetic viewpoint is essential here, since many fair-trade projects are well intentioned, and there is evidence to suggest that certain peripheral groups benefit from these connections, such as Third World communities which are provided with access to necessary technologies.

What is fair trade?

Although definitions vary, fair trade is generally presented as an alternative to the global trading system. It promotes trade based on relationships of mutual respect and co-operation rather than profit. Trade is based on a fair price, often defined as providing a ‘living wage’ for producers. In addition, fair-trade organisations usually commit to purchasing directly from small producers, providing access to credit and technical assistance, encouraging sustainable environmental practices, establishing long-term relationships with producers based on mutual respect, and supporting democratically run workers’ co-operatives.

The fair-trade sector has not evolved in a vacuum. To a significant degree, it is a response to a situation where consumerism and corporate power reign supreme. There is an ever-expanding criterion for consumer ‘necessities’, and there is diminished support for public goods and the taxation system, and relatively little criticism of consumerism as a way of life. While environmentalist doomsayers warn of impending ecological catastrophes, the dominant indicators of the good life still tend to prioritise consumer goods over happy families or meaningful work. While income inequality grew in the 1980s and 1990s, consumer aspirations for both the poor and the rich expanded. Virtually everybody wanted more stuff.

Some may argue that consumerism is a more diverse, pleasurable phenomena than I am presenting. I would happily concede that there is personal pleasure and even a sense of empowerment in buying new things. Moreover, I do not deny that products are used in ways not intended by their producers. Recognising microspheres of power within consumer culture is clearly important, but this should not blind us to broader patterns of powerlessness and exploitation.

In consumer societies the dominant modus operandi of identity construction is through our choices as a sovereign consumer. The consumer-sovereignty ideal endorses the general principle underlying market theory: that the pursuit of individual self-interest leads to a greater common good. Each individual, rational consumer looking out for their own interest is not a drain on common resources, but a powerful source of collective good. Under the ideal of consumer sovereignty, when we are poor, it is our choice to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. If our conscience is troubled by our wealth relative to the world’s poor, we have a choice to buy fairly traded products.

So while people strive to express their individuality through ‘sovereign’ decisions over certain products, the whole premise of consumerism as a soul-wrenching, ecologically devastating way of life is not rigorously questioned in the mainstream public sphere. Counter-cultural consumption has come to mean consuming differently — not consuming less. Clearly a dramatic reduction in consumption would be impossible without a serious challenge to the dominance of consumer sovereignty in North America. Consumerism and citizenship may not be readily compatible, unless Western citizens go beyond token efforts to embrace the difficult set of choices involved with a resource-responsible global citizenship.

Bearing this in mind, I want to suggest that an alternative to neo-liberal globalism must fulfil minimum criteria. It must be committed to promoting transnational economic democracy based on economic, political, and cultural equality and autonomy; it must be underpinned by a practice of citizenship based on equal access to resources, cultural identities and democratic projects; and it must be sustainable.

To what extent does fair trade fulfil these criteria for an effective alternative to neo-liberal globalism?

A useful starting point to answer this question is by a careful analysis of the claims of fair-trade organisations themselves. TransFair USA defines its agenda ambitiously as being to ‘redefine the producer-consumer relationship’, claiming that, ‘Fair trade can and will connect issues of global poverty with the negative externalities of American consumerism and produce new, powerful and productive relationships’.

These are clearly good intentions, which seem beyond reproach or criticism. Contradictions arise, however, when these good intentions are translated into appeals to sell fair-trade products in consumer societies like those of North America. There are three particularly troubling contradictions, or themes, that cast doubt on the potential of fair-trade discourse to provide a counter-politics to neo-liberalism. The first is an unquestioned support for consumer sovereignty. The second concerns support for micro-lifestyle politics over politicised, public-sphere awareness. The third relates to the way in which fair trade can sometimes, perhaps unintentionally, normalise underdevelopment and over-consumption. I want to deal with each in turn.

Consumer sovereignty: thirty-two flavours and then some

A focus on individual choice and consumer sovereignty is a persistent theme in fair-trade discourse — a theme that makes for some rather strange bedfellows. Political leaders throughout the industrialised world have been able to use ideals of consumer sovereignty to identify with the feelings of the ‘masses’. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, for example, presented the model of consumer choice as an adequate framework for all forms of citizenship. A similar idea of ‘voting with your dollar’ is heavily emphasised in fair-trade discourse. Fair-trade seminars often end on this inspirational note — ‘You have a vote! It’s right there in your wallet!’ This moral imperative to vote in the market place was not accompanied by discussion, or even recognition of the skewed distribution of ‘votes’ (dollars) in consumer society. The valorisation of consumer sovereignty was also revealed in the emphasis on the range of goods, their convenience, and the assurance of the high quality provided.

The Bridgehead fair-trade catalogue, for example, reported that their ‘goals looking forward’ were to provide consumers with ‘more stores and more selection’. Traditional development goals — eliminating poverty, reducing technological dependence and so forth — are apparently self-evident to Bridgehead catalogue shoppers. TransFair USA stressed that before consumers will buy fairly traded coffee, they have to be shown that there is ‘no compromise in product quality’, and ‘easy availability, that is, no trips to special stores’.

While one might contend that ‘choice’ is a natural part of doing business in a market society, what is interesting in the case of fair trade, a self-declared alternative to exploitative trade relations, is how consumer sovereignty discourse is so thoroughly embraced. In fact, one of the stated goals of fair-trade organisations is to develop relationships with producers to help them adapt to the changing styles, trends, and preferences of First World consumers.

The overall effect is to create a powerful justification for a globalised world where a small elite has the right to choose between the best products that the world’s cultures have to offer. This elite also has the right to change its mind when certain trends and goods become passé. This world is not presented as objectionable, but is ironically given a veneer of morality since ‘choices’ are made in the name of fair trade and development. Although the rhetoric of consumer sovereignty is a realistic sales strategy, it is troublesome at a deeper level.

This emphasis on choice obscures the production side of the commodity equation, and the associated inequalities. Although the very idea of a fair-trade product draws the consumers’ eye to the notion of unfair global production processes, it is possible that most people who buy these products absorb very little information about the production process, perhaps only a short paragraph on the side of a bag of coffee.

The producers of the beautiful, handcrafted items are shown in only a few places in the Bridgehead catalogue, and these depictions are designed to produce minimal anxiety and maximum satisfaction for the consumer choosing between hundreds of products.

The emphasis on the extreme range of choices available to consumers also obscures the paucity of choices available to producers, who are often driven to produce handicrafts when they are forced off their land. It is assumed that the choice for producers is to either remain impoverished, or produce goods for the fair-trade market. Local self-sufficiency, shortening food links, or de-linking from the global economy are not presented as viable choices. The imperative is to produce as quickly and efficiently as possible.

An ideal of consumer-sovereignty naturalised for North American consumers also presents a narrow notion of choice available to would-be citizens. Political action is reduced to a choice between doing nothing, and buying a product. The realm of political action is confined to the market place. The primary choice for potential consumers is between brands. Absent here is the choice of not buying, or engaging in other types of political action. Although they might give the consumer the moral satisfaction of helping a women’s pottery co-operative in India, these purchases do not challenge the practices, or relative power of the high consumption lifestyle.

The greatest ideological abuse of the notion of ‘choice’ is when it obscures the persistence of social inequality. In consumer cultures choice is typically depicted as a great social equaliser, destroying group boundaries and creating a world where everyone has a ‘vote’. The language of ‘mutual-respect’ between ‘equal trading partners’ used in the fair-trade literature has a similar effect, blending together the sharp economic and social differences between the producers and consumers of the products.

Besides obscuring producer–consumer power differentials, the inequality amongst North American consumers is also hidden from view. The commonly used phrase, ‘as consumers, we can make a difference’, paints a picture of a homogenous mass of equal participants in the market place. The ability to pay the fair-trade premium price becomes a matter of individual willpower and morality, instead of the socio-economic issue that it is for less wealthy North American consumers.

This leads us to another problem with the choice metaphor — it has no way of distinguishing degrees of control over choices. The consumer sovereignty ideal presents consumers as either free choosers, or manipulated dupes — not a very sophisticated portrayal of the subtle moral issues involved in political action. What is not recognised within this simplistic perspective are gradations and forms of autonomous choice, such as the language of citizenship and collective action, an issue to which I will now turn.

Lifestyle politics and a diminished public sphere: from boycott to ‘buycott’

Fair-trade literature is also characterised by the absence of reference to discussions of politics, economics, capitalism, and democracy. Like the discourse of the New Right, fair-trade discourse appears to accept the focus on consumer identities over political and public identities as natural and inevitable. The potential of the public sphere as an arena of critical reflection is thus minimised, as public communication is predominantly organised around market transactions.

Calls to ‘action’ frequently begin with phrases like the following: ‘As consumers, our purchasing choices also have a global impact’. On the 10,000 Villages home page, seven suggestions of ‘how you can help’ are listed. Aside from prayer, the suggestions revolve entirely around the retail experience.

This is a telling example of the de-politicisation of global inequality, and a fairly typical depiction of political action in the fair-trade literature. When consumers are urged to lobby their government, it is to promote the use of fair-trade coffee in the government coffee shops — not to lobby for political changes that would make Southern producers less vulnerable like lobbying for the reduction of Third World debt or fighting corporate rights agreements like the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, or to make North American governments more accountable to their citizens.

Nevertheless, most of the fair-trade literature is highly ambitious about the scope of change that would occur through fair trade, and about the power of lifestyle politics.

Small changes are presented as making a big difference. TransFair USA states this very specifically, supporting a shift in focus from ‘boycotts’ to ‘buycotts’.

While the focus on individual choice here is clearly a sensible sales pitch, it also tends to minimise the accountability of the state and corporations for the public good. The individual is encouraged to take responsibility for global injustice, but in most cases action is limited to purchasing fair-trade products. Fair trade assuages your conscience, and makes your house appear more hip and worldly. Individual lifestyle politics is key. Forget about challenging larger organisations like governments and corporations. Justice can fit into your daily lifestyle.

The danger here is that fair trade is ripe for corporate co-optation of the public’s genuine desire to see the end of sweatshop labour and other exploitative practices. Nike’s ‘no-harm’ clothing campaign is simply one of the more public, sophisticated variants on this theme. I first became aware of the NO HARM CLOTHING slogan on a trip to Los Angeles in July 1999 where it was used to promote the Beverly Hills Nike World super-store. Reading the fine print beneath the ‘No-Harm’ clothing, however, seemed to indicate only that the clothing would not harm the person wearing it.

Alternatively, fair trade can simply become a superficial brush with the exotic ‘Other’. In the inside of the Bridgehead catalogue, the Managing Director calls on the viewer to take part in a neo-colonial mail-order experience: ‘We invite you to bring the world home’. Although appeals to capture the exotic are not always this literal, the fair-trade goods themselves contain important messages about global inequalities and North American desires to possess a piece of the exotic Other.

What message, for example, is conveyed by owning a hand-dyed indigo duvet cover from India? What lies behind the desire for a ‘Kathmandu Carpet’ from Nepal, or a set of ‘wonderfully ornate maracas’ from Peru? Clearly the consumption of these goods has many meanings, including simple appreciation for an aesthetically pleasing handicraft. However, it also seems clear that beneath the attractive veneer of fair-trade chic there continues a long Western tradition of placing the Other safely within one’s reach, while at the same time maintaining the extreme power differential separating core consumers from peripheral producers.

All of this leads to unanswered questions about the political efficacy of the lifestyle politics of consumerism. When I go to a Third World craft store and buy a Zapatista doll (made by Guatemalans in Mexico city) for US$8.50, what am I really contributing to the plight of impoverished campesinos in Southern Mexico? If anything, the availability of such items creates a false sense of solidarity with life or death struggles, and allows the analytical gaze to wander away from the ways in which my lifestyle and my citizenship are connected to the Zapatista struggles. The North American Free Trade Agreement, the inter-continental arms trade, the pillage of Chiapanecan resources, the degradation of indigenous rights across North America — these important issues are nowhere to be found when I take my Zapatista doll and credit card up to the cash register.

This brings us to a third and final theme of this article — the balance between education and normalisation in fair-trade discourse.

Normalising over-consumption and underdevelopment

Fair-trade discourse offers an important opportunity for education about the complex factors underlying underdevelopment. Although attempts at development education are a key part of fair-trade discourse, the strange juxtaposition of core choice and peripheral poverty works to normalise over-consumption and underdevelopment, stifling the possibilities for critical public discussion on these issues.

Nowhere is this juxtaposition of over-consumption and underdevelopment more evident than in the glossy pages of the Bridgehead fair-trade catalogue. Although Bridgehead will send more details of their projects on request, their major marketing tool is the catalogue. The catalogue is beautifully produced on glossy paper with stunning photographs, and an extensive array of goods. Bridgehead wants to impress upon potential customers the importance of ethical consumption, but it does not want to scare them off either. Your purchases are intended to promote ‘development’, yet the catalogue images do not inspire any sense of the need for urgent action to combat global inequality, the impoverishment of the Fourth World, or over-development in North America. Instead, these images are designed to promote a sense of urgency about buying something.

Besides this visual normalisation, the fair-trade concept itself tends to normalise and give moral legitimacy to the idea that some populations should produce products according to the desires and whims of other populations. The whole notion of what is ‘fair’ is revealing. The meaning of ‘fair’ for Alternative Trade Organisations ranges from ‘mutual respect’, to a ‘living wage’, to the country’s ‘minimum wage’. Nowhere is it suggested that producers should ideally be paid at a level befitting the labour of North American consumers, and nowhere is it suggested that the core consumer should be consuming at the level befitting the producers of the goods. So ‘fair’ in the discourse seems not to imply a global democracy of citizens with equal economic and political rights, but a global trading system of inequality, albeit with a more human face. The goal of fair trade remains confined to helping the poor through fair-trade practices — all without addressing the living conditions of the world’s elite.

Although the fair-trade organisations vary in their presentation of global inequality, the discourse tends to present a sugar-coated liberal vision where everyone has an equal voice, and where global citizenship has already been achieved. Fair trade is a development solution where everybody wins: the First World consumer gets a hand-crafted item along with a clear-conscience, while the producers get an improved standard of living. TransFair USA describes the benefits of fair trade as follows: ‘In a global village, we prosper as our less fortunate neighbors prosper’. Nations become neighbours, and we accept that some nations (‘neighbours’) are naturally more fortunate than others. The causes underlying global inequality, such as imperialism, neo-imperialism, trade advantages and the debt crisis, disappear in this quaint metaphor.

The notion that natural resources are limited, and that the First World neighbours gobble up a disproportionate share of the global commons, is also implicitly accepted.

Respect, and even sustainable development, can be produced with a simple purchase as an equally empowered ‘citizen of the world’. Even though handicraft production is often one of the last options available to landless peasants in dire need of land reform, the Fair Trade Federation defends the production of non-essential items as an important part of developing fair-trade relations:

Clothing, utensils, bowls, baskets, and ritual items are windows into the heart of a culture. As we embrace becoming citizens of the world, our appreciation for cultures other than our own is magnified.

The hopeful vision of global multiculturalism supports diversity with little recognition of inequality. Global consumers perhaps, but not global citizens with equal economic resources or political rights.

This is not to say that efforts at education are not made by fair-trade organisations. Some organisations, such as Equal Exchange, provide a wide variety of informative articles on their web site and in their Java Jive newsletter. In contrast to the glossy images of their catalogues, Bridgehead also produces a photocopied newsletter, Bean Around the Block, which includes inspiring quotations on political action, and even a call for political action protesting militarisation in Chiapas.

But most fair-trade education efforts reflect the contradictions I outlined above: an emphasis on consumer sovereignty, and a focus on fair trade as the most important solution to global inequality. Consumers are to be educated to consume ‘differently’; there is no mention of encouraging consumers to consume less, or to engage in the world as citizens. Education is optional, and ultimately subservient to the goal of consumption.

Opportunities and the public sphere

At the same time as these contradictions emerge, it is important to emphasise that no discourse is homogeneous. The separation between citizens and consumers is not rigid or absolute. There are hopeful instances where the issues behind fair trade are effectively politicised as public issues rather than purely private, lifestyle issues, giving rise to the possibility of an expanded, more informed public sphere.

Some groups, for instance, are taking up the project of radical education in a more profound way, such as the ‘10 days for global justice campaign’ in Canada. Because the organisers are a broad, ecumenical group and not an alternative trade organisation, the goal to educate citizens about development issues remains central and primary, while the lifestyle issues surrounding fair-trade products are presented as a partial solution. One education tool, a page of four post-cards, highlights the possibilities for addressing consumption issues in a more politicised fashion. One post-card is addressed to the Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs, and calls for an end to sweat-shop conditions. Another card is addressed to ‘myself and my household’, calling on the reader to avoid excessive consumption and to challenge the Canadian government to protect workers’ rights at home and around the world.

Another promising instance of fair trade in the public sphere was the recent resolution by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to declare 8 May as Fair Trade Day in that city. Not only did the resolution declare the city’s opposition to ‘unregulated economic globalisation in its current state’, but it also made a commitment to support ‘fair trade, socially responsible investment, and sustainable and equitable economic development’. In contrast to the emerging globalism, which gives corporations universal rights of entry and access to global markets, the San Francisco resolution reasserted the rights of citizen bodies to set public priorities. To do this, the resolution relied on the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution which allows public entities to ‘place restrictions on the use of public funds’. The fair-trade issue in this case was taken on by a level of government, and transcended the scope of individual shopping decisions.

Another example of positive correlation between fair trade and a democratic public sphere is found in the International Federation for Alternative Trade (IFAT). IFAT holds biennial conferences for producers and alternative trade organisations to exchange information and viewpoints in a non-commodified context. This venue has hosted important debates on what qualifies as fair trade, creating fair-trade criteria for coffee, and supporting debates around criteria for other products. Instead of working to destroy the competition, alternative trade organisations commit to an alternative co-operative ethic of business based on maximising benefits to producers.

Although these organisations are still minor players in the scheme of global trading, businesses able to defy conventional logic and combine social values with viable business ventures can provide a powerful moral counter-point to the dominant logic of neo-liberalism.

Conclusion: potential and pitfalls of the shopping strategy

Consumer-solidarity strategies based on alternative principles like fair trade have the potential to both challenge and accommodate the dominant ideology and practices of consumerism and neo-liberal globalisation. Fair-trade discourse may also undermine commodity fetishism by forcing consumers to consider factors of production usually shrouded from view. Consideration of production can lead to a questioning of inequitable labour relations, the sustainability of core consumer practices, and can encourage a reorientation away from consumerism and towards socially engaged citizenship.

At the same time, the fair-trade discourse continues within a long-standing mode of regulation within advanced capitalism, and does not perfectly fulfil the criteria for a counter-politics based around collective action outlined above. The discourse of fair trade tends to rely on individualistic notions of choice and consumer sovereignty, obscures the structural linkages between core and periphery in a globalised economy, and belies the collective environmental implications of individual free choice in the market place. Because of its unwillingness to critically assess the consumerism of its customers, fair-trade discourse supports a liberal vision of difference without a serious discussion of inequality, or the emotional and intellectual barriers to sustainability.

Building alternative identities derived from conscientious consumption may be a more realistic strategy than expecting collective identities of citizenship to spontaneously emerge from thin air. Although there is no inevitable transition, conscientious consumption could serve as a conduit to a broader notion of citizenship, where an obsessive focus on individual ‘choice’, is replaced, or at least supplemented with a broader notion of community, sustainability, justice, and democracy.

Josée Johnston is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. This article is an excerpt from a chapter in the book Protest and Globalisation: Prospects for Transnational Solidarity, James Goodman (ed.), to be published in Sydney in February–March 2001 by Pluto Press

That it was a political achievement is undeniable, and the event has been useful as a point at which to uncover the buried history of national debates, especially around issues of free trade and protection. But it wasn’t an achievement of the political imagination in the same way as the American or French revolutions were, or any occasion of independence in which nationhood was wrested from an oppressor, or brought together by a fusion of demands and possibilities, of the real and the ideal. To unite six colonies founded by the same imperial power on a single continent does not begin to compete with the Bastille or the Long March, and people are well aware of the fact.

The event itself was the least disruptive sort of independence possible — the declaration of limited dominion status, with continued domination by Westminster on matters of trade policy and foreign affairs, and the persistence of the Privy Council as a final court of appeal. Even the timing of the event — the first day of a new century — makes it look more like an exercise in book-keeping rather than nation-making. What was widely understood at the time to be an act of continuity with the British Empire is being retroactively redefined as the first in a chain of events whose logical conclusion is the declaration of a republic.

The ‘Federalists’ are trying to revive a sense of nationhood in the political dimension, by reminding people that part of their identity is a politically constituted one. As global neoliberalism proceeds apace — to the point where it has taken on the neutralised term of ‘globalisation’ — and party politics flows towards a unitary centre, the realm of nationhood has been driven back into the purely symbolic, and attached primarily to sport. The double whammy — the retreat of national political and economic independence, and the expansion of purely symbolic nationalism to fill the vacuum — is far from uniform. The success of One Nation — and its potential rebirth — is indicative that there are social groups for whom a sense of national identity exists in the old style, as a concrete myth fusing political history and symbols in a continuous narrative. Yet their appeal has been largely confined to a rural white population, and they have had little success in gaining a base in the industrial working class (though this will change if there is an economic downturn of any seriousness later in the year).

The ‘branding’ of Australia began in earnest in the 1970s, as a correlate to multiculturalism and the dissolution of an anglo-Celtic hegemonic culture. As other commentators here and elsewhere have noted, the ‘branding’ form of nationalism drew on a number of alleged national traits — an easygoing character, an enthusiasm for the ‘fair go’, a familiarity with striking nature — rather than on an internalised and widely shared national story. In the last decade or so it has been fused with the tourism industry for the sake of international ad campaigns, and played up as a contrast to the revived nationalisms and ethnic myths of the post-Cold war era.

Australia is, in this account, the post-national nation, a respite from the world, a place where people can relate to each other with total transparency, having rid themselves of the baggage of their ethnicity, retaining only that which is pleasantly different, such as cuisine and customs. This sense of the place as a new world destination which — unlike the US — does not impose a history of its own was behind the giddy suggestion that Sydney become the permanent venue for the Olympics, Australia as a place where the world comes to get away from itself. It was an image that was achieved only by a marginalisation of the most concrete and tragic narrative of all, that of Indigenous Australians — the masterstroke of which was the faux-naif ‘wonderland’ style of the opening ceremony.

The world as Alice, fallen into the South, where everything is upside-down and nations mock and satirise their own history at triumphal occasions — it is this sort of thing that Don Watson dubbed the ‘post-modern republic’ during his tenure as eminence brune for Paul Keating. Watson called for an ‘aleatoric, bebop’ republic, an improvised and open-ended form of national self-understanding. Such a nation would go beyond the US in identifying its character with a liberal polity — unlike the US it would not seek to impose a specific type of liberalism on individual citizens, but would foreground pluralism and respect for diverse and divergent cultural ways. The ‘Federalists’ have added a political theme to that vision which, at its most exuberant, amounts to the identification of an ‘Australian genius’ for peaceful nation-making.

Alas, Minerva’s wombat forages at night. The achievement of a post-modern nationalism occurs by the grace of a historical process which dismantles the foundations of the Nation — and the best and worst it can offer — in a fashion more comprehensive than the new nationalists realise. The global neoliberal order and its flows of capital, labour and images intersects with the self in a way that makes possible the post-modern national citizen, someone who understands their particular culture as no more than one way of being human, the equivalent of a preference for strawberry over chocolate. Yet at the same time it creates a different form of relationship between person, society, culture and nation, one in which groundedness plays less of a role.

By ‘groundedness’ of course we mean the material nature of community, not the ideal myths of Nation or Race. Social interdependence, limits to mobility and the particular nature of the locality have historically been key sources of cultural meaning and social being. Crude myths of Nation have always been ‘reverse engineered’ — a unified community invented to legitimise an existing polity. The attempt to create a non-National nation from a fusion of actually existing cultural attributes and pluralist liberal hopes is a worthier project, but one more likely to be defeated by its own paradoxes.

The cultural space within which the new nationalists seek to build can no longer be seen as a ‘wedding-cake’ structure in which a local cultural ground is overlaid with external mediated influences, be they British or American. Many core elements of social and cultural development — mass culture, curriculum, consumption — are now oriented to the development of the person as pre-globalised. Particular national identity comes as a mediated form — one’s flavour — but the core psychological structures are general and universal, the necessary hardware for global mobility and flexible work patterns. Real access to global options may vary, but the principle itself dominates aspirations, meanings and values. In fact those who gain the greatest class mobility from the process — working class children who gain a professional education — are the least likely to have any attachment to particular origins, at least in the first part of their adulthood.

This process of social development yields many paradoxical results. Those most likely to politically sympathise with the aspirations of indigenous people are those least likely to have a real and incommutable relationship to country. Those most opposed to indigenous struggles are more likely to have a — comparatively vestigial — sense of place. The desire for a grounded culture throws up absurdities, such as the search for an ‘Australian’ cuisine, in the absence of bounded cultural practices which bring cuisines into being.

On the ground, the downside of such a process is becoming increasingly visible — the combination of social-economic redundancy and cultural-psychological dysfunction. Politically, it presents us with multiple possibilities and few probabilities. As many have observed, our federal system is a fluid and open-ended form, which could be conducive to the most imaginative political developments. Currently much attention is focused on union with New Zealand — a clear mark that the relationship between culture and politics remains little understood. But there is no reason why other possibilities — the creation of new states to promote a renewed focus on regional and local economies, for example — could not come into play.

Yet there is little chance that they will. The Australian political framework resembles a cicada. The popular enthusiasm that made a constitution have now died away, leaving a constitution resistant to change, ruling a population whose identity is by and large not defined within politics. Thus Australians will stir themselves to reject an elitist model of a republic, but no subsequent positive campaign for an independently elected president takes root.

The hopes that the centenary of Federation would provide a springboard for political renewal are overwhelmingly the hopes of those who still work and think within a mindset that sees politics and history as occupying the same space. That does not mean that campaigns to re-extend the reduced scope of democracy within Australian life will not have some successes. But the causes that will move a mass of people to politics will not only be different to those of a hundred years ago — they will be of a fundamentally different form.

S11 was the latest in a series of global protests that have become branded – J18, N30 – in such a way as to suggest that the series will be indefinite – S26 in Prague, O3 and so on. Part of a global movement whose ultimate potential cannot yet be accurately assessed, S11 marked the full entry of Australia to the round of global protest against neoliberalism. It was a strategic and tactical advance in the conduct of protest.

S11 was the first protest in this ‘series’ in which the decentralised affinity group structure meshed effectively with a tightly co-ordinated ‘marshalling’ structure throughout the protest. The J18 protests in London had been pseudo-affinity structured – a tight core group of long-term revolutionaries steering a European style ‘love parade’ into a violent protest. The Seattle N30 protest had a genuine affinity group hub-and-spokes organisation model, but this had limited its tactical effectiveness with the result that forces were split between blocking intersections and blockading the conference centre where the WTO was meeting.

Melbourne’s S11 was significant in that it was the first global action in which the protest worked effectively together without the need for either a single overarching organisation – such as People for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s – or without suffering a split between the command-structure organisations – such as the socialist groups – and the decentralised and participatory groups. That is not to say there was no friction. Many participants believed that the marshals were overstepping their defined role of keeping the crowd informed as to the balance of forces around the various entrances and exits, and were actively commanding. Several quit on Tuesday and those who remained on duty were largely from the socialist group ‘Red Bloc’.

Yet for all the dissatisfaction there was no collapse of protest self-discipline, or of the protest itself. The system of balancing forces around key gates, and of abandoning gates that could not be blockaded when numbers fell, was maintained. Confusion was minimised. Violent outbreaks by angered protestors was almost non-existent. Despite the usual mistrust between command-structure groups and decentralised groups, the marshalling system was largely adhered to.

This clear tactical advance on Seattle is partly due to the lesser degree of hyper-individualism of Australians (the affinity group model developed as a way of accommodating the fragmented nature of American identity politics). More importantly however, it is an indication that the global movement is dynamic – its strategy and tactics are developing, it is learning from itself.

The predictable response of the state has been one of violence – in this case, one that went beyond that legally sanctioned to the police force. The ‘backwardness’ of the Australian state in these matters clashed with the forwardness of the global protest movement – the result being baton charges against non-violent resistance. Meanwhile in the Czech republic, the government is preparing for S26 by establishing low-budget tent cities so that protestors arriving from all over the world have somewhere to stay. Yet Prague S26 may well be one of the last such events where protest is met with a measured and liberal state response. If the IMF meeting is seriously disrupted by protest the global elite will come down hard on Vaclav Havel’s hippie bullshit, and any state wanting to host these lucrative events will have to guarantee that it can make them run smoothly. S11 Melbourne was a harbinger of what can be expected in the near future, many times worse and with bullets not batons.

What will happen to the movement then is anyone’s guess. It will probably replay the sixties/seventies historical course and split into community organisation and armed struggle factions. It may be strengthened rather than weakened by the more naked display of state power that is on the way. But it is vital that protestors understand what we have lived through in the last two years – an Indian summer of permitted dissent, with winter moving in fast – and begin to think strategically about how they will respond to this.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting at Crown Casino momentarily brought Australia into a global loop of protest. Like a travelling carnival, activists have converged to stage large-scale protests in some of the world’s major cities such as London, Rio, Seattle, Manila and Washington. With the protests that started on 11 September, Melbourne can now be added to the list. Yet for all the press that S11 attracted, debate within the corporate and state-owned media was bound by parameters that served to challenge the validity of the protests. This article seeks to illustrate how the media portrayed both violence and the modes of organisation of activists in such a way as to undermine the legitimacy of the protests against the WEF.

In the months leading up to S11, there was little in-depth media exposé of the activists’ myriad accusations against the WEF’s 1007 member corporations. For instance, the media missed the irony that the WEF, of European origin, was here to discuss the economic agendas of the Asia-Pacific – a region still recovering, spasmodically, from the rigours of globalisation, IMF and World Bank style. Instead, the overwhelming focus of the media was the issue of violence, with the most alarmist articles prior to S11 drawing on moral indignation to talk up the prospect of conflict. Bloody confrontations do sell papers. Within this general emphasis, it was the prospects of the use of violence by protesters, rather than by police, that dominated the press. Activists were interviewed time and again by the media and were continuously asked about the prospects for violence at the conference, no matter their declarations of peaceful intent. Even before the protests began, the validity of the protests were undermined as the so-called ‘S11 organisation’ was painted as unlawful, reckless, and set to engage in an activity that was framed as morally indefensible.

Clear opportunities for a discussion in the media of state violence existed prior to 11 September. This was particularly the case with the enactment of the Defence Legislation Amendment (Aid to Civilian Authorities) Bill 2000. As the WEF summit and the Olympics approached, the Bill ostensibly served to guard against acts of terrorism. This legislation stated, however, that troops could be deployed in case of a threat to domestic stability, the meaning of which was left highly ambiguous. It also stated that with only the authorisation of the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister and the Attorney General, the military could have been drawn on to intervene in protests such as S11. Yet instead of questioning the legitimacy of possible state-sanctioned violence by the military against protesters, the media’s treatment of the Bill was framed largely in terms of Commonwealth encroachment on states’ powers. These parameters laid the foundation for the media’s approach to the actual days of protest.

Throughout the protests against the WEF in Melbourne, scant attention was paid to the multiple reasons behind activists’ decisions to blockade Crown Casino, let alone the choice of many activists to resist violence absolutely. Various points around the casino were blockaded by activists who believed that it was futile to respond passively to the violence perpetrated and sanctioned by the state. This is not merely a tit-for-tat argument: a violent state begets shoulder-to-shoulder activism. Passive non-violence can be seen as complicity acknowledging the state’s power and activists’ impotence. Most activists advocated active non-violent protest, believing that meaningful change can only be achieved by reacting non-violently even in the face of violence. Hence the constant chant of ‘no violence’ by activists standing against lines of Victorian police. This plurality of ideas received limited air time. Instead, the press coverage appeared to mirror that of the treatment of the Seattle protests by North America’s corporate media. The ‘Battle of Seattle’ was simply transposed onto the banks of the Yarra. Complex moments of violence and resistance simply became ‘protest violence’ and inevitably the headline read ‘Battle of Melbourne’.

A continued emphasis on the issue of violence by protesters served to challenge the legitimacy of the protests against the WEF. This emphasis also served to conceal the multiplicity of active dissent. At the core of many acts of S11-style dissent is a deliberate attempt by activists to create a sense of theatre. Activists frequently create a sense of playful irony in order to undermine the legitimacy of their targets. Light-hearted props and costumes, such as puppets and clowns, are at times accompanied by shoulder-to-shoulder resistance to create dramatic spectacles. In a famous quote, Abbie Hoffman remarked that the Vietcong attack on the US embassy in Saigon was a ‘work of art’. At that time, the images of violence in the embassy compound served to fracture a consensus in American society.

At other venues, the sight of protesters smashing a Nike window served as a spectacular and symbolic display of fury at one corporation’s exploitation. Rarely do perpetrators of such violence believe that a single act of property destruction will change corporations’ policies or practices. To measure it as such would be futile. Instead, the breaking of store-front windows, the public face of a company, is an expression of angst that can send powerful ripples through society. In this sense, the media has failed to realise the way in which symbolic violence or active resistance against police violence has been used by protestors to auger a sense of crisis instead as a mode of action designed to win over the middle ground. Discussions of this kind, where the media reflects back onto its own role as a key disseminator of ideas, have been consistently ignored in the press coverage of S11.

The issue of violence was the most obvious and dramatic challenge to the legitimacy of the S11 protests. A second stream of articles, however, has served to challenge the validity of protests through an analysis of the organisational modes of protest. Such articles, still mimicking the post-Seattle press, have mapped the emergence of a new kind of technologically motivated and decentralised activism that is networked rather than hierarchically organised. However, even those articles that sought to seriously discuss the fact that S11 was not one event, run by one organisation, with a single manifesto and a coherent agenda, still served to undermine the legitimacy of the protests. Articles of the ‘What is S11?’ genre sought to understand the protest as a collage of activists and organisations. The end effect, no matter the level of sympathy, seemed to turn S11 into a pageant of ideologically divergent professional protesters. The spectre of plurality and difference became a pseudonym for inchoateness and ineffectiveness. Ironically, therefore, whilst most of the media totalised violence as the mode of action, the media remained willing to recognise diversity as a key characteristic of the modes of organisation.

Articles framed by a discussion of S11 did not successfully hone in on some of the more compelling threads linking activists together. For instance, many voices in S11 were stressing the old axiom ‘society is not an economy’. The protests against multinational organisations are often an attempt to redress the absolute priority given to neo-liberal economics within society, of which the WEF is but one manifestation. So it matters not that some demonstrators during S11 stressed the injustices facing Indigenous Australians, that others argued for the removal of Third World debt, and yet others against the use of child labour to make sports shoes. Such seemingly disparate agendas are frequently linked by a common rejection of the exploitation by capital of public space, resources, and the condition of the human body.

At separate post-blockade press conferences, away from the concrete and wire surrounding the casino, representatives from both S11 and the Victorian police claimed success; S11 activists because of a shift in focus in the media away from the economics of the WEF, and police for their exhibition of authority. These messages of success were carried by a media that, paradoxically, had constantly de-legitimised the three days of protest through simplistic representations of violence and of modes of activist organisation. There seemed room for little else during the ‘Siege of Melbourne’.

Damian Grenfell and Anita Lacey are doctoral students at Monash University