‘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.

Just as the reporters in our daily press can’t get their heads around Germaine Greer’s argument that the collapse of culture means the bleakest kind of personal and social devastation, so morally serious discussion of any issue is extremely hard to find in Australian public discourse. John Martin ponders this great lack in the Australian psyche in the first essay in this issue of Arena Magazine in relation to Aboriginal connection to country. The national unwillingness to enter into other worlds, to feel and see them from the inside, has particularly Australian determinants. But history and geography grant us leave of our better senses. Martin says that Australians have no taste for tragedy, which is a shocking indictment.

In fact we settle for received views of the world and accept inferior status, notwithstanding our occasional anti- Americanism and on-tap nationalism. But as an outpost of what Empire exactly are we the wide-eyed underling?

Empires everywhere, it seems, are on the move again. It may not be wise to disavow for much longer knowledge of how that big old world works. Georgia and Iran may be much closer than we think. And it’s probably not a good idea to make slant-eye jokes about our northern neighbour. This is not to even raise the morally serious questions of the fate of peoples beyond our ken, how they perceive the world, or against what claims or threats they pose their own, but merely to suggest that it may also be in our interest to ask such questions.

Of course there is a complication here. There are questions to ask of and about empires other than the one we find ourselves in, as well as such questions about the peoples hidden from view within them (the Chinese, on the one hand, and the colonised peoples of Tibet and Uighur, on the other). Empire by its nature hides difference from the outside world, even if it doesn’t always kill it. In fact some empires have been known to let flourish a great variety of cultures, even for long periods of time, and this has to remain a possible intermediate goal in some situations given geopolitical realpolitik, where the stakes can be very high indeed in ethnic/cultural and humanitarian terms.

A central problem in all this is that the modern colonising attitude, inextricably guided by hubristic notions of progress and supremacist nationalism, underwrites the fate of minorities as primitive peoples who must be advanced. This is the same problem whether you are a supremacist American (Australian), Chinese or Russian. Despite our cultural differences, we all have in common a modernity of assumptions, and it is these, first and foremost, that are dangerous and need first and foremost to be challenged.

Superpower, or imperial, power plays come a close second in terms of danger, and actually come first if we expand our concerns away from oppressed minorities to the flow-on effects for entire regions and globally. Strategic destabilisation has long been an American art form, and it is clear in the cases of both Tibet and Georgia that American hands are not clean. Unless of course, you simply believe in the liberal democratic mission of the United States to bring democracy into dark places; and you have the kind of mind that does not baulk at the colossal dissonance of arguments for sovereignty in some places (Georgia — Bush denounces Russian denial of Georgian sovereignty) and not in others (Iraq — sovereignty is relative).

There is no doubt that Russian Empire is on the move. Who can doubt its own historical inclination to empire, and to brutal repression under Putin (think of Grozny); but who, too, could doubt that American meddling in Georgia and elsewhere within the old Soviet sphere of influence has not pushed Russia into action, as premeditated as it seems likely to have been. With Georgia launching its offensive against South Ossetia while Putin was in Beijing, and a visit by Condoleezza Rice to Tbilisi only days before fighting began, we have to understand that not only friendship between ‘like democracies’ has been a factor in US aid to Tbilisi, but that a set of more broad-ranging plans are also in action. Interestingly, the intervention, and Russian counter, has had fabulous consequences for American influence in Poland and Slovakia, with Poland finally signing up — days after the Russian retort — to have US ‘missile defences’, which is to say forward missile launching pads, erected on its soil. Ostensibly for the protection of Europe against Iranian missiles, the Polish government has now made it conditional that the missiles face Russia — which is what the Russians of course believed their primary purpose to be all along.

Humiliation at the hands of the West is, interestingly, cited as motive for both Chinese and Russian muscle-flexing in the present period. Historical precedents suggest the dangers of national humiliation for international affairs (and minority peoples), but the circumstances today are hardly comparable with anything in the past. How ordinary Chinese people interviewed for Olympics coverage stated again and again that this was China’s chance to overcome a hundred years of humiliation suggests a successful campaign to heighten grossly nationalistic (not patriotic) feeling. There is a population there willing to die for its (media-generated?) imagined community. In the Russian context, the same refrain seems a slim cover for its more immediate need to bolster its borders against an encircling NATO (now with missiles facing Moscow) and to ensure control of the carriage of energy resources, the basis of Russia’s growing hold over Europe and desire to keep links to the Middle East open. (Consult a map to see just how close these protagonists are to vital oil, gas and shipping routes, and the Middle East generally.)

As the empires face off, the primary concern is energy: for access to it for production and more generally ‘growth’; for the power and dollars associated with its sale and transmission; for the commodities to which it is dedicated. Russia is resource rich, and may be even more so as the polar ice thaws; China is a powerhouse of production for an envious world’s insatiable consumption without adequate power sources of its own; American empire is increasingly desperate, a shadow of its former self, but nevertheless with plenty to lose and everything to gain in securing oil through the tutelage of client states, whose people believe they will receive democracy in return for the dangerous game of aligning themselves with Western freedom. It is hard to imagine a more ominous conjunction of competing pretensions and imperatives.

It is not long into the fabled ‘American century’ and it is already collapsing. Guy Rundle argues in this issue of Arena Magazine that American culture has been emptied out into ersatz forms of media-driven community. John Hinkson charts a second stage in America’s sub-prime crisis in the context of the US scramble to secure its economic future. As economic and geopolitical pressures build, the question of what this dangerous situation might all be for hardly emerges. For the American way, some have said, for the moral compass provided by free-acting markets and their agents; but in fact the strongest element in this depressing scenario is a common interest shared by these competing empires.

Which Empire? There are three superstates with (neo-) colonial pretensions, emerging or receding, on the world scene; but in a more general sense, Empire refers to a government of feeling; an exercise of power over actions and desire. Through repression or seduction these superpowers are intent on producing or maintaining a way of life built on unsustainable economic and environmental assumptions, and on universalising cultural mores associated with the spread of a contagious form of hightech capitalism. None of the elements add up, unless, perhaps, you are master of the ultimate chess game. For ordinary people the struggle and strategy will have to take a different form, and surely a rejection of the basic assumptions that give Empire, in the broader sense, legitimacy: a rejection of our collective kowtowing to a mysterious power that explodes the particulars of community and denies more subterranean channels of cultural identity and social meaning.

Alison Caddick

This is not to say that Backman was not making pertinent observations. Even the implication of western romanticism, in the negative sense, may have some element of truth about it, at least in so far as some Tibet supporters and western Buddhists may never have thought about the structures of power in pre-1951 Tibet, or those still operating amongst the Tibetan leadership today. Of course, it is as well to be careful: to make real assessments of the structures in operation, not simply fall prey to good feelings about the Dalai Lama’s espoused pacifism or react in knee-jerk horror when a situation is complex. At another level, of course there is an element of romanticism here, and in a positive sense — just as there is in any support ever given to causes of this kind, as hope must have a springboard, and in the West at least the ‘human spirit’ has been enacted in romantic terms for a good two centuries. Even if we in the comfortable West sometimes ventriloquise our own desires onto other places and peoples, the spirit observed in others’ struggles against huge odds makes the possibility of change real for all and can provide genuine lessons in ethical identification with the hopes and struggles of others.

As an article in our next issue will make clear, the struggle in Tibet has been long and hard, and very courageous, and so much of this story has not been fully told in the West. We certainly don’t have to take up the rights of Tibetans in the narrow and largely dismissive terms attributed to activists by Backman. The real issue is that, just as the broad Left has stood up for struggles against colonialist if not totalitarian regimes in all sorts of places, including our own place, the Tibetan situation calls for radical agitation. The Chinese justification for its policies of translocation of Han families into Tibet replicates the justifications so often given by powers holding that they are bringing light and civilisation to backward places and peoples: the Javanese in West Papua, Europeans in Indigenous Australia, Israelis in Palestine. China has to see that modernisation is not a justification for the sacrifice of another’s life-giving culture. Across the Left–Right divide of modernity there have always been the problematic issues of culture and the person; that is, they remained untheorised; unthought, until fairly recently in new social and cultural theory. Marxism at base, whether of the now statist and pro-market Chinese version or any other, always suffered from the same Enlightenment blind spots that modern western liberal capitalism did — supremacist inclinations built on the success of material production and rationalist hubris, both with their inbuilt incapacity to understand the fullness of human being as culturally constituted.

It is a pity that the very many western supporters of Tibet — all over the world, as the Olympic torch relay coverage has shown — probably do not see it this way. Tibet has a special significance for them, and the western adoption of both the Dalai Lama and Buddhism in large numbers must surely be part of this exceptionalism. In this context the complexity of the China–Tibet situation should be required food for thought for all. That the Dalai Lama did receive monetary support from the CIA for some period of time in the 1970s should alert everyone to the big games that have been, and are now being played out even more earnestly, around China and the protection and projection of US ‘interests’. The chance that Tibetans may be pawns in more than one power play should not be forgotten.

Alison Caddick is an Arena Publications editor.