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Empire,
War and Citizenship
By
Walden
Bello*
July 27, 2003
Note
TFF advocates nonviolent struggle before anything else.
We disagree with Bello's view that "For a people under
occupation, armed struggle is not one option. It is the
only option."
We hope, however, that by bringing this to our readers,
it will contribute to a much needed debate about the ways
in which the Iraqis can liberate themselves from the
occupation. In addition, many other perspectives in this
article certainly merits our attention and
reflection.
Almost daily, we hear reports
of American soldiers being picked off one by one by
underground forces in Iraq. Since George W. Bush declared
victory on May 1, over 30 US soldiers have died in
combat. Soon, the number of Americans killed after
victory will outstrip the number who died in the
invasion.
This speech was delivered at the UP Foundation Day
Assembly on June 19, 2003)
" I would like, first of all, to thank Chancellor
Emerlinda Roman for honoring me with this invitation to
give one of the two UP Foundation Day speeches. Allow me
to take this occasion to say what I always tell my
undergraduate students: it is a privilege to teach at UP,
and my greatest regret in life is having had to do my
undergraduate work not at this university but on the
other side of Katipunan Road.
Rid Iraq of the
invaders
Almost daily, we hear reports of American soldiers
being picked off one by one by underground forces in
Iraq. Since George W. Bush declared victory on May 1,
over 30 US soldiers have died in combat. Soon, the number
of Americans killed after victory will outstrip the
number who died in the invasion.
I must confess that I feel no sympathy for plight of
the American troops in Iraq. I look at them in the same
way I view the Nazi storm-troopers or Japanese soldiers
during the Second World War - machines who have opened
themselves up to retribution for participating in the
brutal invasion and destruction of a country and its
people. The average American soldier in Baghdad may plead
that he is simply following orders. However, the
Nuremburg and Tokyo war crimes trials were clear in this
regard: one cannot plead obedience to immoral orders as
an excuse for violating people's rights.
If we were in the shoes of the Iraqis, one thing is
certain: our primary duty as citizens now would be to rid
the country of invaders, and if armed resistance is the
only way to do it, then we have no choice but to resort
to it. This is not, let me stress, a Fanonian position
that glorifies the so-called "therapeutic" functions of
violence. In some contexts, moral suasion works. In
others, unfortunately, valuable ends like liberation from
foreign domination can only be achieved by other
means.
Visiting
Iraq
These days I find myself wondering about what happened
to the students we met at Baghdad University, Iraq's UP,
on March 16, a few days before the invasion of Iraq. I
had gone there as part of an Asian Parliamentary and
Civil Society Mission that was one of the many last-ditch
initiatives launched globally to prevent the
Anglo-American invasion.
It was a beautiful spring day, March 16. I still
remember the exchange we had with students in an English
Lit class taking up Romeo and Juliet. What did they think
about George Bush, Congresswoman Etta Rosales, one of the
members of the delegation, asked. "He is like Tybalt,
clumsy and ill-intentioned," said a young woman in
near-perfect English, referring to Romeo's tormentor.
What did they think about Bush's promise to invade
Iraqis? Answered another student, "We've been invaded by
many armies for thousands of years, and those who wanted
to conquer us always said they wanted to liberate us."
Iraq was weak, said another young woman, but "our faith
will overcome the invaders."
Youth and spring are a heady brew, and the threat of
impending war made the occasion all the more poignant,
and we all felt sad as we sped away. Two days later, we
were hightailing it on the 550 kilometer stretch from
Baghdad to Damascus, trying to beat the onset of the
American aerial bombardment. Those young people, however,
had nowhere to go. Some of those eager new fans of
Shakespeare will not see another spring, having either
died in the bombardment on in its aftermath of chaos. But
I am sure that some are now active in the resistance.
Just two days ago, an American soldier was shot in the
head while buying a Coke at Baghdad University. The main
thing that flashed through my mind was: Was the
executioner one of the students we met a few weeks
ago?
CNN is trying very hard to portray the urban
guerrillas picking off American soldiers as "terrorists"
or "remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime." But that is
increasingly a hard sell, not only to me but to most of
the world, who see these people for what they are:
freedom fighters, much like the guerrillas of the
National Liberation Front in Vietnam and the Waray bolo
men who inflicted one of the US forces' worst and
bloodiest defeats during the American conquest of our
country in the town of Balangiga in 1901.
Armed struggle is
the only option - visiting the United States
For a people under occupation, armed struggle is not
one option. It is the only option. This became very clear
to me when I was in the US a few weeks ago, speaking at a
sparsely attended anti-war meeting. Moral suasion on the
questions of Iraq will not work with most Americans at
this point. America is Bush country at this juncture, and
the polls show that, so far, the majority of Americans
approve of the invasion of Iraq even if the
Administration manufactured that false story about Saddam
possessing weapons of mass destruction to justify the
aggression.
There one comes up against the moral and political
tyranny of a poitically conservative majority that Louis
Hartz pointed to as the underside of the liberal ideology
of America. However, people who are willing to allow the
rights of others to be trampled end up losing their
rights. We have seen in the last two years a massive
assault on constitutional rights that has been tolerated
by most Americans on grounds of "national security."
There are at least 5,000 Muslim men - permanent
residents, citizens, non-citizens - who are locked up
indefinitely without charges, their identities publicly
concealed, and the great majority of Americans do not see
it fit to protest. Appealing to the decency
and values of these people to throw off the yoke of
occupation will not work since the majority of Americans
are currently political zombies, the living dead, who
will leave their state of transmogrified bliss only with
great effort on the part of that minority of courageous
Americans who court the anger of the very majority that
they are trying to awake. We salute those
anti-imperialist Americans, but patriotic Iraqis know it
would be foolhardy to base their liberation on the
eventual success of these fine people.
Empire of the American variety rests on democratic
consent, and with George W. Bush, we are entering a new
phase of US imperial democracy. Globalization to promote
the collective interest of the global capitalist class is
out, the nationalist pursuit of supremacy of US corporate
interests is in. Multilateralism as a system of global
governance is out, unilateralism is in. Managing the
empire by relying on a mixture of political and
ideological hegemony and force is out, force as the first
resort in dealing with threats to the global order is in.
Hardt and Negri's Empire as an explanation of the global
conjuncture is out, Lenin's Imperialism: the Highest
Stage of Capitalism is back.
Why has America shifted to the unilateralist mode
under George W. Bush? One answer one frequently
encounters in liberal circles is that a tiny group of
neoconservatives has hijacked the White House and imposed
a militarist policy aimed at assuring permanent global
hegemony for the United States that is opposed even by
key factions of the US elite. I am dubious about this,
and the reason I am is that the Democratic Party - the
elite opposition - is having a hell of a time trying to
articulate a different foreign policy vision than Bush's.
If Bush is successful, it is partly because the US elite
has largely closed ranks behind him - and, unfortunately,
the majority of the American people behind them.
The severe crisis
of US hegemony - globalization has failed: overreach
I think far more plausible is the explanation that
Bush's unilateralism is a response to a severe crisis of
US hegemony. Look at the 1990's and notice the contrast
between the beginning of the decade and the end of the
decade. The beginning of the decade was the collapse of
the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, capitalism
triumphant, free market ideology or neoliberalism
unchallenged. Now look at the end of the nineties and the
first years of the 21st century, and you see Seattle, the
failure of corporate-driven globalization, massive
disenchantment with neoliberalism, the corporation losing
legitimacy, the massive Wall Street collapse that
inaugurates an era of global economic stagnation and
deflation.
Globalization has failed. Liberal internationalism
Clinton-style has failed as a formula for the maintenance
of hegemony. Multilateralism and diplomacy are too
cumbersome. Unilateralism is the answer. The employment
of force is the only reliable way to maintain a global
order dominated by the US. This, in brief, is the
neoconservative paradigm that reigns at the White House.
There is only one problem with this, and it is that
force without legitimacy creates resistance. And the
spread of resistance pretty soon leads to overextension -
a condition where there is a mismatch between goals and
means, with means referring not only to military
resources but to political and ideological ones as well.
One can understand why, after watching CNN night after
night, many feel the US is supreme and omnipotent.
Indeed, this is precisely what Washington wants us to
think.
But look closer and consider the following and ask
yourself if they are not signs of overreach:
- Washington has, so far, not been able to create a
new political order in Iraq that would serve as a secure
foundation for colonial rule;
- It has failed to consolidate a pro-US regime in
Afghanistan outside of Kabul;
- Israel, a key ally, has not been able to quell, even
with Washington's unrestricted support, the Palestinian
people's uprising;
- The US's moves have inflamed Arab and Muslim
sentiment in the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast
Asia, resulting in massive ideological gains for Islamic
fundamentalists - which was what Osama bin Laden had been
hoping for in the first place;
- The Cold War Atlantic Alliance has collapsed, and in
its place has emerged a new countervailing alliance, with
Germany and France at the center of it, along with Russia
and China;
- The forging of a powerful global civil society
movement against US unilateralism, militarism, and
economic hegemony, the most recent significant expression
is the global anti-war movement;
- The coming to power of anti-neoliberal, anti-US
movements in Washington's own backyard - Brazil,
Venezuela, and Ecuador - as the Bush administration is
preoccupied with the Middle East;
- An increasingly negative impact of militarism on the
US economy, as military spending becomes dependent
on deficit spending, and deficit spending become more and
more dependent on financing from foreign sources,
creating more stresses and strains within an economy that
is already in the throes of stagnation.
The Roman Empire
and the importance of citizenship and legitimacy - Bush
not so
Now let us go back over two millenia.
At another time, another place, another empire
confronted the same problem of overextension. Its
solution enabled it to last 700 years. The Roman solution
was not just or even principally military in character.
The Romans realized that an important component of
successful imperial domination was consensus among the
dominated of the "rightness" of the Roman order. As
sociologist Michael Mann notes in his classic Sources
of Social Power, the "decisive edge" was not so much
military as political. "The Romans," he writes,
"gradually stumbled on the invention of extensive
territorial citizenship." The extension of Roman
citizenship to ruling groups and non-slave peoples
throughout the empire was the political breakthrough that
produced what "was probably the widest extent of
collective commitment yet mobilized." Political
citizenship combined with the vision of the empire
providing peace and prosperity for all to create that
intangible but essential moral element called legitimacy.
The Bush people are not interested in legitimacy. They
are not interested in creating a new Pax Romana. What
they want is a Pax Americana where most of the
subordinate populations like the Arabs are kept in check
by a healthy respect for lethal American power, while the
loyalty of other groups such as the government of Gloria
and Golez is purchased with the promise of cash. With no
moral vision to bind the global majority to the imperial
center, this mode of imperial management can only inspire
one thing: more and more resistance.
Global civil
society on the move - choose resistance
The Bush invasion of Iraq has had very many bad
consequences, but it has had one good outcome, and this
is that it has brought together for the first time a
truly global citizens' movement to oppose it--a movement
that showed its power on Feb. 15, with coordinated
demonstrations in some 100 cities throughout the world
that turned out millions and millions of demonstrators.
The New York Times called the movement the "other global
superpower," and you and I are part of it.
That movement is alive and kicking. Just a few weeks
ago, representatives of this movement from all over the
world met and drafted the Jakarta Peace Consensus
which stated that the first order of business after the
Iraq invasion is the unconditional withdrawal of all US,
British, and other forces from Iraq, and the second order
of business is the convoking of tribunals to try George
Bush, Tony Blair, and other political and military
leaders of the invasion for war crimes. These demands
have since been picked up in one assembly after another
since then.
Am I exaggerating the temperature of global civil
society? I do not think so. For even as the US population
lies lobotomized, others are up in arms. Ask Tony Blair,
who is now under assault by an angry British public for
manufacturing the data about Iraq's alleged weapons of
mass destruction. Because of international civil society
opposition, the US continues to have very few allies on
Iraq, and most of those in the so-called continue to be
embarrassed by their membership in the Coalition of the
Willing. Our president, of course, is an exception.
So it turns out that the invasion of Iraq
was merely the first phase of a protracted war. We have,
in short, the makings of another Vietnam--rising internal
resistance, a powerful occupation force that is
overextended and pinned down, and a global movement
against intervention and war. The main difference is that
the global peace movement today is much stronger than it
was during the Vietnam War.
We will not have peace in our time. The rogue
superpower that the United States has turned into will
not give the world peace. Here in the Philippines, we
must expect to be drawn in more and more into direct
confrontation with a US military that desires the country
as a staging area for projecting power against China and
against Islamic movements in the Southern Philippines,
Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Sooner or later, just as in Iraq and just as in the
Philippines at the turn of the last century, our choices
will narrow. Mindanao is seen by Washington as one of
what Samuel Huntington calls the bloody borders between
Islam and the West, between Asian revolution and American
imperium, and they are determined to protect their
interests even if permanent war and destabilization is
the fate of our peoples. As the American troops occupy
more and more of our national space - both physically and
psychologically - we will have to choose between
submission or resistance to Empire.
Periods when peace and justice reign are evanescent.
This is why we look back to such periods as Golden Ages.
But even as we realize that it may vanish as soon as we
achieve it or our efforts to achieve it may fail, we must
struggle to bring about the reign of peace and justice,
for it is in that struggle that we become truly human.
Let me end by connecting this to our concern
today: citizenship.
Good citizenship means many things. It means electing
people who really serve the people. It means fighting and
exposing corruption. It means participating in the battle
against poverty and inequality. But it also means
struggling against empire, imperial pretensions, against
aggression, against the callous violation of the rights
of the weak countries by the powerful ones. I daresay
that the one of the most urgent demands of good
citizenship, both at the global and the national level,
at this point is the struggle against American Empire.
This is a call that we can resist only at the pain of
being damned by future generations.
I thank you."
*Professor
of sociology and public administration, University of the
Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City.
©
TFF and the
author
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