Empire and International Order: Should There Be States?

Year 2009, Volume: 1 Issue: 1, 85 - 91, 01.06.2009

W. Julian Korab-karpowicz

Abstract

What should our future be like? Can the world order be organized along the lines
of an international society, or will it dissolve into anarchy? Before attempting to
answer such a big question, let us first inquire whether in the future there
should be states.
The phrase “transnational progressivism” was coined in 2001 by John Fonte
to describe a post-modernist ideology that is a new challenge to the world order
based on a system of states and to liberal democracy in particular. The transnationalists
argue that in the era of globalization, the transnational connection
between non-state actors increase and make obsolete the traditional paradigm
of governance based on the nation-state. Perhaps there is no more sophisticated
theoretical expression of this ideology, which I prefer to call “global progressivism,”
than Empire of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.1
The authors do not hide
their ideological preferences and compare their book to Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
However, in intellectual complexity they exceed their old master. They
display a comprehensive knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition and
use it to deconstruct the intellectual scaffolding that supports the modern political
theory of the West. They advocate political arrangements that can be described
as post-modern, post-democratic, post-liberal, and even post-human.
Rich in metaphor, the writing of Hardt and Negri is a proof that nowadays
IR theory can be not only scientific or philosophical, but also poetic. Nevertheless,
since a theory has to be evaluated in rational terms, I will apply the principle
of charity and present their argument as clearly and as strong as I can. To
present their work I will use a series of images, and then I will the examine the
ideology of global progressivism which will thus be unveiled.