Let us name that which could risk making the euphoria of liberal-democrat capitalism resemble the blindest and most delirious of hallucinations, or even an increasingly glaring hypocrisy in its formal or juridicist rhetoric of human rights. It will not be a matter of merely accumulating, as Fukuyama might say, "empirical evidence," it will not suffice to point one's finger at the mass of undeniable facts that this picture could describe or denounce. The question posed too briefly would not even be that of the analysis with which one could then have to proceed in all these directions, but of the double interpretation, the concurrent readings that the picture seems to call for and to oblige us to associate. If one were permitted to name these plagues of the "new world order" in a ten-word telegram, one might perhaps choose the following ten words.
- Unemployment, that more or less well-calculated deregulation of a new market, new technologies, new worldwide competitiveness, would no doubt like labor or production deserve another name today. All the more so in that tele-work inscribes there a new set of givens that perturbs both the methods of traditional calculation and the conceptual opposition between work and non-work, activity, employment and their contrary. This regular deregulation is at once mastered, calculated, "socialized" (that is, most often disavowed), and irreducible to prediction -- like suffering itself, a suffering that suffers still more, and more obscurely, for having lost its habitual models and language once it no longer recognizes itself in the old word unemployment and in the scene that word named for so long. The function of social inactivity, of non-work or underemployment is entering into a new era. It calls for another politics. And another concept. The "new unemployment" no more resembles unemployment, in the very forms of its experience and its calculation, than what in France is called the "new poverty" resembles poverty.
- The massive exclusion of homeless citizens from any participation in the democratic life of States, the expulsion or deportation of so many exiles, stateless persons, and immigrants from a so-called national territory already herald a new experience of frontiers and identity--whether national or civil.
- The ruthless economic war among the countries of the European Community themselves, between them and Eastern European countries, between Europe, the United States, and Japan [we can also include here Russia, China, and India, as well as the oil producing nations of the world]. This war controls everything, beginning with other wars, because in controls the practical interpretation and an inconsistent and unequal application of international law. There have been too many examples in the last decade or more [We can look at Iraq and the much more recent and ongoing conflict in Georgia].
- The inability to master the contradictions in the concept, norms, and reality of the free market (the barriers of a protectionism and the interventionist bidding wars of capitalist States seeking to protect their nationals, or even Westerners or Europeans in general, from cheap labor, which often has no comparable social protection). How is one to save one's own interests in the global market while claiming to protect one's "social advantages" and so forth?
- The aggravation of the foreign debt and other connected mechanisms are starving or driving to despair a large potion of humanity. They tend thus to exclude it simultaneously from the very market that this logic nevertheless seeks to extend. This type of contradiction works through many geopolitical fluctuations even when they appear to be dictated by the discourse of democratization and human rights.
- The arms industry and trade (whether it be "conventional" arms or at the cutting edge of tele-technological sophistication) are inscribed in the normal regulation of scientific research, economy, and socialization of labor in Western democracies. Short of an unimaginable revolution they cannot be suspended or even cut back without running major risks, beginning with the worsening of said unemployment. As for arms trafficking, to the (limited) degree that it can still be distinguished from "normal" commerce, it remains the largest in the world, larger that the drug traffic, from which it is not always dissociated.
- The spread ("dissemination") of nuclear weapons maintained by the very countries that say they want to protect themselves from it, is no longer even controllable, as was the case for a long time, by statist structures. It exceeds no only statist control but every declared market.
- Inter-ethnic wars (have there ever been another kind?) are proliferating, driven by an archaic phantasm and concept , by a primitive conceptual phantasm of community, the nation-State, sovereignty, borders, native soil, and blood. Archaism is not a bad thing in itself, it doubtless keeps some irreducible resource. But how can one deny that this conceptual phantasm is, so to speak, made more outdated than ever, in the very ontopology it supposes, by tele-technic dis-location? (By ontopology we mean axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation, to stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general). For having spread in unheard-of fashion, which is more and more differentiated and more and more accelerated (it is acceleration itself, beyond the norms of speed that have until now informed human culture), the process of dislocation is no less arch-originary, that is, just as "archaic" as the archaism that it has always dislodged. This process is, moreover, the positive condition of the stabilization that it constantly relaunches. All stability in a place being but a stabilization or a sedentarization, it will have to have have been necessary that the local differance, the spacing of displacement gives the movement its start. And gives place and gives rise [donne lieu]. All national rootedness, for example, is rooted first of all in the memory or the anxiety of a displaced -- or displaceable -- population. It is not only time that is "out of joint," but space, space in time, spacing.
- How can one ignore the growing and undelimitable, that is, world wide power of those super-efficient and properly capitalist phantom-States that are the mafia and drug cartels on every continent, including the former so-called socialist States of Eastern Europe? These phantom-States have infiltrated and banalized themselves everywhere, to the point that they can no longer be strictly identified. Nor even sometimes clearly dissociated from the process of democratization (think -- for example -- of the schema, telegraphically simplified here, that would associate them with the "history of a Sicilian mafia harassed by the fascism of the Mussolinian State thus intimately and symbiotically allied to the Allies as well as in the reconstruction of the Italian Christian democratic State which has today entered into a new configuration of capital", about which the least one can say is that we will understand nothing of what is happening there if we do not take account of its genealogy.) All these infiltrations are going through a "critical" phase, as one says, which is no doubt what allows us to talk about them or to begin their analysis. These phantom-States invade not only the socio-economic fabric, the general circulation of capital, but also statist or inter-statist institutions.
- For above all, above all, one would have to analyze the present state of international law and its institutions. Despite a fortunate perfectibility, despite an undeniable progress, these international institution suffer from at least two limits. The first and most radical of the two stems from the fact that their norms, their charter, the definition of their mission depend on a certain historical culture. They cannot be dissociated from certain European philosophical concepts, and notably from a concept of State or national sovereignty whose genealogical closure is more and more evident, not only in a theoretico-juridical or speculative fashion, but concretely, practically, and practically quotidian. Another limit is strictly linked to the first: This supposedly universal international law remains, in its application, largely dominated by particular nation-States. Almost always their techno-economic and military power prepares and applies, in other words, carries the decision. As one says in English makes the decision Countless examples, recent or not so recent would amply demonstrate this, whether it is a question of deliberations and resolutions of the United Nations or of the putting into practice or the "enforcement" of these decisions: incoherence, discontinuity, inequality of States before the law, the hegemony of certain states over military power in the service of international law, this is what, year after year, day after day, we are forced to acknowledge.
These facts do not suffice to disqualify international institutions. Justice demands, on the contrary, that one pay tribute to a certain of those who are working within them in the direction of the perfectibility and emancipation of institutions that must never be renounced. However insufficient, confused, or equivocal such signs may still be, we should salute what is heralded today in the reflection on the right to interference or intervention in the name of what is obscurely and sometimes hypocritically called the humanitarian, thereby limiting the sovereignty of the State in certain conditions. Let us salute such signs even as one remains vigilantly on guard against the manipulations or appropriations to which these novelties can be subjected.
(Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx)
