From Imperialism to Empire

With every day's headlines, the failure of the Bush Administration's unilateralist policies and imperialist adventures becomes clearer. In Iraq the military occupation and efforts at nation-building are such fiascos that even the architects of the war can no longer muster optimism. The fact that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death, which earlier would have been celebrated as a sign of imminent victory, solicited from George W. Bush only a note of caution on the long road ahead is a measure of how deep things have sunk.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, which until recently had been vaunted as the model of success, the veneer of order and control has completely dissolved. We are now told that there is danger of a resurgence of the Taliban, the government's handle on social order is tenuous at best and the population is seething with resentment against the US occupying forces. Here, too, the mirage of victory has been revealed as failure.

It is worth taking a moment to step back from the rush of events, though, to reflect on what these failures mean. My view is that they indicate not only the errors of one government's policies but also the end of imperialism itself and the emergence of a new logic of global power that comes with new dangers and possibilities. In order to understand this "end of imperialism" and what it means for politics, we need to look back a few years and approach the current failures from another perspective.

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