Universal Challenge posted by Richard Seymour

A week or so ago, I suggested that nationalism was likely to be the horizon of political discourse in the near future and noted how it was already framing the assumptions of commentators of both left and right.

According to Fred Halliday , the "war on terror" is effectively a contract of mutual particularism, in which the United States (or its political leadership at any rate) has reverted to pre-universal normative sources ("American values" etc), and Al Qaeda are leading the charge of Islamic nationalism, but an aggressively sectarian kind that torments its Shia brothers as well as targeting the decadent liberal West:

This ideological shift was underway before 9/11. It was given intellectual support by the spread of a vapid relativism, sometimes termed “postmodernism”, that had – in response to the collapse of forms of rigid political rationalism – gained considerable influence across the developed world in the 1980s and 1990s.

But 9/11 compounded this process – in the generalised and pervasive fear that those events caused, and in the superficial and ranting responses it occasioned in much of the west. There is another reaction not to be underestimated among many people in America and Europe: a retreat from engagement with the political world and of international events – even if this lacked a clear public expression by dint of its very private and socially atomised character.

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Numerous other elites, what may be termed the “crackdown states”, have taken advantage of US appeals for solidarity in the fight against terrorism, to impose more authoritarian control over their own societies, and particularly over those calling for great recognition of minority rights: Uzbekistan, Russia, China, Egypt, Israel. Two important US allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, are themselves the sites of significant anti-western and pro-al-Qaida feeling. The US has for its part openly vaunted its military power and increased its defence budget to $400 billion.

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[T]he response of the United States of America to the attack on its territory has made any serious, effective and considered course of action even more difficult. The world is being dragged towards disaster by two arrogant, militarised, leaderships. We must do all we can to persuade people to shift the world in the other direction, the better to address the issues that predated 9/11 – issues that remain very much alive and pressing, and which, if left unresolved, will lead to more spectacular and ghastly confrontations.

I know it seems a bit much to blame postmodernism for the rise of Al Qaeda and this aggressive phase in US imperialism, but Halliday surely has a point inasmuch as the overemphasis on cultural specificity as well as the assumption that we are principally defined by our cultural differences impacted on the general political culture. Similarly, according to Anatol Lieven , the Bush administration has tapped into a latent American nationalism which was briefly aroused after 9/11. While urbane intellectuals in the foreign policy establishment happily discuss American imperial power in its own terms, most Americans understand US military actions through the prism of nationalism. They do not consider America an imperialist power, on the whole. Indeed, when President Bush sold his imperial policies to the nation, he did so with two noteworthy gestures: 1) he presented it as an effort at spreading democracy and "American values", and 2) he presented it is a concerted effort at defending the American nation.

I think this is all perfectly coherent analysis and worth saying, but one question imposes itself: why should it be that this new nationalism in US foreign policy dovetails so nicely with a certain kind of liberal universalism? Isn't it precisely the case that US particularism is the universal ideology at the moment, inasmuch as few bat an eyelid when values like democracy and liberalism are claimed as "American values"? Isn't it that, given the refusal of universal validity by much of the left, given its retreats, given the fact that the working class has not seemed to have serious international muscle, given the collapse of the institutional "big battallions" of the global Left - "American values" are precisely what have come to fill that empty universal?