Historicizing the Global, Politicizing Capital: Giving the Present a Name

Politics in Command

I'd like to begin with a simple quotation, from a proclamation issued to the people of Baghdad: 'Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, but as liberators'. These words were spoken eighty-nine years ago by the British commander Lieutenant General Stanley Maude on the occasion of the military occupation of Baghdad in March 1917. They were mirrored almost exactly by the speech addressed to British troops on the eve of the current invasion three years ago by Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins, who said: 'We go to liberate, not to conquer'. Of course, the mirroring of these two stories doesn't end there. Within three years of General Maude's proclamation, 10,000 had died in an Iraqi uprising against the British rulers, who gassed and bombed the insurgents. It was likewise entirely predictable in our own time that a new military occupation of Iraq would face determined guerrilla resistance long after Saddam Hussein had gone. Incidentally, in 2003 the British military headquarters in Baghdad's Green Zone was named 'Maude House'.¹

'History' is important not just because it casts the current geopolitical catastrophe of the Middle East and Central Asia into a necessary longer context of colonialism, military pacification, improvised state formation, and nationalist insurgency – 'history' is important not just because of those necessary reminders, but also because the architects of current US and British policies in the region constantly call on history in explanation of their decision to invade. I'm thinking here not so much of the debased rhetorical comparisons of Saddam Hussein with Hitler and of his dictatorship with that of the Third Reich, or of the associated loose analogies with the processes of economic and political reconstruction in Europe after the Second World War. I'd like to focus instead on the larger historical rationales that are now moving the two principal and partially competing visions of a 'new world order' that underpin the current US and British presence in the Middle East.

The first of these is the more 'liberal' version espoused by the British government under Tony Blair, which has drawn a wider chorus of voices in its support, from mavericks like Christopher Hitchens to human-rights commentators like Michael Ignatieff and a wider equivocating and ambivalent network of public intellectuals who accepted the liberal rationale for a policy of regime change but couldn't quite bring themselves to line up behind the Bush administration. In the common language of its advocates, this standpoint is 'a new internationalism' or a 'new doctrine of humanitarian intervention', what Blair called in February 2003 a necessary redefinition 'of centre-left politics to cope with a more insecure world'.² This view postulates a co-operative international system. Among practitioners, one of its most influential advocates is the British diplomat Robert Cooper (currently Director-General for External and Politico-Military Affairs at the EU), who laid it out in an essay called 'The Post-Modern State' in a volume published in 2002 by the Foreign Policy Centre.³ These arguments are predicated on a large historical claim about the distinctive international order created by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War; they are linked to concepts of 'failed' or 'collapsed' states; they redeploy liberal-imperialist arguments about the civilizing mission; and they urge the advanced states like the US and putatively the EU to step up to the plate and accept 'their responsibilities in the world'. Here are the concluding paragraphs:

The post-modern EU offers a vision of cooperative empire, a common liberty and a common security without the ethnic domination and centralised absolutism to which past empires have been subject, but also without the ethnic exclusiveness that is the hallmark of the nation state – inappropriate in an era without borders and unworkable in regions such as the Balkans. A cooperative empire might be the domestic political framework that best matches the altered substance of the post-modern state: a framework in which each has a share in the government, in which no single...