Rene — Holmes — LOOKING OUT FROM THE MARGINS
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interview with Brian Holmes
http://www.transeuropicnic.org/e_event.htm
Q: For the second time we are witnessing the phenomenon of enlargement and unification of the European Union. From one point of view, many people tend to equate the term ’empire’ with the USA and its recent aggressive foreign policy strategies. Yet, European integration is conditioned by a strong enforcement of laws and legitimate rules, which have big influences on EU members or future member countries. According to the landscape this strategy is creating, would you say that the European Union presents a new form of ‘soft’ empire?
BH: Actually, when Negri and Hardt theorized Empire, I think what they were really talking about was the European Union! They thought that the cultural legitimacy, formal law, and constitutional guarantees that seemed so prominent during the Clinton years were going to continue to develop uninterruptedly as a model for kind of global constitutionalism. What happened instead was that America’s old nationalist-imperialist right connected to the oil companies, to the major industries and above all to the army, came back and reasserted a classically imperialist paradigm. The European Union can’t do that. In fact, what you read about constitutional dynamics in the book “Empire” describes a lot better the way the EU is operating, even if they just failed miserably with the first attempt at a constitution. Still the overall notion of empire has a meaning, which is not just reducible to imperialism. Globalization is articulated around three major regions. The first is the United States, which has firmly established NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), and is trying to extend that over the entire western hemisphere in the form of the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), which they probably won’t succeed in finishing. Realistically, they are aiming to push all the way down through Central America to Colombia and Venezuela, which will result in an articulated production bloc, over which they would like to have a more or less unified kind of control. The European Union has succeeded in responding to this quite rapidly, promoting its own continental unification with a more social-democratic kind of management. Here the question of legitimacy is much more important than for the Americans, who just need to take control, turn on the TV stations and start enforcing the rules. There is a third area in the world, South East Asia, where there is a beginning of institutional construction called the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations). It’s very unclear what’s going to happen there because of the role of Japan, which is the major center of capital accumulation in that part of the world. It appears impossible for the Japanese to assert any kind of central organizing control, because of what they did in World War II, the naked force, the atrocities. So you have this very uncertain situation, where Japan supplies the capital, the Chinese and the rest of the ASEAN countries do the labor, and no one really knows what the future will be. Empire is the controlled disagreement and rivalry between these three very shaky ways of getting people to work together. There is a global market, and the Americans obviously have a global military, but there isn’t one global production schema. There are rather three evolving forms of continental integration, each with its own periphery. This is the key thing-each with its own periphery! And that’s where we can finally start talking about the constitutionalism of the European Union. The EU constantly presents itself as an entirely legitimate sort of democratic, integrative thing, based on rights, cultures, languages, exchanges. It wants to present itself as a kind of utopia; but it too has its periphery. In fact, I would say there are two peripheries: an internal periphery, underneath the umbrella of the single currency, and this sort of gigantic free-trade bloc around it. The internal periphery is mainly the former East, where many of the countries are now becoming members of the EU. I’m sure we’re going to see a transfer of low-waged jobs to the internal periphery of the EU, and the emergence of an increasing number of mechanisms to maintain the distinction between people living on the periphery and the people living on the center, i.e. Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Italy and Spain. Of course, England is a kind of pivot for all this, it’s the force that tries to draw the whole European construction over into the American bloc, while Germany and France constantly resist England’s strategy, as everybody saw so clearly during the last Iraq war. For me, that’s the big picture. We have to talk about all that, before we begin to talk about anything specific. Then we get to the question: “What’s life like on these two European peripheries?”
Q: Life on the peripheries has already changed. Ten former socialist countries from Central and Eastern Europe are joining the EU on May 1st. The question arises how this periphery, these Eastern countries, are going to fit in? Taking the obvious cultural differences into account: how can they accommodate Western standards? This paradigm shift led by the heritage of socialism-is it going to happen, or is it going to just stay like it is?
BH: I think this is a huge historical process. It’s going to continue, potentially over generations. The initial construction of the EU involved a lot of attempts to harmonize territorially what was happening in the member states. There are what they call structural funds, which were given to Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland. Those countries were really the big winners in the first enlargement of the EU, during the ’70s and the ’80s particularly. Of course, this raised a lot of hopes for all the new entrants into the EU, but what you see now is a bit different. There are nowhere near as much structural funds available to achieve this kind of equalization and implementation of a common standard of production and consumption that allowed the Spanish and the Portuguese to reach the same level as their immediate neighbors, the French. I don’t think they’re going to be able to achieve that with the new members, because the EU has shifted from being a political project to become a free trade bloc. The inner periphery is not joining the EU that it dreamt of in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s not a Vaclav Havel, literary sort of thing where they build theaters and give everyone a fair trial. It’s a production machine where you’re ultimately competing with the United States and some combination of Japan and China. Now, if you go to the outer periphery, it becomes worse. What is the interest of this space outside the border? From the capitalistic point of view, the interest is that you can take advantage of weak labor laws, you can take advantage of all kinds of zones where there are no rights, not even the relatively meager rights which you’re going to have inside the EU. On the inner periphery, those rights will have to be more or less respected. But outside, you can really have predatory capitalism. And what is there to stop it? A historical project for an alternative to capitalism generated cultural forms which are now rejected, because of, what did they call it? – “democratic centralism.” Basically, the Soviet-style bureaucracy was unbearable, insufferable, and all those cultural and organizational forms have been rejected. Now the countries on the outer periphery are going to be exposed to a very savage form of predatory capitalism. So when you think about what you’re going to do over the next few years, just keep in mind that everywhere there’s a need for the reinvention of cultures of resistance. This need for cultures of resistance is interesting for all of us, and at the same time very daunting for all of us, very formidable as a challenge. Because everyone is faced with a similar mix of situations. You can see the same thing on the edges of the American bloc. When you live in Latin America, you can use some of the tools that are coming from the center, but the conditions under which you live are much more dramatic and savage. People are facing the danger of having no income, of having no more functioning state to develop any kind of social welfare programs; and in cultural terms, there is the danger of having no places sheltered from the market. But this also means that people are forced to take risks, to invent new structures, to develop new solidarities. The question then becomes: can people trying to resist the capitalist process in the central areas find ways to cooperate with people living on the peripheries, while recognizing the differences and not just confidently exporting the beginnings of whatever solution or ideology they are finding to areas where the conditions are not at all the same? I think this would be a question to ask, the question of solidarity.
Q: We mentioned the first EU enlargement, which invested much more instructional reanimation in institutions, in terms of accommodating certain Western standards. Right now, it seems that the strategy of EU enlargement has changed. Everything seems to be based on power, not on financial investments and structural funds. This approximates what actually exists in Western countries. Could this mean that we are experiencing a process of structuring an open-trade market and locating new labor resources?
BH: At this point, globalization is everywhere a capitalist project, developing simultaneously on the regional and world scales. But this project is always expressed through local systems of governance and culture. In the situation on the external periphery of Europe, as in Serbia, what you are likely to see is a strong manipulation by people who want to create a local system of power, which will develop in parallel to a predatory capture of markets. Markets are very important to the central countries, much more so than labor which can increasingly be done by robots. If you want to get somewhere in the world, invent a consuming robot! In the case of Serbia, there will be a much smaller capture of some kind of labor force. That has happened on a larger scale in other peripheral countries, such as Hungary or the Czech Republic, where they’re using what’s considered a sophisticated and yet very cheap labor force, somewhat like what the Irish labor force was considered to be in the ’70s and ’80s. Poland is a third case, which is going to become increasingly important. The question for them is, are they going to be able to develop their education systems as Ireland did? Are they going to emerge from the position of being a cut-rate, unregulated cheap-labor zone? I’m afraid that’s not even the question in countries like Serbia. Rather, it’s about buying up certain kinds of resources, for instance tourist infrastructure, which is massively owned by Western interests now; so it’s about invasively taking over markets. But there’s not going to be any particular investment in the political and cultural system of the outer peripheries. The EU wants those countries to remain relatively stable, without too many civil wars-but they will accept anything that works. What we are likely to see, in the absence of any deep institution-building, is the attempt by the local political classes to create some kind of national identity, a folkloric identity, where cultural differences are maintained. And these differences are also maintained to give people a way to explain the tremendous difference between their situation and the situation of people living just on the other side of the border, like the capacity for mobility, for having a job and an education, which is dramatically different. So, if they explain to you that your identity is dramatically different, then this could be quite useful for a political class who wants to find the way to try to set up an enduring structure of governance. Unfortunately, all the things I’ve just described are also the perfect recipe for inter-ethnic wars, and if you look around, you’ll see that those wars are becoming the way that imperial geopolitical management “works”… So what about people who want to do experiments in media? And what if these are not only experiments in creativity and expressivity, but also in connectivity, in organization, in processes of what I would call micro-representation, where you find a way to network among small groups? All this is a very contemporary experiment in democracy. It’s also a self-managed educational process. It also trains a sophisticated labor force. And it even opens up markets for consumer electronics, for media products, for lifestyles and all those things. So the small, independent initiatives are at the center of all the contradictions! For these good reasons you will get a lot of interest from the European civil societies and from the EU cultural funders, plus a much more ambivalent treatment from the local political class, for which you are at once a kind of promise and a kind of threat, simultaneously. The easy solution, of course, is to be the poster boys and girls for a cultural modernization that only happens in a few bureaucrats’ dreams. Or to be the gadflies of a hometown techno-class that interfaces between the local power-brokers and the EU businesses. But neither of those solutions are really enough when you have to live under the constant shadows of fascism, civil war, international intervention, and the whole disaster show that goes along with capitalist globalization. So I guess the question of what used to be called “institution-building” gets somehow real again, but in a different way.
Q: Those small, independent initiatives that you have mentioned don’t necessarily need to stay small, with limited influence. When we talk about media and new communication technologies, there is always the question of infrastructure. The latter is a very interesting thing, especially in the Eastern part of Europe. Yet, an underdeveloped infrastructure is also a great opportunity for building up mainstream media monopolies. What is the future or are the possibilities for independent media initiatives in Europe and beyond?
BH: There is always the question of the relationship between alternative media and major media, which we don’t talk about enough. If you want to extend the kinds of experimental practices that you’re interested in, eventually you come to a point where it’s a question of enlarging. That means both enlarging the number of people who are collaborating with you, and also your infrastructure-your space, equipment base, and the possibility for people to work on full-time projects. And then you have to confront your real situation in society. Lot of people became aware of this when Soros pulled out of places like the former Yugoslavia. There had been a possibility to develop in a kind of social vacuum, because people came from the US or Northern Europe with all these ideals of legitimacy and the need for direct democratic expression and access to media and so on, and they gave a sort of a “jump start” to lots of initiatives. It wasn’t really so different in the central countries. We saw tremendous growth in these “democratic experiments,” experiments in representation and communication, which initially surfed on the stock-market boom. They developed along paths of rhizomatic singularization, in a way that was predicted surprisingly well by Guattari in late ’80s and early ’90s. But how far can they go before they come up against the wall of capitalistic culture, which is basically defined by the major media? How can we stave off the integration of these new expressive and communicational possibilities into a system of flexible production, consumption and management that’s still beneath the boot of those who control the major media? I think it’s an unresolved question all over the world. There hasn’t been much penetration of the media, because people don’t want to. And they’re right! But we do need infrastructure and a lot more small institutions, which could manage things like festivals, but with enough autonomy to actually produce access to more than just tools, access to a whole kind of a culture of self-organization and co-operativity. So far, what we have is a kind of a floating situation with temporary sorts of gatherings and great amount of a volunteer work, which is very good. But maybe we need to find how to expand the volunteer aspect, while creating certain kinds of infrastructure or institutions that don’t bureaucratize or commercialize, and don’t halt the kind of innovation that creates the desire on which everything is founded. This would be a real development of constituent power, in its divergence from all the constituted powers. I think that’s the interesting perspective. What Geert Lovink said at the Neuro festival was right: “Things begin with an event.” The event, in the mid and late ’90s, was “networked media becoming accessible.” Then came political events: the anti-globalization movement. And also institutional events: the invention of all these little media centers. We are now living off those events, and the question is: “How can we start to invent something that transforms a big surprise into sort of possibility for many, many smaller ones-without taking away the possibility of another big surprise?”
Q: Now we come to this question of solidarity, which is present in every kind of process of cooperation, networking and working together. Could you elaborate on the parallel you draw between the movement of non-aligned countries that existed during ’60s, and the present situation, where witness a growth of independent social and media movements world-wide.
BH: I think it’s something we could all really look out for. In a text called “Imaginary Maps, Global Solidarities,” I wrote about the non-aligned movement, which was built up in the ’60s, particularly around India, Cuba, and the former Yugoslavia, and which was also an important reference point for the political resistance movements and counter-cultures of the developed countries. By evoking that, I just wanted to give a kind of historical analogy to an unfulfilled possibility of today. I think there is nothing like that right now, but I also think that something similar will be or already is a necessity. In the emergence of a stronger cooperation between India, South Africa and Brazil, there is a kind of direct echo of the non-aligned movement. But I’m not sure it’s enough. I don’t think that we’ve yet seen an invention in those terms. And I’m not sure that we’ve really seen an invention with the “social forum movement” either, because there’s a lot of nostalgia for the non-aligned movement, and for modernist central planning. The ones who have that nostalgia tend to be the better-organized ones, because they’re still inhabiting the organizations that came out of that period. But the problem is that they don’t face the failures of the modernizing projects. That is a certain limit on the amount of people who can be integrated into those projects, leaving behind the massive reality of those who are excluded. You can see it very clearly in countries like Argentina. It was a modernizing society, an industrial system with European-style social guarantees, including health care, public education, retirement benefits and so on. What happened is that the capitalist project we were talking about before just destroyed that modernizing attempt, in a process that goes from the dictatorship in Argentina in 1976-83 all the way to the Menem period in the ’90s, when public services were massively sold off, according to the plan of the IMF but to the direct profit of the local political class. That political class became tremendously rich, along with the local business class. At the same time, literally half the population of the country lost the possibility to make a living. So, the question is what kind of political invention is going to arise to take account of this disaster that’s unfolding in the world? It’s really a disaster, and therefore different kinds of political constructions are arising, you can see them on the horizon. It’s clearest in Latin America. But, the traditional leftist way, the one that’s represented with a great deal of hope by Lula in Brazil, is probably too closely attached to the stagnant institutions of the industrial age, and to the power system that put them into place, then partially destroyed them. What needs to be discovered now are political and organizational forms that give people the space and resources to take care of themselves, without forgetting or denying their dependency on everyone else. So what I’m talking about is not to immediately leap on a bandwagon of the social forums, or of the Brazil-South Africa-India triangle, although these things are worthy of our interest. I don’t want to deny the tremendous amount of effort that’s going into constructing then, but there will need to be a further step, which can only happen if you ask the question of who’s really included. From this viewpoint, if you’ve got your hands on a computer and a video camera, you are included, you’re part of the modern economy. But we are talking about millions, even billions of people who increasingly don’t have enough to eat. There’s the ultimate urgency, and my feeling is that a leftism for our time will only come together when some network of social groups invents ways of responding to it on the continental and global scales. In that perspective the creation of transnational networks is very important, and the question of solidarity is what kind of active role can people like ourselves have, people who are included, but in a marginal way. A lot of people living in the Western European countries are included in a marginal way, we’re included in what is called a “precarious” way, or an “unguaranteed” way. And it’s interesting that a lot of people have actually chosen this position. It’s as if they said: “I don’t want to be included in the mainstream project of this predatory capitalism, I prefer to be on the edges, in a marginal position.” From that position, on the edges of that insane kind of rivalry between the production blocs that we were talking about before, it may be possible to look and listen enough to find out what kind of political invention is actually going to happen. I’ve begun to travel around the world for that reason, and you can see something starting. You can participate in it. But as far as I can tell, nobody can yet say exactly what it is.