Governance in the New Global Disorder

Politics for a Post-Sovereign Society

Daniel Innerarity, Sandra Kingery

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231542258
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

When we talk about globalization, we tend to focus on its social and economic benefits. In Governance in the New Global Disorder, the political philosopher Daniel Innerarity considers its unsettling and largely unacknowledged consequences. The "opening" of different societies to new ideas, products, and forms of prosperity has introduced a persistent uncertainty, or disorder, into everyday life. Multinational corporations have weakened sovereignty. We no longer know who is in control or who is responsible. Economies can collapse without sufficient warning, and the effort to rebuild can drag on for years. Piracy is everywhere. Is there any way to balance the interests of state, marketplace, and society in this new construct of power?

Since national economies have become deterritorialized and political interdependencies aggravate our common vulnerabilities, Innerarity contends that there is no other solution except to move toward global governance and a denationalization of justice. Globalization tries to unify the world through technologies, the economy, and cultural products and styles, but it cannot articulate or regulate political and legal equivalents. Everyone faces the same risks to their security, food supply, health, financial stability, and environment, and these risks demand a new global politics of humanity. In her foreword, the sociologist Saskia Sassen isolates the key takeaways from Innerarity's argument and the solutions they present to growing global tensions.

PART I

AN UNPROTECTED WORLD

1

THE RETURN OF PIRATES IN THE GLOBAL ERA

IN his famous book The History of Piracy, Philip Gosse (1989 [1932], 298) recalls that people, at the end of the nineteenth century, believed the disappearance of pirates was imminent. It was the dream of a world where there is no territory without sovereignty, in other words, no one distanced from the rules of the state (Thompson 1994; Anderson 1997). Subsequent history seems to flatly disprove this prediction. Piracy has stopped being a historical curiosity or a simple metaphor. Pirates are among us and taking on diverse forms in many different realms: pirates of the air and seas, radio pirates, parliamentary pirates, global terrorists, computer pirates and hackers, viruses, spam, illegal immigrants, squatters, biopiracy, lobbyists, free riders, financial pirates, leaks, data aggregators, flags of convenience, international organized crime, money laundering, and so on.

The pirate is part of the contemporary social imaginary of globalization, where there is a convergence of predatory capitalism, fundamentalist movements, networks that escape the states, and the libertarians of deregulated cyberspace. Piracy maintains a close relationship with the figure of the parasite since pirates cannot exist without a social system off of which they live, but to which they do not want to belong: viruses live off our organism; those who steal intellectual property are dependent on the existence of cultural creation; the financial economy depends in the end on what we call the real economy; and so on. There are also “free riders”: people, institutions, or countries that go it alone and escape the agreements that should bind them.

The theme of piracy affords an interesting lens with which to consider many of our current conflicts regarding the ways in which ideas and technologies are created, distributed, and utilized. What is at stake, in the end, is the nature of the relationship we would like to maintain between creativity and commerce. It is not going too far to affirm that we are in the midst of the most profound revolution in intellectual property since the middle of the eighteenth century, and that it will probably destroy the conception of intellectual property that we have held until now and that is at the heart of our systems of copyrighting and patenting. Adrian Johns has announced this transformation by specifically taking the idea of piracy as a metaphor (Johns 2009). Internet protocols, in particular, seem to confirm that there are viable alternatives to the norms of traditional property. Many new business models make use of open software, which exploits previously unprecedented network properties; protests are being extended to the abuse of the system of pharmaceutical patents; and so on. In any case, the questions at stake do not merely represent changes in technology.

By virtue of the information economy, piracy has been generalized as a metastasis challenging the capacity to understand and control it. The accusation of piracy has turned into the reproach of our age, an omnipresent element in the discussions of business politics. At the same time as piracy has grown and diversified, a counterindustry dedicated to fighting it has also emerged.

The ambiguity of the phenomenon sparks very diverse reactions. The most fearful among us will fretfully affirm that we are moving toward a world full of pillage and plunder; on the other hand, the panorama seems to promise new emotions to those who are bored with the traditional political scene. In any case, it is worth asking if this reappearance of piracy gives us a clue to better understand the current world, its promises, and its dangers. We should verify the hypothesis that piracy is inseparable from the globalization of mercantile flows, from the formation of a transatlantic maritime world; that is why pirates are found in every period of transition. They have reappeared, in our case, given the current lack of definition about the nature and management of humanity’s common goods in the context of globalization and the knowledge society. Whether in the Mediterranean during the seventh century, in the Atlantic beginning in the seventeenth century, or in its current form everywhere, the tactic of piracy always consists in lying in ambush as close as possible to mercantile flows and as far as possible from the large political-military centers. It is no longer necessary to move anywhere to be in a place like this since the reality of globalization is that the financial system prevails over the political system everywhere; all locations today are close to the economic networks and far from political power.

The current profusion of various types of piracy is a sign of the type of world we inhabit thanks to globalization; some scholars have interpreted this as a “liquid” world. With the increase in what we could call common public goods (the climate, Internet, health, security, financial stability, and so on), uncertainty about their ownership and management also increases. All the efforts to regulate these new realities could be understood as attempts to afford a certain territorial intelligibility to areas where a special ambiguity has reigned until now. The difficulty of the matter consists in that this can no longer be done within the old categories of the nation-state; it requires a new way of thinking and managing the new public space.

LAND AND SEA

The point of departure for this inquiry could be the divergence between the land and the sea that has been part of our geopolitical imaginary since Thucydides (1972), who contrasted coastal Athens to landlocked Sparta, one democratic and the other a conservative alliance. The premodern world was an imperial, “maritime” world, not organized on the basis of strict territoriality, as nation-states in the modern era would later be defined. Herman Melville, the great poet of the maritime world, has one of his characters in Moby Dick declare: “Noah’s flood is not yet subsided.” Both the unity and the division of the planet then depended on maritime factors. The empires wanted to assert their authority as hegemonic powers across the oceans. The imperial age cannot be understood without hydropolitics.

The legal notion of “territory,” fixed and delimited, on the other hand, is a creation of modernity. The ancient world was still too fluid and limitless. Ancient and medieval cities and republics established dominion over specific geographic extensions. Even the Roman Empire admitted that its supremacy extended to the Limes of the empire. But this boundary was not a border. It was a point where the area of a specific jurisdiction stopped, a point provisionally reached by the advance of the legions. Even when they became stable, these were not strict limits. Instead, it was a zone of transition, commerce, and communication between the Roman and the barbarian worlds. There were typically these types of spaces in medieval cities. They were not divided by lines, but by areas, sometimes sufficiently broad so as to allow enclaves and exclaves, where authority could always be debated. In a strict sense, the line of territorial demarcation emerged much later. As many historians have shown, the border was an invention of the absolutist state, especially in France.

Sea and land are also confronted as images with epistemological meaning. In a famous passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contrasts solid land, which he calls the “land of truth,” with the ocean as the “region of illusion” where the fog banks seem “a new country” (1968b, B294/A235). Modernity is epistemologically inaugurated as a supremacy of territorial permanence in the face of the fluidity and ambiguity of marine liquid.

Modernity is politically translated into the shape of the nation-state, based on territory, which establishes a new way of dividing the space of power, with clear jurisdictions and without areas of ambiguous sovereignty. But this period is a moment in history that is overcome in the middle of the twentieth century, when the process we call globalization is accentuated. The resulting interdependencies seem to lead us to a space that has more in common with the maritime indetermination of empire than with the solid ground of states.

The contrast between the sea and land also allows for a more general consideration of political theory in which two ways of understanding the social order become imaginarily opposed. Looking at things from this contrastive lens, we find this very antagonism in reflections made by Carl Schmitt in the period between the world wars (Schmitt 2008). The German jurist found it unfortunate that the dry-land nations, protectors of security and property, were growing weaker in the face of the maritime, liberal, oceanic powers. For Schmitt, the sixteenth and seventeen centuries were torn asunder by the antagonism between the terrestrial powers of closed societies and the maritime powers of open societies. This outline is the backdrop for all the political debates of modernity, which have revolved around a fundamental distinction between autarchic terrestrial states and limitless maritime powers, the collision between a political philosophy of land and a political philosophy of the sea, between a belief in limitation and a belief in limitlessness. For Schmitt, a conservative, that which is finite and completed represents the ideal, in contrast to that which is open and incomplete, typical of liberal societies. The supremacy of politics was symbolized for him in the power of solid ground, in the determination of that which is continental.

What horrified Carl Schmitt was that the land could collapse into the sea, in other words, that nations could end up disbanded in the ambiguity of a common public law. That explains his strong opposition to the birth of a new international order or jurisdiction, as he pointed out after the Second World War. Since then, the very dynamic of globalization has led us to the configuration of new spaces that require a jurisdiction beyond the national state, the appropriate management of interdependent common goods, and global governance. “Humanity” is now an inevitable term; from discussions about human rights and crimes against humanity to humanitarian associations and interventions, the name of our common species is crucial to refer to particular issues that point toward a cosmopolitan horizon.

This antagonism between the open sea and the limited land is very well exemplified in the philosophies of Grotius and Hobbes. The first is the defender of a world without static sovereignties and, therefore, without stable properties. Hobbes, on the other hand, is the champion of the terrestrial order.

We should recall the history that gave birth to this particular ideological juxtaposition. In 1603 in the Straits of Malacca, a Portuguese ship was captured by a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company. Portugal denounced this act of piracy and demanded the restitution of its cargo, while the Dutch company tried to justify the seizure. The Dutch then appealed to Hugo Grotius, a young lawyer at that point, who argued, in a work titled De Jure Praedae Commentarius (1606), that it was an act of legitimate defense against a country, Portugal, that was trying to gain exclusive control over the Asian seas to guarantee their business. His final argument was that, in the name of natural rights, no one can appropriate the air or the water and that it is impossible to appropriate the sea, because it belongs to everyone.

In this way, Grotius justified the right to plunder, to appropriation, as the new maritime way of thinking. He questioned the sovereign states’ attempts to appropriate the seas. Grotius came to affirm that the uninhabitable oceans had a specific legal status that made them closer to the properties of air. It was not possible to acquire fixed sovereignty over these elements. All attempts at possessing the open seas, whether they were claimed as a “discovery,” through papal bulls, or through the laws of war or conquest, were equally invalid. A similar argument was formulated by that great writer of the seas, Herman Melville, who established a distinction in order to legitimize colonial capture between the “fast-fish,” which belonged to stable, consolidated authorities, and the “loose-fish,” which were fair game for whoever arrived first. He concluded that the “loose-fish” category included America for Columbus, Poland for the czars, and India for the English. There is also an old tradition that associates property with the cultivation of land and believes that what is not cultivated or not cultivatable (such as the sea) cannot strictly belong to anyone. Plutarch once described the inhabitants of a certain island as pirates because they did not know how to cultivate the land. It is the same argument that was used to say that the Americas were unpopulated when the conquistadors arrived. Inhabiting means cultivating the land; those who do not do so do not have any rights over the space. That is why it was permissible to expel the indigenous peoples in the Americas or to freely ply the seas.

Hobbes’s Leviathan (published in 1651) could be interpreted specifically as the attempt to establish terrestrial order and security against maritime disorder. The modern nation-state thus arose against the disorder of the sea, against that which is mobile, unstable, floating, fluctuating, and elusive, symbolically personified by pirates. It is not surprising, therefore, that Schmitt found in Hobbes a precedent for his conception of a sovereign state, as that which introduces order and limitations in the face of maritime chaos.

THE NEW ECONOMY OF PILLAGING

Everything seems to indicate that the battle is currently tipped in favor of what Zygmunt Bauman has called the “liquid world” (2007): globalization is driven by general fluidity, which implies liquidation not only of the old borders, but also of the very idea of the border, which becomes obsolete in a deterritorialized space. We can comprehend what is going on with the metaphor of an “oceanification of the world,” in which fluidity is liberated from territorial constriction. It is a question of a world in which displacement and flexibility are the only reality, a world of generalized circulation, in which everyone navigates, whether it is through digital, financial, or communicative spaces. What has not been fulfilled is Virgil’s dream where, in the fourth of his Eclogues, he affirmed that, in the future, we would live in a golden age when there would be no more voyages by sea. Even though there are now faster means of transportation, maritime traffic has not decreased: 95 percent of the global transportation of material now takes place by sea. The sea, this shapeless, unmarked medium, a universe of danger and conquest, is now the risk society, deregulated spaces of finance and consumption over which the old nation-state appears to be a power without authority.

We are facing a configuration of the world that looks like the archaic form of the societies of hunters and gatherers, who conceive of the world more in terms of itineraries, plunder, and pacts than as closed spaces and stable properties. There is nothing strange about the figure of the pirate reappearing in a world like this, and it is not surprising that it continues to represent an ambiguity between freedom and barbarity. The pirate ship is a multiracial and multireligious utopia that one can choose to join, the celebration of the right to leave against the obligation of identity. There are various recent studies regarding the pirate economy and its peculiarities (Lesson 2009). The Marxist historian Christopher Hill (1973) pointed out that many radicals viewed piracy as more honorable than the sugarcane culture based on slavery.

The pirate embodies the type of enemy who does not threaten a particular country as much as land nations in general, not a concrete sovereignty as much as the idea of sovereignty in general. This is a person who, according to Philip Gosse, is “in defiance of all organized respectability.” A pirate is distinct from a corsair in that he obeys no land laws and receives support from no land government. Cicero talked about people who are situated beyond the obligations of the “immensa societate humani generis” [“immense society of the human species”] (Gosse 1989 [1932], 1.53). Within the taxonomy of enmity, pirates occupy a special place given their character as enemies of anyone who passes by. A pirate is not an individual enemy but everyone’s common enemy (communis hostis omnium) (Heller-Roazen 2009). For the Roman philosopher, being part of the human community implies belonging to a clearly delimited territory. This is not the case for pirates, which explains their unsettling dangerousness.

Piracy is the opposite of hegemony, not in the sense that it is able to compete with empires in the power arena, but because it contests the idea of sovereignty itself. Piracy meddles in the intervals that the cycles of sovereignty continue to open, in “the space without witnesses, in the moral void” (Sloterdijk 2005, 180). This absolute hostility leads to our current designation of genocides as “crimes against humanity” or terrorists as “unlawful combatants.” Modern terrorism is reminiscent less of a traditional war between nations than of the piracy that stems from the weakening of modern conventions on territorial war (Chomsky 2002; Innerarity 2004). We find ourselves facing “brigands,” in the sense in which Bodino used the term to refer to those who do not respect the rules of the game (which also has unintended consequences, since turning the enemy into a “brigand” or a “fugitive” has served as an excuse for a strong decline of justice, for weakening democracy and international law). The parallelism between ancient piracy and current international terrorism is based on the fact that both phenomena are situated on the fringes of the territorial picture.

For this reason, I do not believe it is overextending the metaphor to affirm that piracy represents a new form of being in a world that has become liquid. I am referring not only to global terrorism but to current forms of globalization that once again take the bird of prey as a model. We could think about the behavior of consumers, which is so similar to pillaging (as is revealed by the first day of sales at the largest retailers or by any form of consumption that implies damage to the environment). The success of financial products would be inexplicable if it were not for the fact that they promise such large profits that we are blinded to the risks these products entail. I am also thinking about biopiracy, a term that appeared at the beginning of the 1990s to denote the unrightful appropriation of genetic resources. In this case, scientific or medical institutions are denounced as pirates, not because they destroy property, but because they introduce it into places where it did not previously exist. There is a relationship between many current conflicts and the regulation of certain natural resources; this could be called “a political ecology of war.” In short, the current increase in pillaging is explained by the weakness of nations when it comes to effectively controlling their territories and by the worsening of particularly intolerable inequalities.

The analogy also proves its worth if we examine the current ideological panorama, more liquid than territorial, with political strategies that are closer to piracy than to traditional action. The current ideological disillusionment is manifested in the fact that neither the left nor the right is particularly interested in taking part in habitual pathways to representation. Both conservative individualism and radical leftism see themselves as “antiestablishment movements,” as “parapolitics.” The pirate, in both their ideologies, represents the paradigm of the fight against the rigidity of the state or against the neoliberal order; for various and even contradictory motives, piracy is considered the most adequate strategy for the economic and cultural evolution of capitalism.

Some theorists appeal to a civil society and others to the multitude (Hardt and Negri 2000); these are both very liquid and not very political concepts. We are no longer in an age of the institutionalized right- and left-wing, but in the age of the Tea Party and social movements. The right prefers the market over the state and the left—rather than traditional forms of labor, social, institutional, or armed struggle—formulates substitute battles like exile, defection, or nomadization. As Deleuze and Guattari suggested, the nomad, more than the proletariat, is the resistor par excellence (1972). On the left, the most innovative strategies reflect the decline of revolutionary ideals. The most they can aspire to is “détournement,” a satirical parody proposed by contemporary art, making use of a term coined by the Situationist International. It implies attempted sabotage, derailment, distortion, or subversion. It is a question, in accordance with Deleuze, of interruptions or microspheres of insurrection. Of course, there is nothing reminiscent of the old goal of seizing power; the most ambitious proposal is to benefit from the interstices or the zones unoccupied by the state. Naomi Klein (2000), one of the principal advocates of the antiglobalization movement, appeals to “cultural jamming” as a form of resistance; this interference transforms brand advertising without altering its codes of communication in order to question the values these brands transmit. It is easy to note the contradiction of this alterglobalization, since choosing piracy demonstrates precisely that we do not believe “another world is possible.”

Pillage, which was a common form of appropriation in the ancient and classical world and which the modern state attempted to resolve with the establishment of codified forms of property, has currently assumed (in the world of finances and information) enormously complex manifestations. One of the most telling entities of contemporary piracy is the tax haven, these places without identity, without taxation or residency requirements. What is claimed there is the unusual right to ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword by Saskia Sassen
• Introduction: Whose World Is It?
• Part I. An Unprotected World
• Part II. The Unfulfilled Promise of Protection
• Part III. Governing, or the Art of Taking Charge
• Epilogue: Us and Them
• References
• Index