ABSTRACT
It was not supposed to be like this. The so-called end of the so-called Cold War was supposed to bring a dispensation of the retreat of empires and the unstoppable propagation of liberal democracy. This was supposed to be the end of history, after all. Instead we live in a new age of empire, democracy as ever seems to be a precarious thing in short supply, and history (blood-red in tooth and claw) carries on regardless, unimpressed by its alleged fi nality. The fi rst Gulf War, the opening virtual war of this new age, was-we were told-supposed to cement a new understanding between East and West, between the US and the Arab world, and allow the conditions for peace between Palestinians and Israelis, while reinvigorating
the UN. By the time of the second Gulf War (if we characterize the lowintensity bombing of Iraq’s southern regions and a decade of sanctions as a cessation of hostilities) the democratic status of a Russia fraying at the edges looks uncertain, Europe is divided amongst itself over its perceived relationship with the US, the UN (self-indicted for corruption) is (as it always was in the past) frequently ignored, the Arab world is increasingly set against America, with nuclear proliferation once more a global business and what we are obliged to call ‘the war on terror’ justifying repressions and counter-violence of every kind, Israelis and Palestinians infl ict new injustices on each other daily, and the prodigious growth of Chinese capitalism accelerates it towards ecological and economic, if not yet military, contest with the West. So where did it all go wrong (if indeed it has gone wrong and if these prominent mediatic examples of global disorder can be taken as an accurate account of the state of the world today)? The global order is in mutation: politically, socially, economically, technoscientifi cally, ecologically, militarily, in every sphere of the media, the religious, and the law. How can one account for these transformations without invoking the inherited models of either an overfamiliar, structurally inadequate Marxism or an outdated, reductive ‘postmodernism’?4 For we must account for them, this is the fi rst task of the thinker today. Allow me to follow a strand through this global scene in the hope of achieving some leverage on the whole.
