Toni Negri on the EU constitution

This might be of interest to this list, since Negri
is held in great esteem by part of the intellectual
left (me not included).

Trond Andresen
Norway

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Toni Negri in favour of free-market constitution
Empire ends in the European Constitution
Salvatore Cannavò

Antonio Negri has said in the French newspaper Libération that French people
should vote yes to the European Constitution in the referendum on 29 May.

He has reached what I think is this wrong political conclusion by applying
the analysis of Empire, laid out in a book he co-wrote with Michael Hardt in
2001 [1]. This analysis is certainly attractive, but this shows its
inadequacies and limits.

Negri’s reasoning can seem pragmatic and concrete. That’s why it has been
praised by the French intelligentsia, who fear a No vote in the referendum.
Negri says he is a "realistic revolutionary". This realism is dictated by
his determination to prevent the rejection of the European Constitution.

Toni Negri speaking at the Paris ESF, 2003
This rejection, he believes, would allow the interests of Empire to win.
Empire, for Negri, is the new globalised, capitalistic society. He thinks of
Europe as being a “brake on the ideology of economic unilateralism which is
capitalist, conservative and reactionary. So Europe can become a
counterweight against US unilateralism, its imperialist domination, its
crusade in Iraq to dominate oil production.”

The brake must not be that of what Negri calls "the shitty nation state that
is destined to disappear". Instead, Europe is the political space in which
the state can disappear, despite the fact that the constitution is, as Negri
admits, neo-liberal and cannot be an alternative model for society.

"This isn’t the point," says Negri, because the constitution is a "passage"
towards a supranational state, “a new step towards a bit more federalism
although this Constitution is not federalist enough.” It is just an
instrument therefore, “you have to be stupid,” says Negri, “to think that
you can build equality of the basis of a constitution.” He explains that if
France defeats the constitution the whole edifice will collapse, leaving the
nation state as the only counterweight to Empire. If the No wins it is a
return to mediaeval times, if the Yes wins, we have a chance to compare two
models-the European and the American.

The no voter is conservative and obscurantist. The yes voter is
"realistically revolutionary". A French Yes will strengthen the drive for
Europe to become a political, economic and military power, as we have known
it since before Maastricht in 1992.

It is the slow, contradictory construction of a supranational entity, which
would be a more functional instrument for navigating modern globalisation
and therefore, and thus to be a political, economic, (military)
counterweight to the US superpower.

If that is so, Negri’s analysis of Empire has problems. This states that the
planet is governed by multinational networks of power that transcend
nation-states and other institutional spaces that exist such as the UN.
Opposition to it cannot be based on states, but by an "exodus" of the
multitude of people who are held down by this power.

The world is criss-crossed by a thick network of links, but this is only one
part of reality. The war on Iraq demonstrated the limits of claiming there
is an undifferentiated Empire. The US fell back on its traditional
instruments of imperialist rule. The war split Europe, especially the
French-German alliance. This could not be explained by Empire.

So Negri argued that the US had performed a U-turn and had executed a "coup"
against Empire in order to push its particular interests.

Negri faces contradicting himself again. Europe should have been a component
of the problem, but now it is a brake on Empire. Empire becomes the US
again, downplaying the capitalist nature of the European Union. What this
doesn’t take account of is that approval of the constitution would indeed be
a counterweight to US power-but only because it would boost the European
neo-liberal project.

This ends up mirroring something that was an option available to the
workers’ movement of the 20th century, and which the movement often fell
for. This ideology leads you to support the most progressive element of
capitalism. Then you realise that the workers’ movement has been sacrificed
to the interests of the strongest capitalist player.

This is what is at stake in Europe today. A victory for European capitalism
is not better than a victory for US capitalism. It is the anti-capitalist
and anti-war movements that have created the supranational networks that we
need to build up.

This workers’ movement will imagine an alternative to both British and US
models, without having to look to nationalism. The victory of the no
campaign in France would open up the possibility of driving forward a
process of solidarity.

Negri doesn’t like the word socialism, so let’s put that to one side. But
don’t make us out to be conservatives, because he is the conservative.

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Salvatore Cannavò is a member of the national political committee of the
Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) and deputy editor of the PRC’s daily
newspaper, “Liberazione”.

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NOTES

[1] Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN 0674006712. Click here for online version.

http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/article.php3?id_article=792

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Received on 05-06-05