I
WHAT are the issues that we must take into account as our immediate intellectual tasks if we are at all interested to keep Bangladesh alive as a ‘political community’ in the context of international relations? What are the political essence of us as political community that could ensure our survival in the global system of states? We may take a step back and honestly ask ourselves is it at all necessary to claim a ‘state’ if we are not ‘political’? Being a ‘Bengali’, ‘Bangladeshi’ or Muslim cannot be a justification to have a separate state. In that case why Chakma, Santal or other indigenous communities with separate ethnicity, language and culture should not have a state of their own? Or why we cannot be a part of a Muslim state? In the same vein, why minorities should not have their state within the state of Bangladesh? Being ‘political’ implies we are conscious of all such politics of identities. How to transcend such identities politically in order to absorb such non-political differences within the state? If we are not sure where we are distinctly different from other political communities we will not be able to ground the state politically. If we are not convinced that what we possess has global significance, we cannot survive in the present global order. It is not enough to know the significance, we should be capable to convince others. By global significance I mean we cultivate and nurture certain core political and ethical values, insights about human history, and a vision for a common human future that are essential for a post-capitalist, post-imperial global order.
States are the political organisations of political communities and they are constituted as sovereign power. To a state all other states are potential enemies. I have consciously avoided the word ‘nation-states’ since it implies that political community could only be organised on the basis of their ethnic, anthropological, cultural or linguistic identities. We have seen such formation historically when capitalism was coming into global scene. In the era of globalisation, where all such imaginary nationhood or ‘identities’ are being questioned, we need to find more meaningful justification for the state. This is the reason why distinctive global significance in purely political term is an issue that we must discuss. and make an object of our intellectual exercise.
It is also true that we are also observing bloody ethnic conflicts. To what extent they are the consequences of the disintegrating effect of global capitalism and competition between transnational corporations for energy sources and minerals may be discussed separately in order to understand the link between the economics and politics of imperialism. The task now is to imagine a post-imperial and post-capitalist future and re-organise the state on a ethico-political premise that ensures that it is an inevitable outcome of people’s struggle to realise this imagination. Such premise will also provide us the strategy to defend ourselves as a powerful political community (state), economy and society and articulate our imaginations in our poetry, theatre, culture, artworks or, in short, in our lifestyles. What is important here is to note that the ‘distinctness’ that we are arguing here is not based on any kind of essentialism, therefore free from identity politics but as a global task, an ardent call to constitute ourselves as political subject that is capable to play a global role to go beyond the present global order.
Generally, to be political implies that all other political communities are potential threat to Bangladesh. The idea of ‘friendly’ state is an illusory imagination and persistence of such idea in a community implies that people are not capable of constituting themselves politically. Being political does not imply how we find ourselves – Bengali, Bangladeshi, Muslim or indigenous communities, etc, but how we constitute us as political subject in the global order absorbing our internal difference and how we would like to become collectively as a state with a viable constitution in order to act globally. One must not draw the conclusion that we are proposing discontinuity from what we have been becoming historically till now, or denying our historical existence as ethnic, cultural or religious entities. We are arguing for critical political mind that does not ‘essentialise’ history, in order to let history unfold and develop those elements in us that are globally significant and collectively vital for the survival in the future. Present global order is not ‘global’, it is European and now more and more American suppressing the vitality of other communities through colonialism and imperialism. The ‘local’ is posed as global and it is our turn now to enter into global arena with our own local historical experience to make the ‘global’ possible. We need a critical mind to re-read our religions, cultures, languages and lifestyles to identify where colonialism and imperialism has suppressed the ‘global’. It is time to unleash the power of our histories to reconstitute the European and American history of the so-called ‘modernity’ into real global history.
II
THIS is not an easy task, of course, but a task that we cannot avoid. We are facing a simple reality: there is world order and we have a choice to survive in this order either politically in order to act and transform the order, or merely as economic subjects, negotiating what we can get at the receiving end without fundamentally challenging the order. It is now clear that the notion of international order that European modernity continually proposed and re-proposed, at least since the Peace of Westphalia is in crisis. We are hearing that sovereignty of the states are in decline. We can also perceive, to some extent, that although we are recognised as an independent ‘state’ by other states and occupy a seat in the United Nations, we have hardly any state sovereignty. According to the classical Westphalian conception, sovereignty was the juridical order that organised the supremacy of a state to claim exclusive territoriality as well as absolute property rights of that state’s subjects. Sovereign power is always already above power. To be sovereign is to be subject to no higher authority. This is not true any more and very obvious in the case of Bangladesh.
Within the Westphalian paradigm such absolutising power reflects theologically-derived monarchic power to claim ‘private’ ownership of territories and people. But what is known as internal sovereignty is predicated upon the threat of a breach of territory by other states. The necessity of forming ‘equal’ and ‘friendly’ relations among states is recognised in Westphalianism and resulted in a codification of the principle of external sovereignty as a key doctrine in shaping international politics. Sovereignty in such a legal doctrine asserts three principal aspects: (1) exclusive jurisdiction over a territory and the permanent population living there; (2) a duty of non-intervention; and (3) a duty of international obligations arising from customary law as well as treaties on the participating states’ consent.
The claim of exclusive territorial jurisdiction is prima facie valid if the claimant is first recognised and accepted as a state by other states and a juridical equal to them. Interestingly, what is contradictory is the ‘duty of non-intervention’ but at the same time ‘duty to remain obligated to international law and treaties’, which often necessitates intervention. The discussion of the decline of state sovereignty is often linked to the discussion of globalisation. What we are hinting at is to revisit Westphalianism and locate the inherent contradiction between very notions of ‘sovereignty’, ‘state’ and ‘non-intervention’ within the international juridical order. State is recognised as ‘sovereign’ but were never free from ‘intervention’, theoretically or in reality. Countries like Bangladesh are constantly under this threat because of its weak economy, internal division and military institution. Global order has always been hierarchical. The demand to democratise this order is impossible without demolishing the hierarchy. It has become more difficult now given the hierarchy created by the economic globalisation or economic aspect of imperialism. The role of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation and other bilateral and multilateral economic regimes has undermined the sovereignty of Bangladesh. The global economic hierarchy that is in place now is impossible to break without fundamentally challenging the global order.
III
IN THE face of the war on terror and the blatant intervention and violence that we are observing from imperial countries, we may conclude that sovereignty has lost all meanings. Transformation of the global hierarchy has become more than impossible now. It is obviously not true given the military resistance of the people and the forced retreat of the powerful countries. The spectres of firearms, martial orders, and bombs may blur our thinking for a while and we may wrongly conclude the imperial power is essentially political and militaristic and military means is the one and only option left to the people living in the periphery of the global order.
What we must take into account is that there is paradigmatic reorientation of power into the form of networked legal and economic governance. Legal scholars are turning attention to the new and variegated forms of linkage enacted between sovereign states that demands a critique of Westphalianism. Absolute sovereignty has given way to networked sovereignty, a kind of new global order. Imperialism now does not refer to a system in which tribute flows from peripheries to great capital cities, but to a diffuse, anonymous network of globalising power. Sovereignty no longer consists in the freedom of states to act independently, in their perceived self-interest, but in membership in a global community. To challenge this global interest, often represented by transnational corporations, the globally significant ethico-political values derived from our history, language, culture and lifestyles is necessary in order to go beyond the present era of recoloniasation, war and violence.
The idea of political community is again extremely significant here, since what we contribute should be useful to make up the substance of international life. If global was dictating and shaping the local, it is time that local must dictate and reshape the European modernity and American arrogance into a global order that serves the ‘common good’. European modernity or American imperial projects must be confronted with this global spirit with strong local standing. If Europe is racist, we cannot be the same by glorifying our own ethnicities, language, culture or religion to project a counterracist and communal strategy. If Americans are destroying the world, and became the threat for all life forms on earth, we cannot repeat the same robotic behaviour becoming another mutants of terminators.
The new understanding of ‘sovereignty’ does not imply that the people’s resistance against imperialism, particularly against transnational corporations and their local stooges should be discontinued, but it adds to the present task. We must remain aware that this is only one of the aspects of resistance against the global hierarchy of international relations. We rather should intensify our struggle to defend our energy, mineral and biological resources as well as against the structures of exploitation and plunder. People’s power must be constituted against the power of the capital, more obviously, the power of the transnational corporations. But not to ‘privatise’ them in the name of ‘sovereignty’ but as a collective common of the global community, opening up new horizons of sharing and receiving for global common good. Our task is more complex and, therefore, more interesting, challenging and exciting.
The global imperial hierarchy intensifies a renewed apparatus of capital accumulation beyond borders. It is comparatively more flexible than what we are familiar with. The new kind of network intensifies and facilitates capital accumulation via speculative free flowing of finance and assets. States are involved in this apparatus, albeit in a transborder structure and in a process that undermines or perforates their sovereignty. Such a multilayered network of capital accumulation and circulation is detrimental to the states. There are potentially infinite points of vulnerability as capital jumps and is traded from country to country, financial system to financial system, political environment to political environment. The illusion that movement of capital signifies interdependence of sovereignty is a legacy of the old notion of sovereignty. It rather does magnify the loss of control over trans-border movements of capital and by extension, a loss of balance in the rights duties matrix of state sovereignty.
Re-configuration of inter-state and supra-state relations is also in place for governance. World governments see the need to transform the international society of states into a decentered form of global governance. The cry of the so-called ‘governance’ arise from this need. Empirical evidence suggests unitary states are no more the key actors in the global political system. New institutions and forms of international relations that represent components of the state armed with a corresponding set of techniques and protocols in their exercise of transnational governance are formed. Finance ministers, securities commissioners, environmental agencies, armed forces representatives, and other para-governmental representatives, are now forming units of trans-governmental operatives. Meanwhile, the vertical networks of national and their supranational counterparts, such as judges, antitrust regulators within a regional bloc (e.g. the European Union), and other legal professionals are increasingly entering into various forms of ‘international judicial negotiation’ at a functional level. These are with no required reference to the state as a unitary entity or sovereign power. As a result of the horizontal and vertical linkages involving the transnational technocratic professional class, the structure and network of interaction in international relations is allegedly based on the disaggregation of the state and its sovereignty. Officials are enable in each domain to solve common problems, share information, harmonise rules, generalise normative expectations, coordinate policy, and punish violators of global law without claiming to do so in the name of the state as a whole. What emerges, therefore, is a powerful global matrix of networked units made up of new actors in the global system of states where sovereignties can not be conceptualise in old terms. Sovereignties are ‘perforated’. Consequences for countries like Bangladesh is obvious.
New forms of decentered legal cosmopolitanism has also taken shape. The regime of new global power articulated in legal terms is in part formed through vertical networks of legal professionals who have the capability to enact new jurisprudence, without embedding it in local or national courts or referencing it in domestic laws. The legal Westphalianism of global order as a ‘society of equal states’ is no longer perceived as the necessary basis for law making. A new kind of global political constitutionalism involving various levels of communication and exchange, such as a partnership between national courts and a supranational tribunal is in place.
Are we facing a post-sovereign, decentered world order that is signifies not a decline of sovereignty, but a new reconfiguraton debasing the unitary nature of sovereign power? Legal experts claim that indeed a cosmopolitan legal system regulating global politics actually exists and that is already constitutionalised. For example Cohen argues, ‘the global political constitution is produced not by legislation but through decentered legal self-reflection and through a global community of courts, which ascertain legal validity and legal violations. The emphasis here is on the emergence of a global political constitution and a global legal system through polycentric, plural, autological processes that produce valid legal norms that regulate actors connected through complex networks bounded not by territory but by functions, communicative codes, and particular practices’ (‘Whose sovereignty? Empire versus international law’, in Global Institutions and Responsibilities: Achieving Global Justice, eds C Barry & T Pogge, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp 159-189).
These are extremely significant development in the new global order. The political power of the people perhaps no longer implies reconstitution of the sovereignty at the state level, but power that inherently will yearn to connect with people’s power of other countries and take advantage of the new reality to go beyond the present international order.
Challenging the existing international order demands imagining new way of relating with other political communities and construct the ‘global’ in the true sense of the meaning.
farhadmazhar@hotmail.com
