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Welcome to the Desert of Real Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Sonja Buckel  and
Jens Wissel

Extract

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In response to the violence of the international system, “realist” approaches are flourishing. In the aftermath of “9/11”, gulf war No. 3, the challenge to the achievements of international law and the unchallengeable dominance of the US military-industrial complex, this is particularly noticeable. Theories which affirm an anarchical world without any international regulation, in which only the application of military power guarantees freedom and security are gaining credibility. This everyday understanding is also employed in Robert Kagan's essay. While “the Americans” exercise power in an anarchical international system, “the Europeans” aim for a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity. The fuss about Kagan's essay can hardly be explained by a rich analysis of the current international situation, for it does not supply this. It is even more surprising that the superficial pattern of interpretation considers that the essay expresses a “fundamental truth of the international system,” which is only articulated once in ten years. But we want to argue that it is not about “truth,” but about the production and propagation of a hegemonic discourse. Accordingly Kagan must be perceived as what he is: the co-founder of the reactionary think tank “Project for a New American Century”; an intellectual belonging to the neo-conservative leadership structure, a group that pressed the ideological case for the war against Iraq.

Type
Special Issue
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 4 , Issue 9: Special Issue , 01 September 2003 , pp. 971 - 975
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 Compare, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Die Macht des Weltrechts. Der Irak-Krieg wird juristische Folgen haben, Frankfurter Rundschau, (15 April 2003).Google Scholar

2 Kagan, Robert, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003).Google Scholar

3 Cooper, Robert, Europa muss seine Macht besser nutzen, Süddeutsche Zeitung (16 May 2003).Google Scholar

4 And so about a power-knowledge complex that construes truth.Google Scholar

5 See, also, Misik, Robert, Bolschewismus von rechts, tageszeitung (17 March 2003); Ralf Hanselle, Mars Attacks. Wie Robert Kagan Amerika intellektuell für den Platz an der Sonne fit macht, Freitag (25 April 2003). Compare also the letter singed by Kagan, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to the former US president Bill Clinton, in which, already in 1998, military intervention in Iraq was demanded: www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm.Google Scholar

6 The term “civil society,” going back on Antonio Gramsci, is not to be confused with the normative use to which it was put in the late 1980s. For Gramsci “civil society” is in no way separate from power and relationships of rule.Google Scholar

7 See, also, Hans-Jürgen Bieling/Steinhilber, Jochen, Hegemoniale Projekte im Prozess der europäischen Integration, in Die Konfiguration Europas. Dimensionen einer kritischen Integrationstheorie 102 (Bieling/Steinhilber eds, 2000).Google Scholar

8 In the sense of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault.Google Scholar

9 Compare, Alison DesForges, Kein Zeuge darf überleben (2003).Google Scholar

10 This applies also to the “We Europeans” of Habermas and Derrida, as the idea of a vanguard core Europe. Jürgen Habermas/Jacques Derrida, Nach dem Krieg: Die Wiedergeburt Europas, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (31 May 2003).Google Scholar

11 Nicos Poulantzas, Staatstheorie. Politischer Überbau, Ideologie, Autoritärer Etatismus 154 et seq. (2002).Google Scholar

12 Stiglitz, Joseph E., Bush's Plan – The Dangers, The New York Review of Books (12 May 2003).Google Scholar

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14 Nicos Poulantzas, Staatstheorie. Politischer Überbau, Ideologie, Autoritärer Etatismus 195 (2002).Google Scholar

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16 Cox, Robert, Production, Power and World Order 359 et seq. (1987).Google Scholar

17 See, e.g., Arrighi, Giovani, Entwicklungslinien des Empire: Transformation des Weltsystems, in Kritik Der Weltordnung (Thomas Atzert and Jost Müller eds., 2003).Google Scholar

18 On law, see Teubner's interpretation of “lex mercatoria.” Gunther Teubner, Breaking Frames. Economic Globalization and the Emergence of lex mercatoria, 5 European Journal of Social Theory Nr. 2, p. 199. And as a critique, Sonja Buckel, Empire oder Rechtspluralismus? Recht im Globalisierungsdiskurs, Kritische Justiz 2/2003, p. 177–1191.Google Scholar

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22 Habermas/Derrida, ibid.Google Scholar