The Centre of US Power after September 11 2001

When in 2000 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri published their book, Empire, it became an instant best-seller in anti-globalization circles around the world. The major thesis of the authors was that an empire-like regime with no territorial boundaries was presiding over ‘an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule – in short, a new form of sovereignty.’ The empire they saw ‘materializing before our eyes’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: ix) reverted to the more familiar imperial Gestalt after September 11 2001. In response to the bombing attacks on targets of American power by Muslim radicals, whose resentment of Western modernity and its cultural and political formation is indistinguishable from that of violent European fascists of the 1920s and 1930s, the US, under the leadership of a president whose existential legitimacy had been in doubt since the unusual circumstances of his election in 2000, emerged as the global hegemonic regime. All questions about the territorial location of the hegemonic regime became answered in a straightforward way. The surviving superpower of the Cold War lost all symbolic inhibitions against the use of violence and began to behave as the empire it had become since the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union in 1989–91 or, as some have argued, had been since its founding (Bacevich 2002) and during long stretches of recent history (Johnson 2004).