Iran Bulletin: Starting with the war, how do you explain the US invasion of Iraq? What theoretical concept, in your view, could provide the best framework to understand current US policies at the international level?
Aziz Al-Azmeh: I believe firmly that there is no one theoretical concept that might make this event - an event possibly of world-historical import - accessible, but that there might be a conjunction of the theoretical and the historical in an effort at interpretation rather than explanation. The historical lies clearly therein, that the events of 1989 had brought to a close what we might, with apologies to Hobsbawn, call the very long 19th century.
The collapse of the Soviet Block brought to an end a series of waves of revolution which started in 1848 (or even to the French Revolution) that precipitated various forms, experiments, and experiences of democracy, and later on, and especially after World War 2, the New Deal, the Welfare State, the Great Society, the Swedish model of Social democracy, and so forth. In the context of colonial and post-colonial societies of which the Arab World forms part (and I use post-colonial in the literal sense, not in the hypertrophied and dubious sense used by Indian intellectuals in US universities), this led to policies of national liberation, plans for comprehensive development (including crucially cultural development, without any sense that “culture” is a factor independent of history, to be romantically reclaimed in what amounts to a gentrification of backwardness much in evidence in post-modernist writing). This was the era of UNESCO, UNDP, ideas of liberation, an optimistic age.
With 1989 dawned an era in which Keynesianism was no longer a desideratum for the proper functioning of the capitalist system; hence the shamelessly rapid ejection of Keynesian ideas in favour of flexible labour, of super-exploitation, of the discovery that social services were “expensive”. The counterpart to this in the South was the ejection of ideas of development in the name of structural adjustment in accordance with a natural theology of the market.
In short, we are back at the point when Marx and Engels composed the Manifesto. A not unnatural corollary to this is that power might be exercised entirely untrammelled and on a global scale. And with the threat of the Soviet Block no longer existent, the exercise of the US of its capacity as hyper-power is no longer hampered by the fear that local resistance might be buttressed by a balancing factor. So in theoretical terms the notion of a hyper-power is useful and required elaboration, including consideration of extra-legal activity, which can no longer be checked by an international legal order of humanist import which could only have had credibility had there been a system of checks and balances at the international level which might give it operational import and credibility. Negri's Empire is useful, though I find that it ignores much too much the complexity of the world and the possibility of systemic resistance. It may be right, but this far I find the notion unpalatable.
IB: If Washington is able to carry out successfully its current policies in the Middle East, what could be its politico-economic and cultural consequence?
Aziz Al-Azmeh: The politico-economic consequences seem to be to be an acceleration of trends already in place: structural marginality, cultural disintegration of the Arab body-politics defined as territorial states, the increasing transformation of “natural” communities into political actors. Correlatively, increasing xenophobia, an internal disaggregation that disallows almost all but the identitarian mode of thinking about public life - in short, the model represented at once by Zionism and by US multiculturalism.
IB: . What are the actual and potential obstacles facing US policies in the Middle East. How do you assess, in particular, the opposing power of the global anti-war movement?
Aziz Al-Azmeh: The global anti-war movement (and the Porto Allegre setup) are precious phenomena whose efficacy is yet to be tested. Yet I do not see that they have much resonance in the Middle East apart from certain sections of the intelligentsia, and they cannot be fully operative without proper political organisation. NGO activity and the fragmentation of socio-political interests internally do not give me cause for optimism.
I am all the more pessimistic as the only properly organised political groups seem to be Islamist: though I do not fear that they might gain power, not least because of an impossibility dictated by US disinclination, it is eminently possible that, once the radical fringes are eliminated, they will be allowed to play a socially and culturally repressive and retrogressive role in imposing, say, constitutional changes that set boundaries on the activity of progressive forces. This will be very much in keeping with US multiculturalist views: Muslims by birth must be Islamist by political predilection, and an Islamic constitution would be most appropriate.
IB: How do you interpret the fact that the Americans seemed not to care about the looting of Iraq's cultural heritage. What does that say about their plans and attitudes towards Iraq and the Middle East?
Aziz Al-Azmeh: It is difficult to answer this question in a manner apart from saying that this was not a priority. But there are clearly indications that at least part of the looting was done to order, and some objects seem already to have found their way to the international antiques trade circuit. It is noteworthy to mention here the Council for Cultural Policy, a group of American curators and antique dealers who have been lobbying the US government towards altering the international rules that govern national antiquities, which they want liberalised and taken out of state control (Berlusconi's government is moving in this direction in Italy, though in a manner far more guarded). CCP representatives are reported to have had meetings in the Pentagon since last winter, offering their “services” in the “preservation” of Iraqi antiquities. It would be naive to assume that these events are not connected. Liberalising trade; the commodification of national heritage. Would it not be singularly appropriate that Iraq, a country being divided up at a variety of levels into communities of blood, should have no national or indeed commonly human heritage ?