Berardi Franco

"international Future Humanity"

(articolo, 2003)

Some days ago I witnessed a debate on the USA/conflict on the Italian TV current affairs programme the Infidel by Gad Lerner. There was an interview with Dani Cohn Bendit that impressed me. The position of Cohn, Bendit, Fischer, Sofri, and Liberation has recently undergone a mutation, that makes of it the most interesting nucleus of contemporary Europeanism, an evolution of the culture of 1968 that connects the liberal and reformist legacies in order to combine them in a form of cosmopolitan and humanist neo-enlightenment.

What is emerging from this perspective is an opposition between American hegemony and European autonomy that finds its content in the defense of civil rights and in a liberalism moderated by socialdemocracy.

Is this project realistic?
Can we consider the great Europe, the Europe of the national states and of the powerful financial capital as a force that is capable of imposing respect for human rights? More radically: does a Europe still exist after the divisions of the last few weeks? Can we see in the french-german hegemony a new European project autonomous from the USA? I see a serious danger of european nationalism in this perspective. A European nationalism that presents itself as the opposition to the war rhetoric of the Bush Administration appears to us today as close to the anti-military and pacificist front, but isn't this an optical illusion? Isn't the danger of a new nationalism founded on the anti-american prejudice just around the corner?

The last months have seen a quick and brutal maturation of contradictions that are implicit in the European construction, during the crisis that we are going through, even more if this will result in a war, it will become necessary to carefully avoid an identification 'national-european.' To avoid this europeist and anti-american nationalism there is no other way that to transform the european consciousness into an internationalist consciousness.

There is a danger in the European appraoch, that has emerged clearly in the past few weeks. The European perspective offers a representation of international reality as an opposition between the USA and the EU, but in opposing the virtues of the European approach to the brutality of the unilateral American approach, it risks to represent the situation in nationalist-european terms and thus produce and anti-americanism effect.

The global movement against the war cannot, in any way, be reduced to this perspective. It is obviously tre that there is a strategic opposition between the american hegemonism and the French-German axis. But on this basis we will built nothing else than the ground for a new cold war that will oppose (there are all the conditions for this) an anglo-american capitalism to a French-German capitalism. It would be as if the twentieth century never existed, or better, it would be as if in the twentieth century would have been produced nothing new except for the atomic bomb. The new world order would thus be the pre-1914 order plus weapons of mass destruction.

There is no America and Europe. We have to reject this representation. There is a democratic public opinion of euro-americans against the war. There is a public opinion against war that is largely majoritarian in Europe and close to half in the USA. This is the point. The European destinies at this point count very litte. Maybe, Europe will come out of this war dead. What counts is the new emergence of internationalism. Internationalism, that in the last twenty years has been reduced to solidarity with the losers, during the current global crisis should acquire the power of a majoritarian political perspective.

Forget Europe then? Not at all. We have to oppose the reduction of the
concept of Europe to a national, geopolitical or economic entity. We have to affirm a concept of Europe as a principle of extensive, bottom-up, post-nationalist construction. The best to have come out of the european experience was just this: the creation of networks that do not coincide with any territory and that are projected towards areas that are distant from the historical-geographical Europe.

At the same time we need to elaborate a discourse on the future of the United States of America that is free from anti-americanism. Anti-americanism is the worst of intellectual dangers. Today's America is close to a kind of military fascism. The Bush administration is resolutely going towards the imposition of a violent, oligarchic, fascist regime.

In an article entitled "Gaining an empire losing democracy?" Norman Mailer writes : "The combination of corporate and military power and flag fanaticism has created a pre-fascist atmosphere in the USA" It is difficult to dismiss the feeling that the Bush clan is as dangerous as the German nationalsocialist party, with on top access to weapons of total destruction that luckily Hitler did not possess. But the USA are not like Germany in the thirties. We need to leverage the contradictions between American libertarian and democratic culture and Bushist Nazism, if we want to come out of the trap that the ideology of preemptive war has by now pre-arranged. Only revolution in the USA could free humanity from the dangers of global fascism, certainly not the opposition of the ancient european virtues and the vices of american hegemonism,. Bush is first of all the enemy of the americans. It is in the USA that the global movement will defeat Bush, its nationalist fury and the neo-liberalism that has produced this folly.