The distinctive analysis of ‘Empire’ that posits an amalgam of the national and the supranational resulting in a smooth space is predicated on a particular view of the state and sovereignty. Hardt and Negri map the development of sovereignty over centuries in Europe, interpreting it as a response to specific problems that modernity brings in its train. In tracing the development of the concept, Hardt and Negri come to the conclusion that sovereignty was specifically European and evolved to
‘guarantee survival against the mortal dangers of war’. Part of the process of avoiding such dangers was a pact between leader(s), which assigned absolute power to the leader(s), with the exception of the means of reproduction and survival. Such an implicit contract transferred the ‘autonomous power of the multitude to a
sovereign power that stands above and rules it’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 84). At the juncture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘the concept of national sovereignty finally emerged in European thought in its completed form’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 101). This melding of sovereignty with the concept of nation was the direct result of the trauma associated with the French Revolution and the counter-revolutionary aftermath. For Hardt and Negri, it was the spiritual body of the nation that supplanted the divine body of the monarch as the ‘physical territory and population were conceived as the extension of the transcendent essence of the nation’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 95). The notion of a counter-revolutionary aftermath is important because it was during the reaction to the French Revolution that the spontaneous violence and power of the populace (the multitude) were constrained. This was achieved by reconstructing the ‘people’ as an integral part of the nation-state. The transcendent apparatus that is the nation-state, as the sovereign body, was thus able to ‘impose order on the multitude and prevent it from organizing itself spontaneously and expressing its creativity
autonomously’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 83). Detailed analysis Hardt and Negri provide of the historical and philosophical development of the concepts of nation-state and sovereignty need not detain us. Their elaboration of the concept of sovereignty as it evolved through the centuries sees sovereignty as eventually vesting in the nation-state in the modern era, and from there they go on to identify other variants such as imperial sovereignty (which covers the expansion of Europe throughout much of the rest of the world via the colonial process).
With the coming of postmodernity, colonial boundaries were basically torn down (Hardt and Negri 2000: 136). It is only with the erosion of national boundaries (which also are boundaries to the full realisation of a proper capitalist order) that ‘the state and capital [can] effectively coincide’, and when a Marxist theory of the state can be successfully undertaken (Hardt and Negri 2000: 236). The characterisation of the state as an executive board managing the interests of capitalists has been
transformed in the era of postmodernity by the transferring of some of the state’s functions to the transnational level of power. What this means is that some of the command functions of states have been usurped by transnational bodies such as
banks, transnational corporations and international planning bodies. With postmodernity comes not the complete undermining of the nation-state and conversely the complete empowerment of transnational corporations, but rather it heralds a decline of the traditional national constitutional system and its replacement by a supranational constitutional power or Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000: 308-09). The supranational constitutional framework that Hardt and Negri posit is pyramidal. The pyramid of global constitution is a new model of international order that
replaces the international system of states. Mirroring the decline of the power of the nation-state, there has been a corresponding dissolution of the international order based on a society of states. The new pyramidal structure, according to Hardt and Negri, has three tiers with several levels on each tier. At the top of the pyramid, on the first tier, resides the sole superpower the US, who enjoys this position due to its possession of an unprecedented quantity of the means of violence. On this first tier, but on another level, sit nation-states that ‘have the ability to regulate international exchanges’ through the control of global monetary instruments. What binds these nation-states together are ‘organisms’ like Davos, the G7 and the London and Paris Clubs. On the third level of the first tier reside ‘a heterogeneous set of associations’ that include to a greater or lesser extent the nation-states that have hegemony over the military and monetary aspects of global political economy and who also organise biopolitical and cultural power globally (Hardt and Negri 2000: 309-10).
In the second tier of this pyramid the structure is based on the networks that transnational corporations have brought to the world market. Examples of such networks are capital, population and technology flows. These transnational networks are able to operate freely under the aegis of the ‘central power’ that resides in the first tier of global power. It is the world market, however, which has the capacity to homogenise and differentiate territories, re-drawing global geography (Hardt and Negri 2000: 310). Still on this second tier yet subordinated to the power of the
transnational corporations are to be found the ‘general set’ of sovereign nation-states. These nation-states have some political functions such as ‘political mediation with respect to the global hegemonic powers, bargaining with respect to the transnational corporations, and redistribution of income according to biopolitical needs within their own limited territories’. In addition, the nation-states act as a conduit, capturing and distributing wealth from the global power and channelling wealth back to that
entity. The disciplining of the populace still is part of the remit of nation-states on this tier of the pyramid (Hardt and Negri 2000: 310).
The third and last tier in this schema consists of the representative bodies of popular interests and the multitude. For the multitude to have input into the global constitution it is necessary for a modification to occur; the undifferentiated mass must become the ‘people’. The representatives of the ‘people’ can range from NGOs to nation-states (Hardt and Negri 2000: 311-14). Also functioning as representative bodies of popular interests in particular circumstances are the media and religious organisations. What we have in this last tier perhaps is better known as global civil society – a term that Hardt and Negri employ as an alternative (Hardt and Negri 2000: 311).
The three tiers of the global constitution, with their accompanying levels, are the essential components of ‘Empire’. What is noticeable is that nation-states lurk at every tier. At the top of the pyramid is the hegemonic state the US, whose role as guarantor of order (acting also in conjunction with the nation-states in the second level of the first tier), provides the security framework without which the productive organisations could not operate (Hardt and Negri 2000: 310). Nation-states and in particular one nation-state remain indispensable elements of ‘Empire’. The problem with this is that ‘Empire’ purportedly has no boundaries (Hardt and Negri 2000: xiv) and the nation-state and the system of states have lost their status. Yet, as can be seen, the quintessential territorial entity – the nation-state – features in all three tiers of Hardt’s and Negri’s pyramidal structure. They appear, then, to overstate the case about the decline in status of the nation-state and the system of states.