Random Variable

From Žižek’s “Against the Double Blackmail”

So the lesson is that the alternative between the New World Order and the neoracist nationalists opposing it is a false one: these are the two sides of the same coin — the New World Order itself breeds monstrosities that it fights. Which is why the protests against bombing from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, inclusive of PDS, are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO bombardment of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudo-Leftists who oppose the trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to build transnationalpolitical movements and institutions strong enough to seriously constraint the unlimited rule of the capital, and to render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to le Pen and the extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?

From Beck’s “Living in World Risk Society“:

In an age of global crises and risks, a politics of ‘golden handcuffs’ – the creation of a dense network of transnational interdependencies - is exactly what is needed in order to regain national autonomy, not least in relation to a highly mobile world economy. The maxims of nation-based realpolitik - that national interests must necessarily be pursued by national means - must be replaced by the maxims of cosmopolitan realpolitik. The more cosmopolitan our political structures and activities, the more successful they will be in promoting national interests and the greater our individual power in this global age will be.

It is, of course, important to look at the unwanted and unpredicted side-effects of this cosmopolitan vision: The call for justice and human rights is used to legitimate the invasion of other countries. How can one be in favour of cosmopolitan legitimacy when it leads to crises and wars and thus to the bloody refutation of the idea itself? Who will rein in the side-effects of a cosmopolitan moral principle, that speaks of peace while facilitating war? What does ‘peace’ mean when it generalises the possibility of war? It is necessary to make a clear distinction between true and false cosmopolitanism and yet such clarity is hard to achieve because it is the comparative legitimacy of cosmopolitanism that makes it so tempting to instrumentalise the latter for national-imperial purposes. Fake cosmopolitanism instrumentalises cosmopolitan rhetoric - the rhetoric of peace, of human rights, of global justice - for national-hegemonic purposes. There are numerous examples of this in history, the Iraq War is only the most recent.