Empire’s Law

On March 7, 2002, Professor Marks delivered the sixth annual Snyder Lecture at the Indiana University School of Law—Bloomington.

In their recent book Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make the claim that: “Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed 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. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.”

In this lecture I want to consider what Hardt and Negri mean by this claim, what they have in mind when they assert the emergence of a new, global order with a “new logic and structure of rule,” and what implications their analysis might have for students of international law. To bring these issues into focus, I propose to set them against the background of earlier meditations on the relationship between imperialism and international law and on the significance of the colonial encounter in the construction of international legal ideas, concepts and categories.

But first I think it might be helpful to dwell a little on Hardt’s and Negri’s central concept, announced already in the fashionably monoverbal title of their book. For empire is, of course, a term that has many different referents and many different inflections, and if we are to grasp the analysis put forward by Hardt and Negri, we need to be in a position to see how their conception of empire carries forward or departs from other ways of understanding the term. Indeed, we need to be ready not only for comparisons with other ways of understanding empire, but also for comparisons with its similarly polyvalent cognates and affiliates: imperialism, colonialism, and their respective variants.