VULNERABLE MISSION

MISSIO DEI 4.1 (FEBRUARY 2013): 33–48
as Google might compete for power in its technological sphere, similar to characteristic
number five above, but it would require semantic bending to assert that Google has
“client states.” Because of this, philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri assert
that empire of today is unlike Rome in that it has no centralized government or military
power; this is why the United States, despite its military strength, cannot control the
Middle East or other parts of the globe. 12
Political and corporate lines increasingly blur in today’s world. This was manifestly
clear when, on the evening after the attacks on the World Trade Center, then President
George W. Bush declared to the world, “the American economy will be open for business.”
The subtext of such a statement is that “you can’t hurt us as long as people keep
buying,” which reveals that true power lies in corporate stocks. In poorer countries,
corporations have more direct influence. Naomi Klein notes that the economic power
which companies yield give them the ability to dictate public policy, particularly in the
factory-dependent countries of Asia. 13 The mercenary corporation Blackwater took the
power over life usually reserved for the state in its proceedings in Iraq, while the networking
capability of Twitter has been celebrated as crucial to the recent popular uprisings
across the Middle East and Africa. 14 For this reason, I follow Hardt and Negri in their
proposal:
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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. 15
Hardt and Negri note that empire, as they view it, is founded ultimately upon boundarylessness.
This boundarylessness has four qualities. First, they emphasize that this global
empire has no spatial limits. As we have seen, corporate power moves fluidly throughout the
earth with little resistance from traditional nation-state sovereignties. The Coca Cola
company is one example of such borderlessness. I myself can attest that its products can
be found from the epicenters of New York and Rome to the equatorial jungles of Kenya
and the deserts of Mexico and Mali. Recent Coca Cola advertisements in the United
States even show polar bears drinking Coca Cola in the Arctic. Second, Hardt and Negri
explain, empire presents itself with no “temporal boundaries” as the end of history. Francis
Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man, a celebration of Western liberal
democracy, effectively displays this arrogance. 16 Third, Hardt and Negri assert that empire
is the “paradigmatic form of biopower,” seeking to rule life in its entirety. They later explain
that biopower “is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it,
not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology 20, no. 2 (April 2004): 243–74.
12 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Afterword,” Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political
Status Quo, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson and Peter Goodwin Heltzel (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2008), 309.
13 Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (New York: Picador, 1999), 227.
14 Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York: Nation Books,
2007). On Twitter’s role in Tunisia, see “The First Twitter Revolution?” in Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/14/the_first_twitter_revolution,
accessed 3/15/2012.
15 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), xi.
16 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).