After the Future: Enclosures, Connections, Politics

R.B.J. Walker

To engage with any systematic enquiry into our possible futures is to encounter complex fields of paradox and contradiction. Futures seem to be more difficult to imagine even as we approach them with increasing rapidity. They are becoming more difficult to imagine even as we claim to know more and more about the world, or worlds, in which we imagine them. Futures are always elusive, though in some senses also inevitable. In an age of science fictions and computer-assisted extrapolations, of long-range forecasts, conceptual innovations and cross-cultural conversations, our grasp on what we might become seems to dissolve into ever more trivial claims about some coming anarchy, an end of history, a conflict of civilizations, the obliviously benign or a descent into hell.

Many of these paradoxes and contradictions are well known B so well known, in fact, that we have largely ceased to be perplexed by their paradoxical and contradictory character. Puzzles have congealed into received wisdoms, into grounds for asserting that all is as it should be: the ideal is the real, as someone might have said in a slightly different context; these are the facts of life whether we like it or not, as the disciplinary emperors keep chanting in their tattered underwear.

Much of our capacity to imagine our possible futures, I want to argue here, hangs on our capacity to recover some sense of puzzles that have been rendered so unpuzzling by the conventions of modern politics. Much of our prevailing sense of what our futures might bring, and of who this we is that might have a sense of these future possibilities, is predicated upon a curiously unproblematic understanding of what and where we now are. Although we may be keen to respond to so many problems in the present, the present itself is all too easily read as an unproblematic ground from which we might imagine our possible futures. Knowing where we are, or at least being able to negotiate the rhetorical and institutional practices that allow us to claim to know where we are, we place ourselves in an apparently perfect but also quite impossible position to know where we should be going. As an initial stance in any systematic enquiry into our possible futures, therefore, it seems to me to be necessary to stake our ground not with or against some received account of where we are now B that is, in the familiar and quite insidious brawls between political realists and political idealists, or between various kinds of positivism and various claims about the importance of the normative B but in more critical accounts of the conditions under which we are enabled to imagine futures that have possibilities. Such accounts cannot avoid encounters with paradoxes and contradictions.

For example, and perhaps most instructively for my purposes here, it may be that we are all familiar with many variations on a popular and soothing story to the effect that our futures lie in a straight-line trajectory from now to then: a journey from a present to a future along a singular arrow of time, usually portrayed as an historic shift from a warlike and barbaric fragmentation to a mature and peaceful unity. This story may be endorsed even by some of the most eminent minds of our time. It may be invoked as the only ground on which we can envisage worlds that are somehow better than the ones we live in now. It is a story that allows many people to sleep at night, though suspicions also abound about its capacity to induce violent nightmares. While it may be pleasing in its aspirational or soporific effects, however, we all also know that there is no simple straight line from the present to the future, just as B to allude to two of the key cultural mappings through which modern accounts of our possible futures have been charted B there is no simple road from earth to heaven or from the finite to the infinite. Modern life might well be much easier if there were, but if there were then modern life would also be impossible.

As the theologians will remind us, the road from earth to heaven is full of contradictions: contradictions that may be resolved, disconcertingly, only by faith or by death. As the philosophers will also insist, the road from the finite to the infinite is full of quite similar contradictions. These contradictions have been resolved most frequently, at least in the canonical accounts of Western modernity, either by affirming an inevitable and unbridgeable B Cartesian B chasm between human finitude and the infinite universe (even if this involves pretending to erase the chasm by looking at only one supposedly monistic side of it), or by affirming the infinite as the necessary B Kantian or universalizing-moral B ambition of every finite subject (or, conversely, by affirming the finite subject as the agency of potentially infinite ambition). In such contexts especially, we become aware that the soothing though often disturbing story about a straight line to the future is, paradoxically, a product of a culture organized around (Greek, Christian and modern) stories about an unbridgeable dualism, whether between heaven and earth, being and becoming, mind and brain, subject and object, subject and sovereign or, in the realm of the Ainternational@ or Aglobal@ that concerns me here, sovereign and sovereign.

To imagine our possible futures is thus to encounter not only fields of paradox and contradictions, but historically specific fields of paradox and contradiction. Many of these paradoxes and contradictions are embedded in assumptions we take for granted, especially in modern accounts of what it means to be an individual, to own property or to be a subject of legal authority. These accounts did not spring out of thin air, despite our tendency to treat them as simply natural, as given in the very nature of things, or at least in the original tablets of micro-economic theory. Paradoxes and contradictions are especially embedded, I want to emphasize here, in claims about sovereignty and the authorization of authority. These claims often work to efface the ways in which, as an historically and culturally specific site of paradox and contradiction, sovereignty produces not only an account of how the world is and must be organized politically, but also an account of what it would mean to imagine a future without sovereignty. One of the key paradoxes that has been exposed by claims about our potential global futures, in fact, is that so many of the accounts of the decreasing significance of sovereignty that now inform grand claims about our contemporary fates tend to affirm the extraordinary capacity of sovereignty to tell us how to think about the decreasing significance of sovereignty.

This is why, I shall argue here, it is so important to come to terms with the ways in which sovereignty has to be taken much more seriously as a site of political practice than has generally been the case, especially but certainly not only in the context of international relations and international law. Again paradoxically, these are fields that place a great deal of explicit emphasis on the importance of sovereignty, but they are also fields that B quite understandably, and many would suggest quite properly B tend to assume that sovereignty is a relatively simple starting point for subsequent discussion. Sovereignty, it often seems, simply is. It marks the place at which we may put a stop to an infinitely regressive concern with those apparently abstract and metaphysical principles that can be taken care of more appropriately by the philosophers and theologians, the specialists in the abstract and the arcane rather than the specialists in the supposedly real world of power, violence and policy.

As much recent literature has insisted in many different contexts, however, and as the classic texts often insist even more vehemently, sovereignty is anything but a simple starting point. Whatever it is, and it is far from clear what ontological status ought to be assigned to such an elusive political site, sovereignty expresses a very powerful answer to some of the greatest mysteries of human existence. It is an answer that rests upon historically and culturally specific resources for framing and answering these mysteries. Not least, it is an answer that affirms and reproduces some highly dubious accounts of the difference between the abstract and the real, the decorous metaphysics and the dirty world of policy. These accounts in turn enable some quite extraordinarily naive even if endlessly reiterated accounts of power and authority and encourage us to envisage future possibilities without thinking about either power or authority.

To try to imagine alternative futures on terms set by assumptions about sovereignty, even if those assumptions are embedded in claims about the decreasing significance of sovereignty, is to court the eternal repetition of stories about the straight road from present to future that has become so seductively familiar but which serves largely to keep us as we have become. Likewise, to pretend that we can think of the future on grounds that somehow evade assumptions about sovereignty is to assume that we can somehow stand outside the cultural assumptions of western modernity that give us our most basic understanding of what it means to be inside or outside a way of thinking or a way of life. I certainly hold no brief for those who still want to insist that sovereignty is the reality we have to take for granted. Anyone who thinks it is could do no better than to read Hobbes= prescient attack on what passes for political realism in twentieth century theories of international relations and elsewhere. I do want to insist, however, that we have to think about our possible futures by thinking through the ways in which sovereignty works as a claim about all possibilities, past, present or future.

In the following section, therefore, I want to offer a very general and somewhat impressionistic sense of what this involves. At the risk of being simplistically formulaic, where so many attempts to imagine future possibilities have been framed as attempts to move away from or to simply ignore sovereignty, I believe we have no option but to work our way through sovereignty, thereby seeking to resist sovereigntist accounts of what it means to move away, to be outside, to be engaged with futures, or with possibilities. To use a formulation I have used elsewhere, we now find ourselves in a series of puzzles, both logical and practical, trying to identify an outside to a conception of politics that is already constituted as a system of insides and outsides. To try to get outside, to frame accounts of historical change or ambitions for alternative futures as the search for something outside a system of insides and outsides is liable to merely reproduce the (spatial) framing that both encourages and prohibits us from other (temporal) possibilities. This formulation, I believe, offers some sense of what is at stake in challenging the crucial modern expression of how the paradoxes and contradictions of space and time must be resolved. The most impossible thing for sovereignty to be is something that simply is, and yet as a claim to be something that simply is it works so as to affirm the impossibility of any other way of being.

In working through some of these puzzles, many of which are increasingly familiar from various debates about the status of modernity and modern accounts of subjectivity, I want to move towards an affirmation of the increasing importance of temporal trajectories, movements and flows rather than of spatial separations. In this way, I also want to move towards an affirmation of lines of connection and relation rather than lines of inclusion and exclusion. Our understanding of future possibilities, I want to suggest, depends very largely on what we think it means to draw the line in the many different context in which this (for us) largely spatial metaphor now expresses meaning and legitimacy.

In the process, however, I also want to underline both the importance and the difficulty of thinking about our futures politically. The primary reason that we have to struggle with the paradoxical and contradictory legacies of the modern principle of sovereignty is that it expresses our most fundamental sense of what and where politics is. Contemporary challenges to this principle must also be understood to be challenges to our understanding of politics. My argument here is motivated very largely by a sense that the most striking characteristic of contemporary debates about globalization and change in the international system is a very serious absence of discussion of what these debates suggest for politics. Questions about the constitution of legitimate authority especially, it seems to me, have been sidelined in favor of worries about many other things, especially about governance, policy and ethics. While undoubtedly important, neither governance, nor policy, nor ethics can be addressed in the absence of an engagement with the limits of our understanding of politics as a pattern of limits, of spatial separations and temporal impossibilities. While I do not think that it is especially difficult to imagine alternative futures in terms of our contemporary understanding of movements and flows or networks and connections, it is certainly difficult to imagine such futures in terms we might recognize as somehow political. My sense is that this is a problem that will engage us, and help reshape those who engage with it, for some time to come.

Sovereignty, of course, is something, or some principle, or some practice B these different characterizations already suggest a range of interesting puzzles that are part of the problem I want to explore B that is of crucial importance to international law and international relations and is more or less omnipresent in attempts to imagine our possible futures in political terms.

Sometimes sovereignty is of interest as a bedrock on which to ground all else, as if sovereignty could be something so simple and stable as to constitute a bedrock for anything. It is as an assumed foundation, especially, that sovereignty appears in so many accounts of international law and international relations, both as positivist accounts of what is and normative accounts of what must be. As an assumed foundation, it affirms the necessary character of political necessity, and the necessary limits of freedom under conditions of necessity.

The crucial puzzle that arises in this context is how sovereignty came to be a foundation in the first place, and thus what one makes of a claim to foundations that rests, as the popular metaphors go, on stilts in a swamp, on turtles all the way down, on the irrational assertion of rationality, or on an instantaneous leap from a state of nature to a state of law. Again, anyone persuaded that Hobbes= account of sovereignty offers a safe platform from which to launch claims about the way things are should simply look at the extraordinary magic and light show he had to put on in order to make his account of it seem even marginally credible. Hobbes, after all, was a nominalist, an anti-realist, a trader in names that bore no necessary connection to things named. He needed all his considerable imaginative resources to make his authorization of authorities that might authorize seem entirely natural. Sovereignty, we might say, may function as a foundation, but any analysis that treats it simply as a foundation can say very little about all those practices, those myriad equivalents of Hobbes= magic and light show, through which contingent convention acquires the status of natural necessity. Sovereignty may have become the great indispensable principle of the modern political order, but it is simultaneously the most obviously artificial and fictitious principle of that order. Believe in it, as Hobbes tried to show we should, and all will be well. Otherwise, as Hobbes argued, there can be no present, no future, not even a past in which to envisage a present or a future.

It is of considerable consequence, of course, that this most secular affirmation of modern political authority should rest so firmly, or so feebly, upon belief. We have all encountered the familiar slide from declarations of openness and toleration to brutal demonstrations of dogma and the iron fist. The secular exploration of possibilities collides with a quasi-religious affirmation of necessities. Nationalism, revolution, defense policy and war are familiar sites at which tensions between the secular and religious are often exposed. Similarly, modern liberalism stands or falls on its capacity to cope with its internal contradictions in this respect, not on its proclamation of certain articles of faith. It may be advantageous in many circumstances to stay away from the fields of paradox and contradiction that become visible if we think about this affirmation long enough, but neither the advantages nor the circumstances can be assumed to be uncontentious.

Conversely, sovereignty is sometimes of interest as a condition to be avoided, evaded or transcended, as if sovereignty is some thing one can avoid, evade or transcend. It is in this guise that sovereignty appears in so many accounts of structural change in the international system and of the emergence of novel forms of transnational or global politics and legal obligation. The necessity of assumptions about political necessity is challenged, alternative accounts of necessity are broached, and we are then asked to imagine alternative accounts of our obligations, our freedom to do what we have to do, under conditions other than those framed by sovereignty. It is in this context that we can understand the importance of attempts to imagine alternative accounts of governance, policy formation, legal regimes and so on. It is in this context, also, that we can see that it is so much easier to talk about forms of governance, policy formation and legal regimes than it is to come to terms with fundamental questions about the constitution of legitimate authority B about politics. For it is one thing to make simple claims about the decreasing importance of sovereignty; just as easy, in fact, as it is to assert that sovereignty is what there is. It is quite another, however, to see how we might imagine other ways of constituting authority.

Claims about sovereignty are especially susceptible to seductive stories about the future as a destination imagined at the end of a straight road. Sometimes the road leads from a world in which sovereignty is ever-present to a world in which it is somehow absent. Sometimes the road keeps taking us to the same old destination, to the world of states that somehow changes but always remains essentially the same. In the former case, we are usually told that we are on the road to utopia, to idealism, to somewhere in the vicinity of cosmopolis. In the latter case, the signs insist that we are staying close to the way things are, to realism, to somewhere in the vicinity of the polis, our proper political home.

Once upon a time, it seems, sovereignty wasn=t there. Then it was. Different accounts of when it was there B with Roman law, with Bodin, with the Treaty of Westphalia, with Vattel, with decolonization, with this or that legal case or state formation -- offer useful options for telling the story differently. Now, it is still there; or perhaps it=s disappearing; or perhaps almost vanished entirely: the story can be made to seem interesting because no one can agree on what went on in Chapter One or what the ending will conclude. It remains a mystery story in more senses than one. Moreover, this story can be made to resonate with many other stories about our possible futures. The possible disappearance of sovereignty can herald the very appearance of our possible futures. Goodbye sovereignty. Hello globalization, or cosmopolitanism, or humanity as such, or human/global security, or global human rights, or any number of similar worlds in the making. If one does not like these stories, not to worry; things remain the same, the world is as it always was, or at least as it has been since sovereignty came along to ensure that we already live in the best of all possible worlds, in the modern sovereign state that ensures at least a measure of heaven on earth and the plausible hope that our finite subjectivities can match our infinite ambition and our universal humanity.

While this repertoire of narratives will be familiar to anyone who has engaged with the major controversies and traditions of international relations and international law, it is also fairly clear that sovereignty is anything but a simple thing that appeared, stayed a while, and is now either obstinate or obsolete (to invoke the paradigmatic formulation that Stanley Hoffmann articulated in the mid-1960s and which is still repeated with tedious regularity). To stand back from the specific concerns of international relations and law is to become aware that sovereignty is also the site of many of the most intensely contested contradictions and paradoxes of the modern world. This is, after all, what might expect of a site of politics constructed on the basis of subversions and reappropriations of (at least) Greek, Roman, Christian, and Medieval civilizations, and which affirms the unchallengeable necessity of a particular account of necessity.

Not least, sovereignty embodies and expresses all those paradoxes and contradictions enacted by the ways in which the modern world constituted itself by relocating the roads from earth to heaven and from the finite to the infinite onto the territorial space of the modern state. It offers a radically dualistic account of who we are, an account of our split identity as citizens and humans; an identity in which our citizenship has priority over our humanity, or at least has become the necessary condition under which we can aspire to realize our humanity. This dualism rests upon our peculiar modern status as both a part of nature and apart from nature, and our apparent difficulties in reconciling politics with ethics. It offers, in short, our most basic answer to all the mysteries of life, a way of reconciling the apparently irreconcilable. Hobbes= paradigmatic account of it, after all, was effected by both an onslaught against the Aristotelian-Thomist conventions of the age and was propelled by the full weight of the scientific revolution, the Reformation, and the massive social and economic upheavals that shaped them. It offered a brilliant answer to the most difficult questions about the character and location of legitimate authority at a time when traditional accounts of authority were increasingly contested.

To tell any plausible story about the emergence of sovereignty as the core principle of modern political life is effectively to tell a story about the rise of modernity in all its cultural, economic and philosophical glories, and tragedies. Even though much of this more complex story is well known, many of its consequences tend to be ignored as soon as we are invited to think about the future of political life. The broader conditions enabling sovereignty, conditions that are in turn legitimized through claims about sovereignty, somehow recede into the apolitical distance. Sovereignty is read as an achieved condition, the inevitable destination of a road already traveled, a normative aspiration already become irresistible reality, the reality of the sovereign state, whose effects can then be read in the categories made available by its achievement. Contradictions are then read as points, lines and planes, as monopolies of power/authority, borders and territories. In keeping with the way in which the early-modern Europeans read planet Earth through the schematics of Euclidean geometry, we are still inclined to read these points, lines and planes as eternally true, as Hobbes, like his supposed antithesis but longtime dance partner Kant, insisted they must be.

The whole point of this insistence, of course, was to make it as difficult as possible to imagine any other alternative, any other way of being, any possibility of becoming otherwise. The modern claim to political realism rests entirely on the plausibility of this strategy, a strategy with as many tactical variations and rhetorical legitimations as there were once angels on the head of a pin.

The story of a road from a world of sovereignty to a world that somehow transcends or avoids sovereignty, then, is a story that is itself produced by sovereignty, largely by re-scripting a number of other stories through which sovereignty is itself constituted; not least, I have intimated, those stories about earth and heaven and the finite and the infinite. We imagine our futures in terms given by the imaginaries of our present. It is perhaps no accident that the Prime Directive guiding the crew of the Starship Enterprise is so reminiscent of Article 2, Paragraph 7 of the United Nations Charter. It is presumably no accident, either, that the classic utopias of Plato or More are texts of foundation, texts that have shaped and enabled us to become as we are as modern peoples. They articulate our regulative ambitions, ambitions that regulate what we think we might become and thus shape and regulate what we are. Similarly, claims about the erosion or transcendence of sovereignty are very likely to be simple affirmations of options already permitted by sovereignty. Stories about a great escape, we have begun to learn from many sources, largely work so as to make escape impossible.

This is a conclusion that should already be readily apparent from the forms of argument deployed by the archetypal theorists of sovereignty like Hobbes. It is a conclusion that should also be apparent from any reading of the extraordinary tenacity of claims that the only alternatives before us are some kind of sovereigntist fragmentation or some kind of non-sovereigntist universality: (inter)nationalism or supranationalism, sovereign jurisdiction or humanitarian intervention, national citizenship or cosmopolitan citizenship, war or peace, Hobbes or Kant. It is also a conclusion that could be pursued through many more precise and now quite commonplace theoretical formulations that try to get at this problem by showing how we moderns are constantly driven to reproduce Plato=s dismal choice between necessary/impossible universals and the relativism produced by the prior privileging of such universals. Derrida, for example, has drawn attention to our logocentricisms, Foucault has complained about the Blackmail of Enlightenment, Deleuze and Guattari have examined our ingrained attachment to the metaphor of the tree, to arboreal rather than rhizomatic developments. Many others, too, have tried to get at the way we have become caught in various language games, have tried to recommend that we set our desires on paths other than those recommended by those who desire that we desire to stay more or less where and what we are. Still others have resisted the claim that the dominant cultural practices, with their shared even if contested account of History, Progress and Development, have any monopoly on the ways ahead, or any monopoly on what it might mean to envisage a contest of histories or cultures. Nevertheless, the self-proclaimed moralists of our times insist on reproducing a rhetoric of universalisms and relativisms in even more dismal forms and continue to find a ready and willing audience. The rules of the game have been set, and, they insist, rightly so: aspire to principles of universality or join Thrasymachus in the wilds of sophistry; aspire to autonomous maturity or languish in immature states of dependency; aspire to law or grasp at mere power; complain about the entire set up and be framed as a relativist anyway.

Without sliding explicitly into any of these potentially extensive elaborations of the problem I seek to raise here, let me refer very briefly to four themes that seem to me to be especially crucial in thinking about future possibilities. I will frame each of them as claims that I would be prepared to defend, and in part have defended, more extensively.

The first claim is that sovereignty cannot be usefully be examined on its own terms, that is as some variation on the theme of a monopolization of authority in a specific territory. If, as Hobbes insisted, we have to resort to definition, to the arbitrary authorization of the meaning of a term, in order to constitute a claim to sovereignty, it is hardly appropriate to examine sovereignty by simply accepting the definitions that already have been authorized.

One of the key symptoms of the way in which modern political analysis has in fact accepted such definitions at face value, as I have argued elsewhere, is a constitutive division of labor between the political and the international. Political theorists, and all who rely on their assumptions about a domestic political community, read this claimed monopoly of sovereignty internally, as the site of the centralization of authority. Theorists of international relations and international law read it externally, as the expression of the decentralization of authority. This division of labor then constitutes the familiar problem of how the internal and the external should be reconciled.

Read together, as mutually constitutive rather than radically dualistic traditions, however, it is possible to get a picture of a world of both integration and disintegration, of centralization and decentralization, of universality and plurality, of an account of political theory that tacitly B but usually only tacitly B assumes a theory of international relations, and a theory of international relations that tacitly B and again only tacitly B assumes a theory of domestic politics. Much of the most interesting contemporary work currently under way in both contexts, it seems to me, is focused rather precisely on making explicit what the conventions insist must remain tacit. Conversely, much that is most irrelevant in both contexts rests upon a simple and often quite dogmatic refusal to explore the conditions under which we have been able to assume the appropriateness of a sharp line between the inside and the outside, the political and the international.

In either case, we are beginning to regain a sense that sovereignty is somehow Janus-faced, a site of contradictions and paradoxes organized around an apparently clear distinction between territorial spaces, or perhaps spatialized territories. For sovereignty expresses not simply a point, or a line of authority, but a point/line at which claims about universality and plurality are resolved, a specific account of how universality and diversity must be related. This account hinges on a capacity to distinguish a community of authority inside and both an absence of authority and a plurality of authorities outside. It is a complex resolution of rather profound contradictions. The distinction between political theory and international relations affirms the necessity of this resolution. We can then witness the strange arrogance through which political theorists assume that their assumed home, the specific bounded community, is in fact the world as such, and the strange myopia through which theorists of international relations can give descriptions of how sovereignties constitute a field of actors without much concern for how those actors are constituted as actors. It is little wonder, in the latter case, that so much energy is taken up with logically irresolvable debates about structures and agencies, or about whether it is the state or the system-of-states that is the most appropriate Alevel of analysis.@

No intellectual tradition that accepts this resolution, or that simply insists on reducing the inside to the outside or the outside to the inside, is going to be able to say much about a world in which clear distinctions between inside and outside are more difficult to sustain in more and more, though certainly not all contexts. This is indeed, I think, the possibility with which we are now confronted.

Furthermore, if sovereignty has to be understood as a specific account of how universality and diversity must be related, then it is logically futile to expect our future possibilities to be mapped on a road that goes from a condition of pluralistic sovereignties to a unified world without sovereignties. We must, rather, be looking at the possibility of other ways of expressing the relationship between universality and diversity. It is in this context, for example, that it is interesting to try to make sense of contemporary claims about, for example, the changing relationship of Athe global and the local,@ the rapidly changing articulations of a globally organized economy, various flows of people, knowledge and finance, emerging patterns of urbanization, responses to ecological disruptions, and intense challenges to established forms of political and cultural identity. In many respects, I would argue, it is much more productive to formulate hypotheses about contemporary political change in relation to challenges to the modern framing of the relationship between universality and diversity than it is to measure the obstinacy or obsolescence of the modern state or the distance traveled from (inter)nationalism to supranationalism.

The second claim follows from this and is that sovereignty is not appropriately understood either as some thing or even as just a legal principle, even though it often has material and institutional expression and law is obviously one of its crucial effects and manifestations. Sovereignty, I would want to insist, is best understood as a political practice, especially as a political practice that both produces what we now take to be specifically political practices and works to efface the political character of the practices that enable it. Sovereignty works, it constitutes, it produces effects. On this, Hobbes and the trendier theoreticians of our time would agree. A very large part of any hopes for the future we may have must lie with our willingness to recognize the degree to which we engage in and reproduce the practices of sovereignty in circumstances that seem B but only seem B far removed from the grand narratives of states, international relations and international law. Modern claims about sovereignty cannot be divorced from modern claims about subjectivity, despite the common sense that insists that the inner life of mere persons cannot play in the same ballpark as states or states-systems.

The third claim is that sovereignty is a term that covers too many sins, too many practices. I have so far intentionally used the term to invoke many different meanings, and suspect that not too many people have been offended by what I take to be a rather flagrant conflation of distinct though related phenomena. It seems to me that some quite extensive conceptual unpacking is called for in this context. In order to think with any clarity about how we think about our possible futures in terms set by sovereignty, it especially seems important to distinguish between at least:

B the modern framing of the principle of sovereignty; that is, all those practices that enable us to believe we can draw the line between the legitimate and the illegitimate, the authoritative and the non-authoritative

B the application of this claim to the territorial jurisdiction of modern states; that is, to all those practices that enable us to believe that we can draw lines within spatially delineated jurisdictions

B the embodiment of this claim in specific state institutions; that is, all those practices through which the claim to sovereignty is reproduced in a multiplicity of contexts and sites by institutions that have themselves been enabled by claims about sovereignty and its proper territorial articulation

B the reproduction of this claim in the practices of modern political subjects; that is, all those practices through which the principle of sovereignty is inscribed in the identities of peoples, most obviously in practices of nationalism, citizenship, and human rights, but also in the cultural codes of, say, gender formation and the authorization of personhood

B the problem of sovereignty; that is, the question of how legitimate authority gets to be constituted and under what conditions, and thus how we come to terms with attempts to distinguish claims about authority and those about power, or claims about power from those about knowledge, or claims about sovereignty and those about subjectivity B just to name three key sites at which we can expect to see intense negotiations for quite some time.

One way of thinking about our possible futures, it seems to me, is to expect an increasing disaggregation of all these, and other, different meanings, or sites of political engagement. It is not unreasonable, for example, to imagine that the decreasing territorial sovereignty of states may be accompanied by increasingly intense applications of the modern principle of sovereignty, and even more intense concerns about the problem of sovereignty. It may be that classical definitions of sovereignty, not least that of Hobbes, insist that it is an all or nothing affair, that sovereigns either are or they are not. It may also be, if we accept these terms, that we court incoherence if we try to talk about sovereignty in terms of more and less, of the parceling out of sovereignty on this issue or that issue, to this jurisdiction or that jurisdiction. It seems to me, however, that we risk even greater incoherence, and indeed have succumbed to incoherence for quite some time, when we continue to fuse all such meanings into a simple definition. What needs to be at issue is not the necessity of the definition but the conditions under which so many meanings can be fused together in a single necessary definition. We only have to think about the enormous political work performed by concepts like Anational interest@ or Anational security@ to see the practical effects of the way we take simple definitions at face value.

Then again, if sovereignty is our paradigmatic account of what it means to make judgements, to authorize, to discriminate, it is not at all clear how we are to judge discriminations among the various meanings of sovereignty, their necessary or unnecessary convergence, or the authorization of judgements about what is becoming more or less important.

Fourth and finally, and as implied in all these prior claims, the core question that is posed by any attempt to imagine our possible futures involves our ability to reimagine the character and location of political life, and to constitute appropriate practices through which this reimagination can occur. Whether implicitly or explicitly, knowingly or unknowingly, our attempts to envisage alternative futures occur in the dark shadow of Carl Schmitt=s insistence that we can have politics only if we have enemies; that is, as long as we have international relations. It is on this basis that Schmitt gave us our most ruthlessly elegant account of sovereignty as that which is able to make the exception to all general rules. That Schmitt was notorious as a key jurist of the Nazi era should give us some sense of why this shadow is so dark. It should also give us some sense of what is at stake both in a modern conception of politics whose ultimate ground is itself grounded on a paradox of founding, and thus on expressions of faith, irrational assertions of rationality, and so on, and in the demand that liberalism be understood as an expression of characteristically modern contradictions rather than as a bundle of doctrines to be asserted on faith. For all its vaunted aspirations to universality, liberalism rests on a contradiction between universality and particularity that is resolved by the sovereign state. For all its vaunted pluralism, liberalism rests on an affirmation of a plurality of states that is in deep tension with all claims to universality. Liberalism expresses the paradoxes and contradictions of the sovereignty that constitutes it. Liberalism at the limit is a worrying thing. That Schmitt was offering only a brutally elegant expression of a tradition of political thought that can be traced back through Hobbes= distinction between the state of nature and the state of law and Plato=s distinctions between Greek and Barbarian, among many other iconic accounts of political possibility, should also give us some sense of what it might involve to imagine a politics not only without enemies but also without the polis and all subsequent accounts of a politics of containment within territorial borders. It suggests, for example, much of the impetus behind but also the limits of attempts to think of the future in terms of either the perfection of the polis (neo-republican claims about a democratic peace come to mind here) or the verticalization of the polis (as with so many accounts of what is tellingly called European integration).

Our key difficulty in thinking about alternative futures is that the claim to sovereignty expresses not an account of political reality B in this context it is more accurately understood as a normative or idealistic, and massively reiterated claim about what a claim to legitimate authority should or must be B but the limits of our modern political imagination. It is simply not clear to us now how we should be thinking about the constitution of claims to legitimate authority, unless we resort to all those assumptions about who we are, where we have come from and where we are going to that are inscribed in that vortex of practices we call sovereignty.

Political life has arguably become more complex. Much political analysis, meanwhile, has become ever more rooted in disabling cliches and caricatures. This depoliticisation takes many familiar forms, especially in the context of cultures of consumption and commodification. Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Weber still retain a critical edge in this respect. But the depoliticization effected by contemporary claims about sovereignty is especially interesting because sovereignty has been the most powerful expression of what we have meant by politics for so long. Having satisfied itself that sovereignty is in place, and working as it should, modern political analysis more or less lost interest in how it came to be in that place, or how it in fact works, and works in relation to some already established B pre-sovereign B norm.

Many accounts of the impending demise of sovereignty have tended to re-enforce the depoliticisation that is already apparent in the naturalizations of sovereignty informing so many theories of international relations and international law, and which equally inform the unspoken assumptions of most political and social theorists. Literatures on various kinds of ethics have grown exponentially, as have literatures on international or global economies, on globalization as a social or a cultural process, and on the emerging problems of international or global governance. Yet the most profound problems posed by such literatures B those raised by the emerging consensus that various contemporary trends amount to a serious challenge to the forms of political life we associate with the modern state, and thus to the forms of political identity and legitimate authority achieved in relation to the modern state B are difficult to express only in the languages of ethics, economics, policy or governance. Policies and practical responses to dangerous situations, like demands for new forms of governance, or new ethical commitments, are rightly in great demand. But calls for policy and governance assume agents with both some capacity and some authority to choose, to discriminate, to judge. It is in this context that the voluminous literatures now canvassing the scope of contemporary trends and transformations fall into polite and rather embarrassed silence, at best, or at worst, into facile claims about, say, democracy or rights that somehow extend beyond the territorial states in which such things have attained some degree of conceptual coherence and institutional expression.

Nothing is easier than to say that sovereignty is archaic or obsolete. But nothing is harder than to come to terms with what this might mean, not least because it has become so conventional to conflate the fate of sovereignty with the fate of state sovereignty and the fate of state sovereignty with the fate of the state. Contemporary forms of depoliticization thus converge with profound difficulties in working out what it could mean to be politicized under contemporary conditions. In the meantime, the buzzwords of the age B globalization, democratization, development, global civil society B serve as upbeat billboards screening the decaying neighborhoods of established political discourse.

Any serious engagement with future possibilities must engage in a sustained repoliticization of what we mean by political life. It may be the case that we need to invoke new values, or norms, or laws, or modes of conflict resolution, or forms of sustainable development, or cross-national solidarity, or many of the other items now frequently canvassed for an agenda of progressive global action. But all such items pose questions of judgement, of the need to discriminate between values, to authorize this decision rather than that decision, to favor this community rather than that community, to decide when norms have or must be broached. These are all questions about politics. While it was long the case that "international relations" marked an arena in which one could safely abandon any concern with politics as a matter of legitimate authority so as to concentrate instead on the mere interplay of power among powers, the widely mooted but still murky transition to some kind of "world politics" or "global order" has begun to repose very basic questions about the character and location of politics in increasingly dramatic forms. If we are to think creatively about possible futures in this context, questions about politics B and not about ethics, economics, governance and the rest B will have to be central.

Engagements with sovereignty, I want to insist, must be framed as a question about the very possibility of politics, rather than as a powerful, still persuasive, but limited account of what politics must be. Sovereignty has attained the curious status of something that simply is, a fact of life fit for the hard headed political realists, even though its modes of being tend to be imagined as entirely abstract, symbolic, and theatrical. Yet sovereignty tends to confound the convenient ontological categories through which we affirm that which is or is not, that which is hard-headed and that which is merely theoretical. To engage with sovereignty as a puzzle is to understand the radical incoherence of all those claims about political reality that flow from decisionistic assertions about what sovereignty is and thus what political life must be. This incoherence works so as to disable all other accounts of what political life must be. There is a politics to the way we define politics. There is a politics to the way we have come to accept that the way we have come to define politics is indeed politics.

The key weakness of so many attempts to imagine future possibilities is that they try so hard to avoid questions about politics. In this respect, and perhaps only in this respect, the charge of utopianism is often correct, though dwellers in glass houses can ill-afford to throw stones. Too much thinking about the future not only imagines a nice straight road from here to there but also a grand highway away from the political. Indeed, it is difficult to tell these roads apart. Other categories abound, not least those well established evasions of the political that wander under the signs of the ethical, the legal, the humanitarian, the rational and the technological. But the problem of sovereignty will remain with us even if all other expressions of modern sovereignty mutate or are reconstituted into worlds that are currently unimaginable.

Even so, the future tense seems here to stay. Even the most cursory readings of contemporary events suggest patterns of change that are at least as important as those patterns of unchanging territoriality that once made claims about geopolitical necessity seem so plausible as accounts of what we must be, or not be, as political beings. In an age of movement and movements, of speed and accelerations, of flows and circuits and all those other signs of our moving on, our plans and predictions seem obsolete as soon as they are articulated. Stories about the possibility of moving from somewhere to somewhere else B from the sovereign state to some world order or cosmopolis or global society B seem less plausible than stories about the multiple journeys we are already undertaking. Change, we might say, is what there is. It is not the exception to some spatial norm.

The grand trek to the future or the great escape from fractious sovereignties undoubtedly remains a very persuasive metaphor, not least in the Platonist, Aristotelean, Kantian, Hegelian, Marxian and multiple liberal forms that enable our accounts of how we might act politically so as to become more progressive, more emancipatory, more peaceful, more free and equal, more properly human. Indeed, one of the key fields of contradiction and paradox in which we now find ourselves thinking about our possible futures is that so many of our most persuasive and cherished accounts of progress and emancipation serve to legitimize and reproduce ways of life that limit our capacities for progress and emancipation. Too many highways of history and progress, of crystalline ambitions and righteous visions of peace, justice and the global market, have brought many of us, and occasionally all of us, to too many sites of catastrophe. This much, at least, we ought to have learnt from this past century of such striking visions, and such extraordinary violence.

Thus futures, we might say, are best approached indirectly. Futures, we should say, are up for negotiation; not for the plan, the manifesto or the transcendental constitution. The great utopian dream constitutes part of our stained historical record, not a guide to becoming other than we have already become. Futures have to be engaged in practice, and practice always dissolves and reconstructs those arbitrary lines between past, present and future that work to legitimize what we do and how we do it. Futures are not so far away. Indeed, they are already here. Accounts of future possibilities express the fortunes of the present. They are shaped by historically contingent accounts of necessity, and historically contingent accounts of the relationship between contingency and necessity. They articulate, above all, a politics of temporality, an account of how some appropriate form of order is to be achieved in time, and of the kinds of agencies that might enable such order and make judgements about its orderliness.

In this sense, the only serious claims to political realism build on Machiavelli=s recognition that things change, and that to pretend otherwise is the worst possible form of political judgement. The only serious starting point for thinking about our possible futures, too, must be a recognition that even change changes, that our familiar ways of understanding what it means to change are rooted in historical conditions that are decreasingly familiar to us.

To think about our possible futures, therefore, is necessarily to become increasingly sensitive to the limits of our understanding of time, and especially of the difficulty of imagining a politics framed in time rather than in space. The modern state, or course, like the paradigmatic polis before it, articulated a politics in space. It is for the most part only in space, in the contained territory of soil and blood, that we can imagine a political community capable of virtu/virtue, development and perfectability in time. Aristotle rewrote the temporal potentials made available by Plato=s universal nouns. Hegel rewrote the temporal spirit unleashed by Kant=s Newtonian categories. Our histories largely remain national histories. Our clocks measure the hours in metric. It is this privileging of space as the condition under which we might imagine temporal possibilities that is affirmed by sovereignty, whether as a capacity to draw a Euclidean line between the legitimate or the illegitimate or as a capacity to monopolize authority in a specific territory. It is not simply that sovereignty expresses some ultimate reality of territorial space, but, more crucially, the ultimate reality and priority of a specific conception of space.

It is in this context that I would like to conclude by suggesting that the most serious problems posed by our attempts to envisage our possible futures, especially in the context of claims about increasing globalization/localization and claims about the accelerative character of our age, arise from an increasingly widespread sense that we can no longer simply assume that temporality can be framed spatially.

Again Hobbes provides a major archetype of this problem. His privileging of Euclidean space allows him to turn time into either the mere instant of contract or a promised eternity of sovereign rule. Governments may come and go but sovereign states go on for ever. It took some centuries B mainly the eighteenth and nineteenth B for the great gap been the magical instant of founding and the magical promise of the perpetual state to be filled by all those now familiar accounts of History and histories, progress, evolution and development. Some readings of modernity even mistake these accounts as evidence of the way in which modernity must be understood through its preoccupation with temporality, a mistake predicated on a failure to examine the spatial assumptions on which modern accounts of temporality were articulated. Machiavelli, by contrast, framed a paradigmatic account of political judgment as a capacity to read the times, but this too was a capacity ultimately rooted in a desire to sustain a spatial domain, the republic capable of achieving a greatness that might be remembered for many generations though inevitably destined for corruption and decay. Again one might understand these paradigmatic formulations in terms already set out by Plato and Aristotle, terms that affirm some sort of polis as the only possible B spatial, territorial B home for man the political animal.

It seems to me that many contemporary claims about our possible global futures become most interesting and provocative if read as variations on the question of whether we can understand ourselves to be somehow political when the spatialized order of the sovereign state is no longer able to monopolize either the organization of movements and flows or the imagination of temporal trajectories. Questions about the future hang much less on whether we can draw a line from present to future than simply on whether we can draw the line, or even sustain a sense of some Awe@ that knows itself without drawing lines.

Put slightly differently, what is perhaps at stake here is the fate of the modern concept and practice of citizenship. Citizenship, after all, is one of our major practices of drawing lines; of including and excluding those who are or are not political agents in a political community. Most of our primary political categories, and not least of freedom, equality, democracy depend on our capacity to sustain a concept of citizenship as the primary account of our political identity.

In the codes of modern sovereignty that enable the claims of modern citizenship, the obvious alternative to the citizen of the modern sovereign state is some kind of cosmopolitan citizenship. This potential alternative is conventionally rejected on the ground that (i) citizenship involves membership of a political community, (ii) the only political community we have is a modern version of the polis, and (iii) the only cosmopolitanism we can have is a system of autonomous latter-day polii such that citizenship of the state can eventually be consistent with a broader conception of citizens acting in accordance with the universal moral law.

It is perhaps significant that Kant has been employed as an advocate of cosmopolitanisms that both reject and idealize the statist account of citizenship. It is significant because Kant is a profoundly spatial thinker, although his later writings, including those essaying the possibility of a universal peace, are interesting because of the way they grapple with the puzzles of temporal possibility within a highly spatialized framework. It is this spatialized framework, for example, that encourages contemporary accounts of an emerging European citizenship as a vertical elaboration of existing statist citizenships, of a vertically articulated hierarchy established on an existing, though Aenlarging@ or Aintegrating@ spatial ground. Indeed, it seems to be such an obvious form of common sense to think that the future does indeed lie in the vertical dimension, on the great road to somewhere higher.

But where could this somewhere higher be? The Great Chain of Being took travelers to God, who nevertheless resided just out of reach. Modern reason showed us the promise of humanity, which nevertheless resided in a house of abstractions. Claims about globalization, or European integration, or ecological catastrophe, or humanitarian interventions encourage us to believe that we might now rise up to make these abstractions concrete. But where would this be? In tall buildings in Manhattan or Geneva? Up on the 33^rd Floor, overlooking the East River? Up in the supremest court? In the autonomous spirits of modern individuals freed from states by the magic of the market? There is both a great attraction and a great absurdity to thinking that the future of citizenship lies upwards, or even in bringing what is up down to reside within the modern subject. The starry heavens are not up. Space does not provide the framework in which we can understand time. The future of citizenship, we might plausibly suspect, does not lie up either.

Sovereignty, I have suggested, in various forms of shorthand that highlight the continuing importance of paradoxes and contradictions that find especially important expressions in texts by and ongoing interpretations of Hobbes, Kant and Schmitt, has to be read as a much more complex phenomenon than it appears in most modern political analysis. Much of the shorthand I have used here is enabled by the extensive metaphorical fields provoked by images of drawing the line.

Schmitt is important as the twentieth century theorist who has most clearly articulated an account of the ungrounded decisionism involved in constituting the ground from which distinctions between the normal and the exceptional, the friend and the enemy, can be distinguished. He is in many ways the great embarrassment of modern political thought, a figure to be approached gingerly, the point at which the long held suspicion that liberalism at its limits must acknowledge the necessary conflation of truth and power, the irrational assertion of rationality, the primacy of power politics B as Hans J. Morgenthau especially would insist in his Schmittean rendition of the science of international relations. Although Morgenthau=s famous text is perhaps not a place in which to find much theoretical sophistication or reflection, its undeniable achievement has been to place the limits of modern politics firmly on the intellectual agenda of the second half of the twentieth century, even if it did so by feigning silence about its own more interesting intellectual genealogy and effectively displacing the problem to the separate field of the outside of modern politics, to international relations.

Hobbes is our paradigmatic modern expression of the paradox of founding, a paradox he resolves with a story of history written entirely in spatial terms. Irony is an overused term, but it certainly captures something very odd about the way in which his brilliant rendition of the act of creation is remembered mainly through an image of the way the world is, an image he created by projecting an abstract universe of paradigmatically modern individuals back into an imaginary time, a projection that then worked to affirm an account of what life must have been like before modernity.

Kant is our paradigmatic expression of what it means to examine the conditions under which we might imagine a convergence of the finite and the infinite within the moral agency of the spatialized moral subject. We draw the line, and leave it at that. Or we draw the line and worry that it is a line that perhaps cannot be drawn, even in principle. In the latter case, Kant, like Hobbes, becomes interesting as a critical political thinker as well as a dogmatic caricature.

All three thinkers have much to say about how the modern world is constituted by the practices of drawing lines, of making distinctions and judgements under conditions they portrayed so sharply. There are many conditions under which containment rules, and even a few where the conflation of all the primary meanings of modern sovereignty would raise few concerns. Still, there are many ways to imagine the drawing of lines. They can be imagined as connecting as well as discriminating, as temporary rather than permanent, as multiple rather than singular, as thick rather than thin, as sites of struggle rather than as dead zones of airbrushed achievement. The act of drawing lines can be imagined as precisely an act, an ongoing, changing and constitutive practice, a site of motion, an articulation of space-time, rather than a singular affirmation of a great containment, a great escape, a great inclusion/exclusion that always was even while it was being drawn. Lines, we might say, constitute networks as well as boxes.

Networks invoke spatiotemporal possibilities that are sharply at odds with a vision of spatialized territories and subjectivities. They focus on patterns of relation and connection. They encourage accounts of multiple subjectivity. They remind us of other paradigmatic philosophers, in many cultures, including the cultures of modernity. They are already invoked in influential accounts of social movements, political economies and agencies of governance. The emergence of a world of connections eventually might even be read as the primary characteristic of a twentieth century whose most obvious events B international wars, the Cold War, divisions between worlds of development B have seemed to express only a modern framing of spatial separations.

My own view, in fact, is that it is in terms of various patterns of networks and connections, of flows in space-time, that we can already see many attempts to reconstruct our understanding of what it means to claim identity or difference, universality or plurality. One might, though not here, develop a reading of many political practices that occur in spaces and times in which they are not supposed to occur within the modern containers of sovereign subjectivities. It is increasingly difficult to tell what politics is by saying where it is. Or perhaps it is increasingly difficult to tell what politics is in general by identifying where it is in any place in particular. The space is not the territory. The territory is not Euclidean space. The state is not the necessary mediation between the local and the global or the particular and the universal. Federalisms will find it more and more difficult to mediate between spatial extension and vertical authority. Cities and social movements are not small and powerless. Our two dimensional maps are not the future.

The real difficulty in this respect lies not in extending such a reading to many different situations, but in interpreting such a reading in political terms. The crucial issue is not whether it is possible to imagine plausible alternative futures, even futures that are somehow framed in relation to possibilities that are global. Indeed, my own guess is that metaphors of networks and flow will very rapidly displace metaphors of the great containment and the great escape as guarantees of analytical acumen. In many respects they may have done so already. The most difficult problem before us now is not whether we can imagine worlds coming into being in these terms but whether we can give these terms any political content or even imagine a we that might enable these terms to take some political expression. Unless the question of politics is engaged, it is inevitable that claims about governance, policy, ethics, culture and the rest will simply reaffirm a politics that can discriminate but not connect, exclude but not relate, keep us where we are but not allow us to become otherwise.

Notes