The New Imperial Order: Indigenous Responses to Globalization

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.The New Imperial OrderIndigenous Responses to GlobalizationBy Makere Stewart-Harawira Zed Books Ltd Huia PublishersCopyright © 2005 Makere Stewart-HarawiraAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-84277-528-8ContentsAcknowledgements, viii,List of Abbreviations, x,Foreword, xii,Introduction, 1,1 • Of Order and Being: Towards an Indigenous Global Ontology, 32,2 • Indigenous Peoples and the World Order of Sovereign States, 56,3 • Shaping the Liberal International Order, 88,4 • Contested Sites: State Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, 114,5 • Global Hegemony and the Construction of World Government, 145,6 • Globalization, Regionalism and the Neoliberal State: Local Engagement in New Zealand, 177,7 • Global Governance and the Return of Empire, 205,Conclusion • The Spiral Turns. Crisis and Transformation: An Indigenous Response, 238,Epilogue • Writing as Politics, 254,Index, 258,CHAPTER 1Of Order and BeingTowards an Indigenous Global OntologyThis chapter presents the central theme of this book. It provides the foundation for my claim that despite having been devalued, marginalized, disenfranchised and frequently submerged throughout the history of Western imperialism, traditional indigenous knowledge forms have a profound contribution to make towards an alternative ontology for a just global order.The search for meaning, for the essence of 'man' and 'being', has occupied humankind possibly since the beginning of thought itself. In the disorder and uncertainty of the contemporary moment, the need for meaning is more potent than ever as identities, structures and subjectivities get reordered in the flux of rapid integration, disintegration and reintegration. As Touraine eloquently depicts this condition in his Critique of Modernity, modernity's separation of Reason and Spirit has in large measure given birth to 'the crisis of the new millennium'.Responses to this crisis include the reconfiguration of civil society-state relationships. Another significant response has been the enormous rise of anti-systemic movements seeking the overthrow of current paradigms of power and global capitalism; Stavenhagen asserts that this development 'signifies another level, another reality, that of "ontological becoming", in the problematic of multilateralism and world order'. We are indeed in a moment of 'transformational timespace'. In Wallerstein's terms, we are required to engage in an exercise of 'utopistics', of deciding on the basis of 'substantive rationality' our overall goals for the future and the best means of getting there.Ontology and BeingRobert Cox's response to the crisis of this time has been to call for what he terms 'a new ontology of social and political existence'. 'Ontology', Cox states, 'lies at the beginning of any enquiry.' The ontology Cox refers to here consists of the presuppositions that people make in thinking about, for instance, the entities and interrelationships that make up the system broadly referred to as world order. According to Cox, 'the ontologies people work with derive from their historical experience and in turn become embedded in the world they construct'. Historical experiences, however, are understood subjectively. Their interpretation is contingent upon the world view, the values (moral, spiritual and otherwise), the sets of ideas and notions of being and existence held by the subject, and it is in this philosophical sense that the notion of ontology is most contested.In poststructuralist discourses in particular, 'ontology' is often seen to imply the notion of a 'fixed essence', a concept most notably disputed in contemporary philosophy by thinkers such as Sartre, who argues that the only reality by which man can be conceived as existing lies in 'how he acts and what he does', and Foucault, whose suspicion of ontologies as representing essentialist notions of universal truths lead him to declare that, rather t