[Nettime-bold] We The People

[snafu <mdeseriis@tiscali.it>]

WE, THE PEOPLE
Ida Dominijanni
Il Manifesto, 16 feb 2003
www.ilmanifesto.it
Translated by Snafu

"We, the people, do not want this war: millions of Americans are with you 
and challenge President Bush" says from the stage of San Giovanni in Rome, 
Mss Campbell the first woman priest of the council of churches of United 
States - firstly welcomed with coldness and then applauded with warmth. "We 
the people", the signature that inaugurate the American Constitution, a 
formula than returns a plural conception of "the people", which is one, 
just as long as it is aware to be made of many and different, "we". "We the 
people" will say few hours later the demonstrators of New York. But even in 
Rome, it is not only from the mouth of Mss Cambpell that the formula 
resounds in the air.

In the air of Italian capital, oscar of the world pacifist day, with the 
complicity of a transparent air as only the Roman winter can donate, you 
can see in transparency something new under the sky of politics. Over the 
time, we saw the declining of the stars of party representation, flag 
belonging, national and nationalist identity; we saw, over the last two 
years, the uprising of a multiple and global movement, unlimited for the 
perception of space and for the planetary dimension of its goals. Thus, 
such a multifarious, young and mature, male and female demonstration, so 
rainbowing to shadow all the party, particular and belonging flags; so 
global to never fall in the trap of identity juxtaposition that make a 
single entity of an enemy government and its people, this was unseen yet. 
Singular-plural: we the people for the peace, in all the world, without 
nothing else in the middle, nor national borders, nor states, nor 
governments, nor parties. We the people, the signature of American 
Constitution against the  American Sovereign, the disorganized civil 
society against the armed organization, the global multitude against the 
stars and stripes Nation which wants to appropriate globalization by 
proclaiming wars of civilization.

New furrows, new contradictions as we would say once upon a time, announce 
the political panorama of the new century and rewrite the heritage of the 
world. There's something new, a sort of heterogenesis of the aims, in this 
so Americanized civil society -  from the clothes and slogans to the rock 
soundtrack - which turns against the cupola of American power. As if by 
passing from modern European forms to the postmodern ones on the other side 
of the ocean, from active political representation to passive 
video-politics, from organized to plebiscite democracy, western politics 
would have draw a complete circle and found itself to a watershed: not at 
sunset though, but at a new beginning, in which the European origin and the 
American century remix themselves in new combinations.

It is not only a new space to be draw by the planetary march that unravels 
itself from capital to capital from timezone to timezone, but also a new 
time. Born from the ashes of bipolar world, grown together with the 
promises of a world without borders, with the declining states and the 
hybrid identities, the other politics is already in action and it says, all 
over the world, that war that rebuilds the borders, the Leviatan, the 
identity cards is, above all, anachronistic: out of time, Give peace a 
chance, sings the march, and we can give it more than one.



            

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