The attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 did not change the condition of sovereignty but they did perhaps reveal more clearly a change that had already taken place. In particular they revealed the inadequacy of any substantialist notion of sovereignty: sovereignty is not an autonomous substance but rather a relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Sovereign power is never absolute. It constantly seeks to establish and reproduce its hegemony over the ruled. The one who obeys is thus no less essential to the conception and functioning of sovereignty than the one who commands. Consequently there is no exclusive source of sovereignty, as the substantialist notion would have it.

One might say that September 11 demonstrated definitively that the United States is part of the world or really that the U.S. government is not an autonomous source of sovereignty but rather part of a global series of relationships that define the present form of sovereignty. Throughout the modern era the international scene was composed by a set of dominant sovereign national powers who posed external limits on each other’s sovereignty and ruled over the subordinated nations and regions. In our current passage toward Empire, however, the sovereignty of the dominant nation states is being compromised while sovereignty is being transferred to and transformed by a new imperial power, which is supranational and tends toward global control. In one sense, then, one might say that this imperial sovereignty is unlimited externally insofar as it envelops in a certain sense the entire globe. Imperial sovereignty has no outside. In another sense, however, sovereignty remains (and must always remains) limited internally by the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. Sovereignty is in this sense always double-faced; it is necessary a dual system of power.

Since in the passage to Empire the external limits of sovereignty tend to disappear, the concept of war understood as the conflict between sovereign powers has little significance. Social conflicts of sovereignty tend instead to accumulate on the internal boundaries. These internal lines of division are what determine within sovereignty always and inevitably the possibility of civil war. In Empire civil war — along with the police action that works constantly to prevent its eruption — is the only adequate expression of the double-faced nature of sovereignty. September 11 was not the beginning of this imperial civil war, even in what was thought to be peacetime. We have to understand the complex and multiple lines of this civil war that defines imperial sovereignty and discover how it can be transformed into a liberatory struggle that could lead to a veritable peace.

In the very moment when Empire is formed imperial sovereignty is thrown into crisis not because it is threatened by an external enemy (there is no more outside of Empire) but by a multitude of internal omnilateral, and diffuse tensions. Sovereignty is thus here a relative, not an absolute, power that functions on the hypothesis that it can resolve the multiple tensions and from time to time intervene in the spatio-temporal decomposition of the relations of force. As Heraclitus said, sovereignty is war and war is never defined simply by two but by a multiplicity, a multitude.

There is no guarantee that the civil wars that emerge in Empire will present any liberatory possibilities. In fact, the vast majority that are posed in the name of the poor, or the oppressed, or the virtuous, are merely struggles for superiority within the hierarchies of imperial power. Today forces that claim to represent the interest of the wretched of the earth clash with others that pretend to represent justice and peace for all, but such civil wars are simply complex power struggles within hierarchies of imperial power. How can we discover a different axis of civil war that would pose the multitude against imperial control itself? How are we conceive and realize not only a shift in the hierarchies of imperial power but an overthrow of sovereignty as such and the construction of a global democracy without sovereignty? How can a civil war that runs throughout imperial society come to an end and arrive at a veritable peace? We are certainly not yet in the position to give adequate responses to these questions, but they represent today the central problem of any possible theory of imperial sovereignty. Such a theory would have to address the molecular pressures of the multitude on the substantial ambiguity — that is, two-sided nature — of sovereign power.

There are some who think that it is possible to control or contain the multilateral forces of globalization by restoring the old world of the nation-state and its modern sovereignty. In France some of them are called “souverainistes” and in the U.S. others (with a very different ideological agenda) go under the name of unilateralists, but more or less everywhere one can find this conservative tendency. Even at Porto Alegre, in the happy public spaces of the intercontinental march of liberation, one can find such affirmations. It is easy to respond that globalization cannot be turned back, at whatever costs, and that in particular it is impossible to reconstruct the old form of sovereignty. That said, however, it is worth adding that globalization can be desirable because it can correspond to and be part of a revolutionary process: in the modern era this involved the revolt of the working classes in the dominant regions in the globe and their desire as a class, along with the liberation struggles of colonial peoples and their desire to negate themselves as peoples. Within globalization the very possibility of sovereignty can be destroyed by such a regime of desire. This desire is brought to the fore by the civil war that tears apart imperial domination. Whoever wants to travel the path of the liberation of the multitudes must take account of this terrific possibility that is offered by the transformations of sovereignty in imperial civil war. This is a project worthy of the multitude: transform the oppressive state of permanent war in which we find ourselves into a liberatory war that can eventually lead to a veritable social peace.

(excerpts from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Sovereignty, Washington, 2001)