Conference Stream: Development and Globalization Organizing Rhetoric and Power

Borders in an (In)visible World: Privileging the New World Order

by

Kym Thorne Open Learning Program Director The School of Accounting and Information Systems City West Campus University of South Australia, South Australia 5072 Telephone: +61 08 8302 0521 Facsimile: +61 08 8302 0102 Email: Kym.Thorne@unisa.edu.au

and

Alexander Kouzmin Adjunct Professor University of South Australia and Professor of Management Graduate College of Management Southern Cross University Telephone: +61 07 5506 9322 Facsimile: +61 07 5506 9301 Email: akouzmin@scu.edu.au

Published in the US as:

Thorne, K. and Kouzmin, A. (2004), Borders in an (In)visible World?: Revisiting Communities, Recognising Gulags, Administrative Theory and Praxis, Vol. 26, No.3, September, pp. 408-42

Borders in an (In)visible World: Privileging the New World Order

Duplicity and propaganda constitute much of the emerging discourse on a "borderless," New-World Order. Deconstructing Neo-liberal propaganda is one issue. Understanding other colluding discourses is another. Post-modern rhetoric has yet to understand its complicity in refusing to acknowledge and critique the totalizing discourse of Neo-liberalism and there are dangerous currents to be negotiated in the fatuous collapsing of globalized "End of History" posturings with those of borderless worlds. This paper explores the implications for Public Administration of "borderless" identity and community. This exploration questions the privileging of the "borderless," New-World Order as discourse and practice that eliminates all alternative approaches to Public Administration, identity and community. Events at the Guantanamo Bay and Christmas Island Gulags demonstrate the purposeful (re)emergence and persistence of borders. The challenge for Public Administration is to escape the illusions and impractical schemes presented by Neo-liberal interests which benefit from making the visible invisible, borders non-borders, communities noncommunities and persons non persons. Keywords: Border; Community; Globalization; Gulag; Identity; Information; Invisible; Neo-liberal; New Alphas; New Public Administration; Post-modern; Public Administration; and Visible. INTRODUCTION In 1991, Ohmae foresaw a borderless world in which no state could control, or even regulate, the flow of people and information. Borders were seemingly rendered in-effectual. Indeed, sovereignty was a fast disappearing capability in the intended confusions of principal/agent distinctions consequent to the radical attack on sovereign governments in Neo-liberal propaganda. Public Administration is yet to confront this challenge to its legitimacy in any strategic way and this suggests that Public Administration will not escape being caught up in the Neo-liberal enthusiasm for capture and the inevitable and systemic deregulation of economies and the destruction of communities from full privatization to corporate imperialism. However, recent gyrations over the legal and political fictions associated with the categories called alien/non-alien, combatant/non-combatant and terrorist/nonterrorist, situated within nineteenth-century, imperially-imposed borders, surfaces new contradictions in administering not only citizenship, but also identity and community. What is also evident is that the notion of sovereignty has not disappeared but appears in new ways to expose the global orthodoxy of a borderless world as just another gambit in corporate imperialisms manipulations of the visible and invisible. Sovereignty of the state, where borders are exposed as visible or rendered invisible can be understood according to the qui bono

credo. This is not a US imperial novelty. Others, including Australia, are fast learners in manipulating the visibility and the invisibility of borders and national sovereignty. Far from the Neo-liberal fiction, common to others, about the withering away of the state, a re-legitimated and efficacious Public Administration would confront the political economy of opportunistic (in)visibility. Identity politics has already benefited from being rendered somewhat more visible - social capital and communitarianism less so due to the complicity of Post modernism in the Neoliberal project. In stark terms, Public Administration needs less commercial in confidence in it contract management role. Public Administration needs to critically understand the purposeful, on-going fluxes and abrupt changes in visibility and invisibility and must keep the Public Domain always visible within its renewable agenda. The fictional non-persons of Guantanamo Bay and Christmas Island must remind Public Administration of the continuing ubiquity of boundary definition and re-definition that are increasingly coercive in corroding and diminishing existing and hard-won Public Domains of visibility. If this reminder remains invisible, how long before the defence of the Homeland legitimates setting up new American and Australian Gulags for domestic social and political dissenters? A BORDERLESS WORLD According to the pro-globalization literature, such as Drucker (1993), Hammer (1996) and Thurow (1997), a paradigm shift emerged with the approaching Twenty-First Century. What happened before no longer mattered. Ohmae (1991) presented an early, and perhaps the most revealing, version of this new world order. The free flow of ideas, individuals, investments and industries [had] developed into an organic bond between developed economies (Ohmae, 1991: 269). One is now living in a world where money, securities, services, options, futures, information and patents, software and hardware, companies and knowhow, assets and membership, paintings and brands are all traded without national sentiments across traditional borders (Ohmae, 1991: 213). What was emerging was the Inter-linked Economy (ILE), consisting of the Triad of America, Europe and Japan, joined by the aggressive economies such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore (Ohmae, 1991: xii). Many other pro globalists, such as Friedman (1999), went further - expecting that everywhere on the globe could be incorporated into a universal, level, economic-playing field. Some also incorporated a virtual dimension into this encompassing economy, suggesting that technological developments allowed economic activity to flow between widely-spread locations. There were even those, including Post-modernists such as Baudrillard (Bogard, 1996), who were convinced that physical globalization was accompanied, or even replaced, by a disembodied, global cyberspace that was a simulacra of real world activity. These advocates combined to raise what was fortissimo hosannas for the global market as the benign, universal deity immortal, invisible, omniscient, omnipotent (Wheen, 2004, p. 234). The transformation of national borders started with the de-regulation of foreign exchange markets due to advances in communication and computer technology. Somehow, as information about products and services became available to consumers, whatever their location, consumers wanted access to the best possible goods and services. Governments - and the national boundaries they represented - become invisible in this kind of search (Ohmae, 1991: 228). Underlying this approach was an almost religious faith in the transforming power

of information about the products and services available elsewhere in the world to dissolve national-based borders, communities and identities. This consumer-driven, global economy had its own logic and did not respect any borders. Nation-state-based models of community and identity were no longer relevant. This was especially true for those who imagined cyberspace as a substitute for a physicalized world (Tiffin and Terashima, 2001). Ohmae (1991) had the same view as Reich (1992). What was good for General Motors was no longer good for America. Business and other organizations needed to develop new senses of hybrid identities and dispersed, consuming communities. BORDERLESS PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Ohmae (1991: 265) recommended that government leaders realize that their role is to provide a steady and small hand, not to interfere. The mercantile age was over and the welfare state was no longer useful. Planning was constrained and not fully effective in the global economy. Public Administration must be transparent and not prevent the flow of information with t he rest of the world reaching what Davidson and Rees-Mogg (1998) termed the sovereign individual. In Ohmaes (1991: 23) view, governments central failure was the monopolizing of information, cooking it up as they saw fit and re-distributing it in forms of their own devising. This ability to arbitrage was being eliminated by new communication and information technology throughout the Inter-Linked Economy and individual nations exhibited converging trends in relation to key economic indices such as public policy and public expenditure as a percentage of output. Public Administration was to focus on educating people and making sure that that they have as much information as possible and providing first-class infrastructure for businesses (Ohmae, 1991: 242). No barriers or artificial regulation could control the invisible flow of funds. Governments should make nation or sub-regional cities attractive locations for global companies and should nurture local companies to grow into global companies. Any protection or subsidy must be short term or directed to training or other specific infrastructure provision. Everything must be related to providing jobs for the many versions of the consuming New Alphas. Reich (1992) emphasized that this was not just about creating any job but positions for Symbolic Analysts, most able to manipulate global information flows. Florida (2003) went even further, suggesting that those in charge of any specific location must focus on constructing physical and electronic infras tructure which provides the bohemian, yet consumerist, lifestyle demanded by the Creatives that dominate the crucial cyberspace dimensions of the borderless world. In contrast to Korten (1995), Ohmae (1991) held a benign view of global corporations, or multinationals, as non-exploitative servants of demanding customers. Global corporations and multi-nationals knew the value of being responsible corporate citizens - avoiding private deals with elites or governments. If they did not act responsibly within the Inter-Linked Economy, there would be no need for punitive action by government as people would neither work for them nor buy what they produce (Ohmae, 1991: 242). The limited ability for nations to tax global companies operating within borders was also an issue. According to Ohmae (1991), multi-nationals should not be taxed by a Tobin-style automatic, un-earned, transfer payments. Rather, the taxation of multi-nationals should depend on the performance of specific locale(s) in doing such things as educating people which enhanced domesticated individuals ability to compete and consume in the borderless world. Ohmae (1991) envisaged a limited role for some super-

government-like extended European Community which would monitor the performance scoreboard and assist poor performers. Other advocates of the Washington Consensus, such as Freidman (1999) and Wolfson (1994), envisioned a continuing role for existing global institutions such as the World Bank, to keep funds free flowing, and the World Trade Organization, to resolve trade disputes and to keep national markets as open as possible. Public Administrations essential role was to let in the light by making sure the [business] information provided was full, accurate, and generally available (Ohmae, 1991: 243). In the borderless world, Public Administration was expected to be people centred and not protect the interests of companies or industries - but allow individuals to make their own decisions. Public Administration, as the captive of the outmoded welfare state, was unable to control any of the flows across the non-existent borders. Public Administrations best response was to get out of the way and surrender to the market in all aspects of human endeavour. Yet, Public Administrations ability to respond to the demands of the market suffers from the Post-moderns complicity with Neo-liberalism over the misunderstanding and the abuse of information. As Eagleton (2003, p. 67) emphasises, Post-modernism gets off the ground when it is no longer a matter of having information about the world but about the world as information. THE HEGEMONY OF NEO-LIBERAL PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Discourse analysis shows a characteristic pattern evident in this borderless Public Administration - an apology for Neo-liberal-driven New Public Management praxis replacing the burden of proof required from Public Choice arguments (Eagleton, 1996; Andrews and Kouzmin, 1999). Following typical Post-modernist discourse (Eagleton, 1996), New Public Management is sold as a technical device, un-compromised by either side of the ideological spectrum and holding the sole objective of serving the interests of the clients of the state". In stark terms, as Wheen (2004) points out, the Post-modern was not interested in any systematic critique of Capitalism and other economic activities since Capitalism was, itself, a fiction - like Truth, Justice, Law and other linguistic constructs (Wheen, 2004: 84). As Leivesley (1997: 5) acidly observed, the French foundational writers seem to have no curiosity about economics. For example, Baudrillard (1989) dismissed the public sphere as epi-phenomenal to the hyper-real and explored the global simulacra without any critical concern for the empirical dirtiness of the politics and economics (Leivesley, 1997: 5). Neo-liberalism, and the post-modern, shared a world-view based on the end or exhaustion of history and the reliance on ironic, pretentious ambiguity to create ideological space for possessive individualism as the agent of any transformation (to the extent that the Post-modern accepted the possibility of any transcendence). This justified the privatization of aesthetics, morality and consumption in order to legitimize a globalized quest for agency based on individual self-fulfilment - where the market replaces the state as the final arbiter of success or failure. This mutually reinforcing anti-state, anti-hierarchical and anti-centralization disinterest in Public Administration has serious repercussions. As Thorne (2003) indicates, the Neo-liberal faith in rampant computer information technology, unbridled consumer demands and un-encumbered global free markets, resonated with Post-modern fascinations with fragmentation, multiplicity, surface, media images, hybridity, consumption, technological augmentation and, with ever changing, perfect markets. This evidenced a fundamental mutuality of interest between the Neo-liberal and the Post-modern approaches to economic

globalization - a mutuality that distrusts communal, political action, luxuriates in the liberating possibilities of technology and celebrates hybridity and selfabsorption. Neo-liberal and Post-modern pre-occupations with globalization transforming Capitalism, by collapsing time and space, is part of a more extensive theoretical confusion over the origin, context and nature of a borderless world. However, the world is not unified or, even, uniformly inter-related. Globalization is theorized as both its own cause and effect and Rosenberg (2000) comes to one single, simple conclusion. Globalization unavoidably pushes the categories of space and time into a role which they cannot be imagined to fulfil (Rosenberg, 2000: 165). Rosenberg (2000) articulates the essential problem for Neo-liberal and Postmodern advocates of borderless globalization as the only way forward into a Twenty-First Century, where society and markets are supposedly transformed by technologically-induced revolutions in space and time. According to Rosenberg (2000: 165), it is possible that some sort of spatial-temporal transformation is triggered without determining a radical shift in the technology of time and speed, but [w]hat actually drives them is their use by capital to secure, extend and obscure the exploitative and distributive mechanisms through which in-equalities of wealth and power are re-produced in the contemporary world. This highly-constrained approach made it very difficult to link older types of systemic emancipatory politics with these newer politics of self-actualization. Politics is confined to a succession of local, sometimes globally-replicated, pluralistic, single-issue movements that, despite Hardt and Negris (2000) view to the contrary, are almost impossible to develop into a coherent, potent critique of global or national state power structures. The play of these single issues does not challenge the Post-moderns kinship with the de-regulation, privatization and reduction of social welfare of any evident nominally liberal social policy, nor does it encourage the marginalized or less privileged to maintain any extensive, ongoing engagement with the political process or lessen the homogenizing force of global capital. It must be acknowledged that Gerlach and Hamilton (2000), via their reliance on Bogard (1996), do demonstrate that the Post-modern does help one to understand the dangers of a de-physicalized, borderless world. The Post-modern allows one to understand the extension of surveillance into the image and electronic simulation of surveillance (Foucault, 1979) of many aspects of contemporary life of organizations and allows one to understand how individuals are being distracted, if not submerged, by surface, image and desire (see Baudrillard, 1983). However, as Alvesson and Skoldberg (2000) propose, the Post-modern, despite its insights into the dark side of global Capitalism, is constrained, if not captured, by its insistence that what is needed now in relation to Capitalism is just, as Lyotard (1984) implied, to stretch market boundaries without changing anything essential. As Eagleton (1996) indicates, this does not mean that the Post-modern is not useful. Eagleton (1996: 134) realises that the Post-modern contains a rich body of work on racism and ethnicity, on the paranoia of identity-thinking, on the perils of totality and the fear of otherness... along with its deepened insights into the cunning of power. Yet fragmented, Post-modernism is susceptible to the restless, transforming and co-opting pluralism of Capitalism. The Post-modern exhibits a fundamental attraction to the capitalist marketplace, identifying with its logic of pleasure and plurality, of the ephemeral and discontinuous, of some great de-centred network of desire of which individuals seem the fleeting effects (Eagleton, 1996: 132).

Due to a metaphorical, context-free, political grammar (Gouldner, 1974), Neoliberal-driven New Public Management becomes an un-identifiable mass of ideas which are then moulded into new contours: conservatives become progressivists, Neo-liberals become centre-left, ideological conflict becomes cognitive failure and so forth. The result is a dis-empowerment of theory and its divorce from praxis (Andrews and Kouzmin, 1999: 17), without any remonstrations from proponents of the Post-modern. The limitations of New Public Management in a context of increasing demands for the recognition of social costs inflicted upon many social actors, have led Neoliberal ideologues to build a discourse to hide their essentially conservative agenda. But there are more complex matters involved. "Disguised Conservatism" is like a carnival mask: depending on the quality of its craft, it can disguise, more or less, but it always hides something beneath it (Andrews and Kouzmin, 1999: 18-19). Increasingly, what was disguised was the invisible, regulated and exploitative dimension of the borderless, new global order. For example, as Singer (2003: 3-18) discovered, the privatization of the public military and security activities just allowed corporate warriors, trained by public expenditure, to act invisibly in government and corporate interests without any formal declaration of conflict or any acceptance of responsibility for the outcome but with the invisible rendered somewhat more visible within the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. (RE)-EMERGING BORDERS It does not seem that borders have disappeared in any fundamental sense. Borders have been made to appear or reappear. Post 9/11, both the United States and Australia found it useful to assert that geographic areas usually considered part of the national compact were actually different in some crucial aspects or could be effectively exorcised completely. During the war on Afghanistan, some captives were taken for interrogation to Camp X-Ray (then to Camp Delta) in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. About the same time, the Australian government dealt with the danger of having to accept, as refugees, boatloads of middle-eastern terrorists (many fleeing repressive regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq) by removing offshore islands from Australian sovereignty. These re-emerging borders functioned in many ways. The designation of the captives as enemy combatants not prisoners of war is intended to keep them outside the protection the Geneva Convention afforded to prisoners of war. The location of the enemy combatants on land leased from Cuba is intended to keep them outside the protection of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights and their captors outside of the International War Crimes Tribunal. The location of enemy combatants at a United States Military Base, captured from the Spanish and on the front line of the confrontation with Cuban and Soviet Marxism, is intended to keep these individuals outside of civilian justice and to reinforce the sacrifices that would need to be continually made to keep the United States safe. The exclusion of Christmas and other offshore Australian islands made the dangerous water journey from Indonesia almost suicidal and allowed the implementation of the Pacific Solution. This solution involved those people who managed to reach one of the excluded islands, or who managed to be rescued by an Australian vessel, to be transferred for processing to the tiny, near bankrupt island-nation of Nauru where they were housed at the expense of the Australian taxpayer without ever gaining any protection of Australian residency.

Although it is possible that markets are poorly constrained by sovereign borders and that social compacts may be made more amenable to borders, both may be involved in the deliberate manipulation of visibility and invisibility within areas of contested or limbo sovereignty. In effect, borders are moved around, rendered visible or invisible, in order to demonstrate the ability of certain nations or elites to escape the supposed level-playing field of globalization, to resist the reach of international institutions, such as the United Nations, and to renounce international treaty obligations when national interests are threatened. Individuals are also made visible, as actual or potential terrorists, or made invisible as human beings in a manner that savagely echoes the non-persons of the concentration camps, Gulags and devils islands. Although some things flow more easily, such as financial flows, or flow more rapidly, such as some communication flows, everything is not unrestricted. The Neo-liberal, global world order, based on Liberal- democracy, free markets and information and other technology, is not universal. Nation states persist. There are more restrictions on the movement of individuals, refugees and non-refugees than had existed during the height of Nineteenth-Century imperialism. Supra-regional governance is more noticeable. But the United States dominated the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), The United Kingdom was selective about its involvement in the European Union (EU) and Australia was excluded from the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the ASEAN Free Trade Association (AFTA). Sub regions throughout the world seek national or state rights, based on geographic, ethnic, religious or other notions of shared identity or community. Braithwaite and Drahos (2000) seminal text on business regulation indicated the continuing focus on the nation state as the locus of domestic and non-domestic regulation. The imminent introduction of international accounting standards is still based on national jurisdictions and reflects American exceptionalism more than any global consensus (De Lange and Howieson, 2004). Participatory democracy is not pervasive. The United States and its allies continue the neo-colonial practice of propping up despots and other regimes that are only nominally democratic. According to Hirst and Thompson (1999), few, if any, significant markets are free or completely open. The United States and Australia Free Trade Agreement favours the United States farm, media, intellectual property and pharmaceutical sectors. Financial flows are not completely unfettered. Exchange rates, especially the Chinese, are not all free-floating. Computer and communication technology is much more pervasive but, even in the United States, the Internet is not in every home or available to everyone. The Internet bubble indicated the difficulty of devising and operating viable cyberspace-based businesses. Even in cyberspace, frictionless, constantly fracturing perfect markets are hardly in evidence. Smaller players flutter around the conglomerates, sometimes finding favour but, more often, being crushed by their inherent lack of market power. Single global markets are resisted - for example, DVD and film/media launches are based on regions. The democratic, creative possibilities of easily replicable digital code are being resisted by legal sanctions and the extension of restraints on intellectual property. More and more organizations are dissatisfied by the size of their investment in information systems and by on-going performance and maintenance issues. Terrorism has slowed air traffic volume flows and, now, train travel patterns. Perhaps, most symbolic of all, with the demise of Concord, global, borderless cosmopolitans are no longer able to fly the Atlantic at supersonic speed. The predictions that Ohmae and his McKinsey colleagues, Henzer and Gluck made, in their Declaration of Interdependence aimed at the year 2005, have not

eventuated (Ohmae, Henzer and Gluck, 1990). The Inter-Linked Economies of the Triad have not resulted in the capacity for boundless prosperity, even within its own limits. Equally doubtful were their claims that there was any borderless economy that improved the well being of everyone and was open to all, creating no winners or losers. Among the few, shared conclusions in the extensive and discordant globalization literature is the view that however one defines economic globalization, it should inevitably produce winners and losers. As Albrows (1996) investigations into the shallowness of economic cosmopolitanism has indicated, it takes more than access to information about goods and services throughout the world to turn individuals into global citizens. Under pressure, individuals, no matter how cosmopolitan their consumption patterns may be, are likely to resurface more traditional notions of identity and community. Although the gurus of global business [Bartlett and Ghoshal (1989); Porter (1990) and Hamel and Prahalad (1994)] indicate the significance of local customization, most favour the greater ease associated with consumers exhibiting Levitts (1983) type of economic cosmopolitanism, where everyone in every nation aspires to a commonality of tastes with Californians - the worlds most advanced consumers. More and more evident are the dangers of inter-connection. The Asian Financial crisis, SARS, AIDS, terrorism and Mad Cow Disease suggest that there is no immunity in an Inter-Linked Economy. In a post 9/11 world, it is most uncertain whether the Singapore solution of focusing on commercial activity and renouncing military capacity does provide any security. As America, and the usual suspects in the Coalition of the Willing, have demonstrated, unilateral action is possible and a lack of extensive cooperation within global networks is not fatal. It is apparent that this information-dependent, consumer-driven pathway to legitimate global citizenship is hazardous at the very least. It is most doubtful that people have become more informed and clever, as a real consequence of living in a truly global information era (Ohmae, 1991: 13). Far from multi-national businesses being dominated by the power of informed consumers, global industries, even the new high-technology ones, are notable for being sleepy monopolies, exploiting economies of scale and avoiding risk wherever possible. As Albrow (1996) concluded, it is doubtful that any borderless world will be able to create a system of shared values or new notions of identity and community able to replace the glue provided by a nation state. WHAT IS GOING ON? What is going on in this supposed borderless, new-global order is best understood by asking who benefits from convincing us that we must comply and that this is the only pathway to the future? Opportunistic governments and politicians, financial wizards, media barons, corporate Capitalism, the Military Industrial Complex or the Military Industrial and Administration Complex (Eisenhowers original formulation), and ideological supporters and free riders, such as conservative, religious groups exhibit the requisite vested interests. These interests revolve around what Ritzer (2003) identifies as the globalizationgrowth dynamic that operates through three inter-related processes - Capitalism, Americanization and McDonaldization - concerned with the production of the material and dreams of super-abundance. This dynamic is not a neutral process but actively eats up places, people, things and services, replacing them with centrally conceived and controlled forms that are largely lacking in distinctive content (Beilharz, 2003: 106) and are destructive to the conduct of everyday life. Despite Ohmaes (1991), Reichs (1992) and Freidmans (1999) faith in a borderless globalization from below, much more prominent is a globalization from

above, where global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (Kouzmin and Dixon, 2003) (not to mention American and allied military institutions) directed with minimal public scrutiny or accountability via a small, elite concave of capitalist cardinals (Wheen, 2004: 239). As demonstrated in Thorne (2003), these period-shifting ruptures in what was visible and invisible, from what was impossible to what is now possible, such as this rapid change from a bordered to a borderless world, or from nation-statebased identities and communities to globalized identities and communities, do reveal the contours of the strategies elites contend over and use to shape favourable circumstances. This provides the possibility to glimpse not only the machinations and mechanisms of the clash but also, more commonly, the accommodation of these self interests. Examining this flux presents the opportunity to expose the contradictory, irrational and dangerous, even threatening, nature of what now appears as visible and what now was invisible. This was an especially important activity given Ritzers (2003) recent proposal that all the feverish activity within the borderless world was an empty globalization of nothing. The pervasive global market merely allows consumers to select goods and services devoid of distinctive, substantive content. Some understanding of how invisibility and visibility function as a strategic imperative is necessary. The visible strategy in the globalized, borderless world strategy is to convince everyone that the presumed ideological and practical defeat of Socialism and Communism by the spread of Western, Liberal democracy, computer and communications technology and free markets left global Capitalism as the only practical way forward in which all could share in the bountiful rewards if one were prepared to create new, highly-productive, fragmented identities and to remove or transcend outmoded social, political and economic compacts. The invisible part of the globalized, borderless world strategy is to remove, or render ineffective, social and political barriers to economic activity, to open social and public spheres to competitive activity and to make constant consumption the enveloping basis of material affluence. The central, invisible intention is to avoid risk. This was supposed to obscure the business as usual forms of continuing, and newer types of, exploitation practised by global Capitalism. In its most extreme form, this strategy needs to convince one that we have passed over into a de-physicalized, new world where the clash of capital and labour is no longer possible and where disembodied, creative individuals, electronically roam cyberspace, constantly competing to generate new ideas and to manipulate information and logistic systems to better satisfy the limit-less need for goods and services. For example, one was not t o see, or identify with, the exploitative Economic Gulags, sweat shops and factories displaced into impoverished regions or resent the degradation or removal of state services in health and education or resist the increasing hours spent working or perceive increasing local or international inequalities. Once the borderless world is exposed as some strategic gambit and not some inevitable outcome of the End of History (Fukuyama, 1992), it is revealed as an attempt to use visibility and invisibility to shape a favourable economic outcome and to co-opt others to comply with a restricted vision of the future. Once the economic- globalization blinkers are removed, it is evident that borders have appeared and re-appeared in a number of locations. Furthermore, it is evident that physicalized notions of time and place still have a vital role to play in the

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construction of individual identities and communal compacts. Most fundamentally, it becomes apparent that much of the actual global economy is not invisible but is physical and, in fact, highly visible. Not only plants and factories but, also, less tangible services and even digital products have all sorts of critical linkages with industrial infrastructure and physical actions by employees and contractors. As Gerlach and Hamilton (2000) outline, physical actuality can only be stretched so far before it becomes a fiction. There is great danger when such fantasies, economic or otherwise, are the basis for the amelioration of social and political arenas that force individuals to fashion hybrid identities, to exist in permanentlytensed emergency time and to find new elective communities without some nourishing involvement with the proximate, physical terrain. This is especially so when so much of the activity in the borderless economy is, according to cyberpundit Paulina Borsook, boring - not actually creative, engaging only our instrumental intelligence [a]t best, people were reduced to cyber-kindergarteners, cutting and pasting bits of information, collage like, with their computers supplying the virtual equivalent of library paste (Borsook, quoted in Boyle, 2003: 8). The exposure of the purposeful, borderless world strategy also exposed the problematic nature of the basic premise of the Information Age- that information has empowered consumers. When information does not directly create anything new it is not clear how it could ever become the basis for a completely new world order. This reliance on information in commercial and human affairs is not new or unique. As Faviers (1998: 5) indicates in his magisterial study of the rise of commerce in the middle age, Intelligence, experience and information were the basis of commercial life but were never able to completely remove the risk involved [emphasis added] in speculation - the essence of Capitalism, borderless or otherwise. What fate awaits the New Alphas of the denuded New World Order where the individual is the agent of economic transformation and the ability to locate, interpret and act on information depends on individual ability to command costly training and equipment and where the economic infrastructure one must master is stretched beyond the physical horizon? How shall these New Alphas thrive when the New World Order also requires them to detach themselves from the ruins of the immediate physical environment and to seek advancement through a series of weak ties or instrumental contacts with other similarly physically-dispossessed cosmopolitans? How viable is it to have any social order b ased upon the decomposition of loosely-related individuals who have, at best, a symbiotic connection with their immediate surroundings and are more likely to exhibit a parasitical connection with whatever surrounds them? It remains debatable as to what extent a mobile-trained and literate population, not military hardware or the armed forces, are the real source of strength in an international economy. Pro-globalization advocates, such as Friedman (1999), have acknowledged that [t]he hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist (Wheen, 2004: 240). Despite the pro-globalist protestations, have we really left the old pre-consumer paradigm where [a] governments role is to represent its people interests, serve their purposes and protect them from threat of foreigners and foreign corporations and nations? Ohmae (1991), and other economic globalists, propose that the common language and the basis of global citizenship be English, yet they wanted multiple cultures to co-exist in the new, borderless organizations without any meaningful economic role for their native languages. It is highly possible that the relative freedom of information flows does not make old geographic barriers irrelevant.

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THE CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION The flow of information directly to consumers does not inevitably erode the ability of governments to pretend that their national economic interests are synonymous with those of their people. Sovereignty persists, history matters and the past does not need to be removed in order for the future to flourish. Public Administration must not surrender sovereignty, whether visible or invisible, to punitive market forces. There are many pathways to the future. One must comprehend and resist the visible and invisible strategies used by elites, particularly in association with seemingly benign notions of market Capitalism and enlightened individualism. More directly, Public Administration must come to terms with the limitations that the collusion between Neo-liberal and Post-modern thought imposes on the conduct of Public Administration. Public Administration must come to terms with the juggernaught created when Neo-liberal egotism meets Post-modern narcissism. This Neo-liberal and Post-modern collusion, evident in Lyotard (1984) and Baudrillard (1989), denigrates any reliance on rules of coherence drawn from the outcome of sustained ideological critiques of totalising discourses. Instead, shadowy individuals are left to make political and social judgements on a case-by-case basis when engaged in the beguiling, endless pursuit of the aesthetics and material fruits of the borderless, affluence. This collusion exhorts self-enrichment while denying the existence of any actual autonomy or integrity which could meaningfully benefit from being enriched. This collusion extols a visible, but empty, being that recalls Shustermans (1988: 352) questioning of Rortys (1986) notion of the non self as: the ideal self for the powers governing a consumer society - a fragmented, confused self, hungrily acquiring as many new commodities as it can but lacking the unity, integrity and agency to challenge either its habits of consumption or the system which manipulates and profits from them. Not surprisingly, public and social spheres have diminished just at the same time that economic globalization has supposedly provided an un-restricted tabula-rosa, or playground, for the un-mediated actions of cosmopolitan elites, such as the New Alphas, to transgress notions of settled or traditional communities without any fear of reprisal. Neo-liberalism could be said to constitute the new ideological underpinnings of globalization, with rather important issues to be raised for socially-progressive political orientations and, especially, for Post-modernists prone to rationalizing failed old-left, grand narratives and, narcissistically, denying the possibility of the emergence of dangerous, New-Right, grand narratives. Post-modern discourse needs to be confronted with significant issues of ideology. Ideological resurgence, rather than ideological demise, must be a starting premise for countering contemporary Neo-liberal, economistic propaganda, increasingly being disguised within New Public Management. Furthermore, managerialist strains of governance discourse will have much to account for in their contemporary retreat into economistic simplicity and complicity. Post-modernist abdication, especially on the question of the resurgent role of ideology in a globalizing world, however, will be a particular discordant note in future recriminations and intellectual accountability.

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The power of Capital is now so familiar, so sublimely omnipotent and omnipresent, that even large sectors of the political left have succeeded in naturalizing it (Eagleton, 1996: 23). The vehicle for this remarkable default, largely, lies with increasing Post-modernist discourse rationalizing political failure and, in-so-doing, further facilitating, in the economic metaphor of [AngloAmerican] intellectual life, buying into conceptual closures of their masters (Eagleton, 1996: 5) - that is, remaining silent about the need to do more than merely substitute politics and policies attuned to class, ideology and radical change with questions of gender difference and the politics of identity. It ought to be something of an embarrassment to Post-modernism that just as it was discarding concepts of ideology, collective and agentic subjects and epochal transformations, such political manifestations broke out where least expected (Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, economic globalization)(Eagleton, 1996).. Just as General Motors closes its Saturn factories, those original greenfields symbols of overthrowing existing, rooted notions of identity and community to serve borderless globalization, it is vital to ruthlessly interrogate the purpose(s) of those who want to ignore history and devastate notions of community and identity. One should be more careful in accepting those who propagate a rupturing with the past. One must establish to what extent must everything change and how irresistible is the irresistible change? For example, were the old, pyramidal organizations just restricted to using brute force to ensure the blind compliance of managers and employees? Is trust and empowerment the sole preserve of genuinely, global organizations? Do not all forms of organization have the capacity for both aggression and restraint? Does one not need a Public Administration and a sense of community and identity capable of dealing with all these possibilities? How should one react when one discovers that networked organizations, supposedly operating throughout the globe and connected everywhere in real time, are more like geographically-precise, simple and direct connections re-creating home infrastructure in non-domestic locations? Perhaps, even more pressingly, how should one act when a Greenback Empire, not afraid of resorting to gunboat diplomacy, dominates the chessboard of international networks (Johnson, 2004)? Public Administration must establish the extent to which it is useful for the common interest that the New Alphas accept the imposition of stateless do it yourself welfare (Elliott, 2004: 37) and the complete responsibility for individual destiny? It would seem that this acceptance reinforces their detachment from settled communities and traditional forms of personal identity without any corresponding examination of the difficulties of such detachment. More significantly, this self-reliance further exposes those unable to operate successfully within the borderless world and those more attuned to settled communities and traditional forms of personal identity being consigned to the global backwaters and the status of invisible non-persons. For Public Administration, the requisite responses would require more than its current acceptance of what Truss (2003: 7) refers to as the polite acceptance of invisibility. Perhaps, the ultimate challenge for Public Administration is to emerge from the shadows and revoke the license for presumptive action and unacceptable behaviour given to rampaging global Capitalism. Following Sennett (1998; 2004), such action is essential to prevent economic globalization devastating the moral fabric of settled places, to re-build mutual respect between citizens and nations and to prevent the acceptance that individuals could be rendered visible persons or invisible non-persons simply based on a lack of economic success and/or their disinterest in hybrid identities and fragmented

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communities. Extending Selznick (2000: 281), we must not allow any fear of bureaucracy, any yearning for individual transcendence, to mislead us into believing that it is possible to have democracy without government or without an inclusive collective intelligence. Even in a restless world, Beilharz (2003:104) warns that we must not neglect Baumans (2003) injunction that place-making is a precondition of politics. It is possible that our world is increasingly a flux of visibility and invisibility, place and non-place, product and non-product, service and non-service and persons and non-persons and this is not a threat to human sociality as its very expression (Hogan, 2003: 105). What we must resist, is what, echoing Ritzer (2003), Hogan (2003:105), terms, the embrace of being in nothing, being invisible in our own place and having our world emptied by the very means by which we are living it. NEW ALPHAS AND NEW GULAGS: A CODA One of colonial Britains contributions to Civilization, apart from rendering opium (a trade that paradoxically the Taliban refused to support) a global currency during the Nineteenth Century, was the invention of the worlds first Gulag, in Australias Botany Bay. Domestic, but marginalized, non-persons were rendered invisible by the simple expedient of deportation a process cross subsidized by a global search for a new strategic and military commodity; a new source of the flax required to maintain the supremacy of the British navy (Blainey, 1982). A more homeland variant of Botany Bay emerged in Tsarist and Soviet Gulags to buttress the imperial expressions of a Russian empire and, more recently, of an exceptionalist Socialism in One County. Guantanamo Bay and Christmas Island constitute a new imperial dimension to marginalizing and rendering invisible, global citizens in the name of new imperialist pretensions. That such Neo-liberal Gulags should exist in the face of duplicitous mantras of constitutionality, sovereignty and democratic rights is challenging global credulity in the face of the synchronized, egotistical and narcissistic fantasies shared by the Neo-liberal and the Post-modern that the expanding global man (sic) has no real borders to his (sic) ambitions to fulfil his (sic) consumerist ambitions and, unfortunately, no other compelling purpose in life. Such globalized duplicity may continue to prevail in an Anglo-American denial of the consequences associated with a global expression of American exceptionalism. Forebodings about future Gulags to come, beyond the t wenty four international Gulags that have become a little more visible since Abu Ghraib (ABC news online, 2004), might result from an historical and comparative awareness of other, previous Gulags. The US Patriot Act resonates with a collective ignorance of such history(ies) and foretells the emergence of Homeland and out-sourced Gulags of incarcerated nonpersons of the politically marginalized and the invisible. It should not be surprising that the US, the largest incarcerating state on earth (Sheldon, 2004), should now, under the protective cover of privatized invisibility, seek to broaden the incarcerating mandate drawn from race and poverty to the political dissonant and those who refuse to politely accept their invisibility. A system of invisible, Homeland Gulags, within an exceptionalist Democracy in one Country, is not consistent with the End of History or the disappearance of borders but is consistent with a new beginning of history associated with xenophobic and chauvinist, Neo-liberaldriven and Post-modern condoned, Corporate Imperialism.

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