Toward a postmodern prince? The battle in Seattle as a moment in the new politics of globalisation

In the new millennium a challenge for political theory is to imagine and hypothesise new forms of political agency that might lead to more ethical and democratic political institutions and practices. The Seattle and Washington protests provide evidence for such an hypothesis, which following Machiavelli and Gramsci I call the 'postmodern Prince', understood as a set of potentials in movement. The postmodern Prince is a complex, multiple, and diverse form of collective action, akin to a postmodern transnational political party. Its mobilising myths involve human and intergenerational security on and for the planet; democratic human development; and human rights. It combines defensive and forward-looking strategies that involve a universal politics of radical (re)construction, related to four sets of globalising contradictions.