Post by s e pearson on Sept 25, 2011 9:55:06 GMT -5
It is commonly held that nationalism is simply the ideological justification for nation states, that the nation state is unalterably its object. May people who describe themselves as nationalists would accept that judgement without question and with good reason because the nation-state has been absolutely central to nationalism since its modern conception arose around the French Revolution. However it is becoming increasingly clear that this assumption needs to be re-examined.
It’s worth noting an important fact at this point. For one there are no nation states in the West and probably never have been. All Western States are happy to claim dominion over individuals, groups and, in the past, entire nations, which are not members of the nation from which the State takes its name. A state which presumes to claim sovereignty over individuals outside of the nation can not be said to be a nation state since it does not limit itself to the extent of that nation. The advocation of nation states therefore can not claim its most usual defence that the system in already in place and that it works.
Nationalism’s traditional demand for the establishment of nation states is not an end in itself. The demand is based on a value system which, it has long been assumed, is best served by a nation state. These values include the value of ethnic and cultural diversity in a global context , the legitimacy of government, the optimisation of collective effort and the stability of societies. Nationalism asserts, based on a rational historical analysis, that nations are the best political organisation of humanity to pursue these objectives. The nation state is, or rather was, thought to be the best organisational structure to protect the nation and organise its productive potential and it is from this assessment that nationalism based its demand for the establishment of nation states.
This is entirely understandable when we consider the political and social environment nationalism formed in. At the time of the French Revolution, and for the century or so after, it seemed that the nation state was an inevitable development. All over Europe states were becoming ever more powerful as the economic, organisational and technological capacity of societies increased. States had been growing in power for at least 500 years by the point nationalism as a coherent morally based ideology appeared. They were widely associated with the most dynamic societies such as France, the Netherlands and Britain as compared to the stagnant and decaying multi-national Empire States of Central and Eastern Europe.
Moreover the attractions of the potential power of the nation state was irresistible to political thinkers of the time. The state alone appeared to offer the power to remake societies and secure them from outside threats. This is an allure which the state and the nation state in particular has never lost for politically minded people. At the time of the French Revolution and later there was very little either logically or in the historic record to suggest that state’s could not be turned to any objective. That as an instrument or tool it would not be simple to command.
However if we were to reassess the utility of the nation state on the same basis it was adopted by nationalists two centuries ago, by examining it performance and utility as a tool to achieve particular objectives, we will surely come to a very different conclusion. Unlike those original nationalists we don’t need to speculate on the performance of nation states in action, we have two centuries of historic data to assess. We might take the obvious starting point for such a review, the condition of the nations of the West today after enjoying the benefits of nation states for 200+ years. Suffice to say that any such assessment taken from the position of concern for the welfare of Peoples and nations would deliver a grim verdict.
A more detailed study of the operation of nation states in the west would have to conclude that in practice they have at best been neutral in their intentions towards nations, and if they perceived any advantage what so ever, however slight, that they would not hesitate to actively pursue interests opposite to those of the nation. Most obviously this is exemplified in the programs of “immigration†enacted by all Western nation states primarily in the interests of capitalism. As far as nations are concerned in their effect these programs are not distinct from acts of genocide, colonisation and imperialism. It impossible to conceive of a more direct attack on the interests of nations that that of the processes of colonisation to which they have been subject by their own states.
Such a historical analysis of the operation of nation states in the period since the French Revolution can not but find that nation states, at the very least, represent an unacceptable threat to the vitality and even existence of nations. Moreover that they represent the only credible threat to the vitality and existences of what are, after all, by definition massively durable entities. On this basis alone it is impossible for people who accept the values of nationalism to continue to advocate nation states as a viable method of promoting the interests of any Peoples or nations.
Perhaps we should not be surprised to conclude that nation states turn out to be hostile towards the nations they theoretically draw their legitimacy and power from. The same study of the historical interactions between nations and nation states would prove that as dangerous as states are to nations, nations themselves represent a serious threat to states; or at least the group currently controlling that nation state. With the exception of the Russian Revolution of 1917, at that itself is a debatable issue, every revolution in the West since the French Revolution has been largely or wholly motivated by nationalist sentiments and made possible only by the collective sense of nationhood nationalism delivers. If states, even nation states, fear nations then they are right to do so.
However the case against the nation state model from a nationalist perspective does not merely rely on the obvious and demonstrable facts of history. The nation state model has generated other insurmountable problems in ideological and practical terms.
One example is the obvious paradox between the (theoretical) desire of a nation states to protect nations and the effects of that protection if it is successful. The more a nation is insulated from potential threats, whether they are economic, military or social, the less able it becomes to resist those threats. For example semi stateless nations such as Afghanistan have demonstrated a robust capability in defending themselves from an enormous military assault, it is inconceivable that a nation such as, say, Spain would be able to mount anything like that kind of capability. The existence of a professional military has degraded the capability of Spanish society to organically resist external military threats. Indeed the state has actively sought to diminish this capability in the interest of its own security. In the case of Spain of course we are taking about a nation which invented guerrilla warfare in its modern form during the Napoleonic Wars, the word itself was coined in Spain.
The obvious application of this paradox is military; however it is also true of all other potential threats. For example take economics. In stateless societies or pre-industrial societies which necessarily must have minimal states the population must organise itself into workable economic units. Cooperatives, guilds, militias, charitable institutions of all kinds and collective systems of agriculture and manufacturing are the norm and provide whatever services are possible given the resource base available. Industrial nation states monopolise these activities “on behalf†of the People and in the process strip those populations of their cultural ability to organise themselves. This doesn’t just expose the population to considerable risk in the event that the state becomes unable to carry on these activities (as frequently happens when states run out of money), it doesn’t merely mean that the inherent inefficiency and corruption of the state makes these activities consume more resources than they otherwise would or even could. The effect of this assumption of organisation by states denies citizens of an important part of life as a social creature, in the absence of the requirement to self organise communities atomise and the life of people in them is correspondingly impoverished.
A similar process strips Peoples of their ability to politically organise and degrades their political faculties thus leaving them helpless and literally intellectually retarded.
Moreover the concept of the nation state itself contradicts the embedded principles of nationalism itself. If nationalism demands the right of self determination it can only be because it assumes that freedom delivers positive outcomes. However the nation state, because it assumes a centralised monolithic font of political power, effectively guarantees that at least substantial minorities are having power exercised upon them without their active consent. This is not some obscure point of political philosophy. We have already established that one of the objectives from which nationalism justifies the nation state is social stability, if a state is based on a nation then that nation is less likely to resist the state and nationalism becomes a force for stability and not insurrection. However if nationalism uses that as a justification it can hardly deny that other arrangements that take that objective further are superior. For this reason nationalism is ideologically compelled, under its own value system, towards political decentralisation.
In order to remain true to its value systems and intellectual basis as being derived from a rational empirical assessment of history nationalism must abandon the nation state model in the light of the events of the last two hundred years. So where does that leave nationalism in the early 21st century?
Nationalism’s main argument is that nations are the optimal units of human societies because they are stable and promote collective effort for whatever and all ends. However there is no reason why nation states should be seen as the only way of organising nations in order to harness this national consciousness. Indeed we know that states are completely irrelevant to this. In ancient Greece we can see a decentralised system of self governing communities which were animated, when necessary and desirable, to unite as a nation. The same is true of pre-Roman Gaul. It is equally true today of places like Afghanistan and Iraq where in extremis disparate groups have come together to pursue the objective national self determination. We can therefore surmise from historical and contemporary precedent that political unity enforced by a state is unnecessary to maintain national consciousness or co-ordinate national collective effort.
It is entirely coherent and reasonable for nationalism to advocate the sort of decentralised political organisation under which nations ideally existed in pre-industrial societies. A collection of sovereign communities, operating whatever political arrangements they find desirable or workable, held together by a common appreciation of their mutual cultural, ethnic, linguistic, geographic, strategic and economic bonds. This arrangement solves many of the moral and practical nation state nationalism faces detailed above.
This takes nationalism out of the political arena and places it rather in the cultural or spiritual. Under this sort of post nation state nationalism nationalists do not seek to control the state and impose a “benevolent dictatorship†rather they argue for and work to improve the existence of the nation as a concept within communities. So at a day to day level nationalists might oppose attempts to impose supra national authority or attempts to weaken national consciousness with their neighbourhoods. After the nation is an intellectual construct based on observable reality, not a mechanism of power.
The adoption of this post nation state decentralised model of nationalism opens the door to all kinds of new strategies and tactics of building parallel democratic, maybe even legal, structures and of community organisation. These techniques are far more likely to bear fruit than doomed attempts to take control of a nation state by playing a rigged game of purely electoral politics.
Nation State nationalism is an idea which is no longer sustainable either strategically, morally or practically. It can not solve them problems our societies face now much less those they are likely to face in the future. By contrast decentralised nationalism offers solutions to those problems, has the flexibility to operate in all kinds of environment and is fully internally consistent. Shorn of its commitment to a failed institution in the nation state nationalism can regain the vitality which made it the unquestionably most successful radical political movement in Western history.
It’s worth noting an important fact at this point. For one there are no nation states in the West and probably never have been. All Western States are happy to claim dominion over individuals, groups and, in the past, entire nations, which are not members of the nation from which the State takes its name. A state which presumes to claim sovereignty over individuals outside of the nation can not be said to be a nation state since it does not limit itself to the extent of that nation. The advocation of nation states therefore can not claim its most usual defence that the system in already in place and that it works.
Nationalism’s traditional demand for the establishment of nation states is not an end in itself. The demand is based on a value system which, it has long been assumed, is best served by a nation state. These values include the value of ethnic and cultural diversity in a global context , the legitimacy of government, the optimisation of collective effort and the stability of societies. Nationalism asserts, based on a rational historical analysis, that nations are the best political organisation of humanity to pursue these objectives. The nation state is, or rather was, thought to be the best organisational structure to protect the nation and organise its productive potential and it is from this assessment that nationalism based its demand for the establishment of nation states.
This is entirely understandable when we consider the political and social environment nationalism formed in. At the time of the French Revolution, and for the century or so after, it seemed that the nation state was an inevitable development. All over Europe states were becoming ever more powerful as the economic, organisational and technological capacity of societies increased. States had been growing in power for at least 500 years by the point nationalism as a coherent morally based ideology appeared. They were widely associated with the most dynamic societies such as France, the Netherlands and Britain as compared to the stagnant and decaying multi-national Empire States of Central and Eastern Europe.
Moreover the attractions of the potential power of the nation state was irresistible to political thinkers of the time. The state alone appeared to offer the power to remake societies and secure them from outside threats. This is an allure which the state and the nation state in particular has never lost for politically minded people. At the time of the French Revolution and later there was very little either logically or in the historic record to suggest that state’s could not be turned to any objective. That as an instrument or tool it would not be simple to command.
However if we were to reassess the utility of the nation state on the same basis it was adopted by nationalists two centuries ago, by examining it performance and utility as a tool to achieve particular objectives, we will surely come to a very different conclusion. Unlike those original nationalists we don’t need to speculate on the performance of nation states in action, we have two centuries of historic data to assess. We might take the obvious starting point for such a review, the condition of the nations of the West today after enjoying the benefits of nation states for 200+ years. Suffice to say that any such assessment taken from the position of concern for the welfare of Peoples and nations would deliver a grim verdict.
A more detailed study of the operation of nation states in the west would have to conclude that in practice they have at best been neutral in their intentions towards nations, and if they perceived any advantage what so ever, however slight, that they would not hesitate to actively pursue interests opposite to those of the nation. Most obviously this is exemplified in the programs of “immigration†enacted by all Western nation states primarily in the interests of capitalism. As far as nations are concerned in their effect these programs are not distinct from acts of genocide, colonisation and imperialism. It impossible to conceive of a more direct attack on the interests of nations that that of the processes of colonisation to which they have been subject by their own states.
Such a historical analysis of the operation of nation states in the period since the French Revolution can not but find that nation states, at the very least, represent an unacceptable threat to the vitality and even existence of nations. Moreover that they represent the only credible threat to the vitality and existences of what are, after all, by definition massively durable entities. On this basis alone it is impossible for people who accept the values of nationalism to continue to advocate nation states as a viable method of promoting the interests of any Peoples or nations.
Perhaps we should not be surprised to conclude that nation states turn out to be hostile towards the nations they theoretically draw their legitimacy and power from. The same study of the historical interactions between nations and nation states would prove that as dangerous as states are to nations, nations themselves represent a serious threat to states; or at least the group currently controlling that nation state. With the exception of the Russian Revolution of 1917, at that itself is a debatable issue, every revolution in the West since the French Revolution has been largely or wholly motivated by nationalist sentiments and made possible only by the collective sense of nationhood nationalism delivers. If states, even nation states, fear nations then they are right to do so.
However the case against the nation state model from a nationalist perspective does not merely rely on the obvious and demonstrable facts of history. The nation state model has generated other insurmountable problems in ideological and practical terms.
One example is the obvious paradox between the (theoretical) desire of a nation states to protect nations and the effects of that protection if it is successful. The more a nation is insulated from potential threats, whether they are economic, military or social, the less able it becomes to resist those threats. For example semi stateless nations such as Afghanistan have demonstrated a robust capability in defending themselves from an enormous military assault, it is inconceivable that a nation such as, say, Spain would be able to mount anything like that kind of capability. The existence of a professional military has degraded the capability of Spanish society to organically resist external military threats. Indeed the state has actively sought to diminish this capability in the interest of its own security. In the case of Spain of course we are taking about a nation which invented guerrilla warfare in its modern form during the Napoleonic Wars, the word itself was coined in Spain.
The obvious application of this paradox is military; however it is also true of all other potential threats. For example take economics. In stateless societies or pre-industrial societies which necessarily must have minimal states the population must organise itself into workable economic units. Cooperatives, guilds, militias, charitable institutions of all kinds and collective systems of agriculture and manufacturing are the norm and provide whatever services are possible given the resource base available. Industrial nation states monopolise these activities “on behalf†of the People and in the process strip those populations of their cultural ability to organise themselves. This doesn’t just expose the population to considerable risk in the event that the state becomes unable to carry on these activities (as frequently happens when states run out of money), it doesn’t merely mean that the inherent inefficiency and corruption of the state makes these activities consume more resources than they otherwise would or even could. The effect of this assumption of organisation by states denies citizens of an important part of life as a social creature, in the absence of the requirement to self organise communities atomise and the life of people in them is correspondingly impoverished.
A similar process strips Peoples of their ability to politically organise and degrades their political faculties thus leaving them helpless and literally intellectually retarded.
Moreover the concept of the nation state itself contradicts the embedded principles of nationalism itself. If nationalism demands the right of self determination it can only be because it assumes that freedom delivers positive outcomes. However the nation state, because it assumes a centralised monolithic font of political power, effectively guarantees that at least substantial minorities are having power exercised upon them without their active consent. This is not some obscure point of political philosophy. We have already established that one of the objectives from which nationalism justifies the nation state is social stability, if a state is based on a nation then that nation is less likely to resist the state and nationalism becomes a force for stability and not insurrection. However if nationalism uses that as a justification it can hardly deny that other arrangements that take that objective further are superior. For this reason nationalism is ideologically compelled, under its own value system, towards political decentralisation.
In order to remain true to its value systems and intellectual basis as being derived from a rational empirical assessment of history nationalism must abandon the nation state model in the light of the events of the last two hundred years. So where does that leave nationalism in the early 21st century?
Nationalism’s main argument is that nations are the optimal units of human societies because they are stable and promote collective effort for whatever and all ends. However there is no reason why nation states should be seen as the only way of organising nations in order to harness this national consciousness. Indeed we know that states are completely irrelevant to this. In ancient Greece we can see a decentralised system of self governing communities which were animated, when necessary and desirable, to unite as a nation. The same is true of pre-Roman Gaul. It is equally true today of places like Afghanistan and Iraq where in extremis disparate groups have come together to pursue the objective national self determination. We can therefore surmise from historical and contemporary precedent that political unity enforced by a state is unnecessary to maintain national consciousness or co-ordinate national collective effort.
It is entirely coherent and reasonable for nationalism to advocate the sort of decentralised political organisation under which nations ideally existed in pre-industrial societies. A collection of sovereign communities, operating whatever political arrangements they find desirable or workable, held together by a common appreciation of their mutual cultural, ethnic, linguistic, geographic, strategic and economic bonds. This arrangement solves many of the moral and practical nation state nationalism faces detailed above.
This takes nationalism out of the political arena and places it rather in the cultural or spiritual. Under this sort of post nation state nationalism nationalists do not seek to control the state and impose a “benevolent dictatorship†rather they argue for and work to improve the existence of the nation as a concept within communities. So at a day to day level nationalists might oppose attempts to impose supra national authority or attempts to weaken national consciousness with their neighbourhoods. After the nation is an intellectual construct based on observable reality, not a mechanism of power.
The adoption of this post nation state decentralised model of nationalism opens the door to all kinds of new strategies and tactics of building parallel democratic, maybe even legal, structures and of community organisation. These techniques are far more likely to bear fruit than doomed attempts to take control of a nation state by playing a rigged game of purely electoral politics.
Nation State nationalism is an idea which is no longer sustainable either strategically, morally or practically. It can not solve them problems our societies face now much less those they are likely to face in the future. By contrast decentralised nationalism offers solutions to those problems, has the flexibility to operate in all kinds of environment and is fully internally consistent. Shorn of its commitment to a failed institution in the nation state nationalism can regain the vitality which made it the unquestionably most successful radical political movement in Western history.