Sometimes it is good to place purely topical political issues on hold to pursue the deeper realm of political theory. I recently wrote a diary in which I reproach Bernie Sanders for using the term "nation-state" in an interview as he discussed immigration reform in the US. The appropriate phrase in that instance, in my opinion, is sovereign state, that is, a state which incontestably rules over a delimited territory and which completely obligates those therein to obey its laws. A nation-state, on the other hand, is a technical social science term and represents something completely different. It is a concept more deeply rooted in a particular historical epoch than is the much more transcendental concept of sovereignty which merely denotes legitimate or recognized political authority over a particular area.
Let's begin with a simple definition. I chose the following for its simplicity and accuracy: A nation-state differs from a "state" or a "nation" for a couple of important reasons: A nation refers only to a socio-cultural entity, a union of people sharing who can identify culturally and linguistically. This concept does not necessarily consider formal political unions. A state refers to a legal/political entity that is comprised of the following: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) a government ; and d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states. This distinction is an important one because...political scientists must be able to account for both political and socio-cultural factors in a political entity. Using the term nation-state, permits this [conceptualization]. The idea of a nation-state is specifically one in which the term nation is operative as defining a common cultural-linguistic identity. Many countries with highly diverse ethnic populations exist today which have a common identity in this way but they didn't necessarily begin as nation-states whereby a common ethno-linguistic identity bound the people together. The idea was really formulated in Europe and developed over the course of several centuries from the age of exploration in the sixteenth century until the early twentieth century. Actual physical nation-states didn't really appear all over Europe until they were created by the peace settlement after WWI. This settlement carved up nation-states out of four former continental empires; the German, the Russian, the Austrian (Hapsburg) and Ottoman Turkish. Though defended as an attempt to satisfy the long suppressed nationalist aspirations of a variety of European nations submerged under the rule of these empires, the final boundaries more reflected the desire of the victors to punish the vanquished rather than to create the true nation states that were believed to bring the political stability sought by the big powers. But nationalism and the creation of nation-states were a long time in finally coming. Is Nationalism Inherently Racist? Scholars differ on the origins of the nation-state, though they all seem to agree the idea and phenomenon was born in Europe. Historian George Mosse affirms this notion and, in his well known book Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, credits the dogged pursuit of the nation-state, along with many other uniquely European cultural phenomenon, with racism and genocide. The reason is that, for Mosse, the idea of the nation-state is intimately connected to the rise of nationalism and thus racism. Mosse believes that much of this begins with the European Enlightenment's making a fetish of scientific inquiry. This led inexorably to the pseudo-science of "racial studies" in the nineteenth century and to the anthropological classification of differing groups of human beings. Thus was born the concept of race as an institutionalized and purely modern concept. From here it becomes a slippery slope toward racist nationalism and the obsession with who is justly considered to be part of the nation and who is not. Eric Zuelow, in a brilliant review of Mosse's book for The Nationalism Project, explains Mosse's ideas on modern European nationalism and its distinctly racist origins. The relevant parts deserve to be quoted at length; "...the Enlightenment saw the development of early anthropology, which attempted to place man in nature by studying behavior, measurements, and making comparisons of groups of men to animals. It did not prove difficult for anthropology to quickly become tied with phrenology (reading the skull) and physiognomy (reading the face), pseudosciences which attempted to learn about mankind by aesthetic means alone. By judging men on their appearance and comparing groups living in less modernized ways to animals, early racial thinking was able to adopt a scientific validity. Very quickly, "The ideal-type symbolized by a classical beauty and proper morals determined attitudes toward all men." Groups which fell outside of this accepted range, especially blacks, were viewed as sub-human and morally undeveloped and wild. Mosse makes it clear very early in his book that it was not a lack of contact which bred fear of the unknown, but precisely the opposite. As contact between black, white, and Jew increased through the Colonial experience and Jewish emancipation, the increasing visibility of minority groups played directly to racial fears. Suddenly those groups who had been scientifically shown to be less-than-human were present in rapidly growing numbers. After establishing these early developments, Mosse shifts his focus toward anti-Semitic racism in the mid nineteenth century. While Jews had not borne the brunt of the first racial theories, that began to change during this period. At least some of the change began when Sir William Jones, not himself a racist, suggested that there was a connection between Egypt, India, Greece, and Italy long before they had settled into a common territory. This thesis gave Friedrich Schlegel the fodder for his argument of common Aryan origins as demonstrated through "organic languages." Common Aryan roots placed the Aryans in direct opposition to the Semites and on a racially superior plain. The increasing intolerance of nationalism was then set against showing who had common roots and who did not. Jews were thus placed in opposition to the nation. Once this had happened, it was not long before racist intellectuals began trying to determine more specific differences between all national groups--however contrived the comparisons needed to be...Moving into the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century heritage of racial thought had created two important legacies: a "mystical idea of race, which extended the ever present subjectivity of racial thought until it left any pretense of science behind" and a tradition which "sought scientific and academic respectability for racial classification." These nineteenth century developments acquired a greater urgency as the pace of urbanization, population growth, and modernization increased. Who was and was not a member of one’s specific community truly mattered and racial hygiene seemed even more important. The earlier eugenics movement developed into racial biology. Meanwhile, the mystery of race became ever more connected to national origins. When the newly created ethnic idea of ‘nation’ was combined with the growing spiritualism which descended on Europe and the growing need for national unity brought on by increasing class strife, racism became an important part of a new national religion." In Mosse's analysis, nationalism has historically meant the creation of what Sartre has called "the other" or one that is alien or contrary to one's self. It necessarily involves the vilification and persecution of "the other" as a mode of modern politics. But other scholars differ on this issue. Benedict Anderson, whose book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, is considered possibly the most valuable and influential contribution to the subject of the nation-state, the creation and persistence of national identity and nationalism. For Anderson, nationalism is not itself inherently racist. In fact, Anderson all but condemns the notion that racism is a product of nationalism arguing rather that it is more a product of ideologies and systems based on caste and class because of the importance of hierarchy and, more importantly, hereditary social standing and privilege. Anderson asserts; The dreams of racism actually have their origins in ideologies of class, rather than those of nation: above all in claims to divinity among rulers and to be "blue" or "white" blood and breeding among aristocracies...racism and anti-Semitism manifest themselves, not across national boundaries, but within them. In other words, they justify not so much foreign wars as domestic repression and domination. (Anderson, 1983, 136) Anderson's attempt to disconnect racism and nationalism historically is based on the idea that racism is a denial of the nation. The use of racist epithets or slurs, for example, tend to not merely "express an ordinary political enmity" according to Anderson. Racist epithets, stereotypes and attitudes tend to "erase nation-ness by reducing the adversary to his biological physiognomy...The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historic destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origin of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations; outside history." (Anderson; 135-136) Thus, while nationalism has a historic quality being a product of a certain time or era, racist perceptions tend to be based on notions of immutability and the alleged fixed, unchanging characteristics of the despised "other." Thus, there is a transcendental quality to racist views, the "other" is, has always been and will always be an object of loathing to the racist because of the "others" perceived immutable and innate characteristics. Anderson, on the other hand, argues that nationalism is based more on love than hate. Anderson is quite unambiguous on this point; In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals...to insist on the near pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism-poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts-show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles. (Anderson; 129) I find such sanguine picture of nationalism astonishing from a distinguished writer who, to boot, tends to follow a Marxist methodology in his analysis and historic narrative. Why the Nuremburg rallies of the 1930s could not equally be seen as a "product of nationalism" is not satisfactorily explained by Anderson. He might argue that such rallies were expressions of pure racism, hate and fear rather than the solidarity and bond that people feel as part of the "imagined community" which is the subject of his book. I don't really find this part of Anderson's argument convincing. How Was National Consciousness Formed? There were no nations or nationalism in history until people developed what could be called "national consciousness" or the idea that they were part of and owed loyalty to a nation. Anderson sees this as emerging as a uniquely modern phenomenon due to certain vital transformations that created this consciousness from the early sixteenth century onward. Three important cultural and political transformations had to occur to arrive at the sense that one belonged to a nation. The proliferation of print media in vernacular languages allowing communication within the imaged community. The political decline of hereditary monarchies or what Anderson calls "the dynastic realm" which is based more on power centers than on the boundaries at the perimeter and which ruled vast expanses of heterogeneous populations. Power was seen as divinely ordained rather than based on "the people" or nation and most feudal kingdoms were formed by marriages of convenience in which national identity played no real role. The problem here for national identity, Anderson argues, was the way in which "sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another." (26) And the third was the abolition of what Anderson calls "simultaneity" or the compression of all time into one perceived epoch, defined chiefly by messianic religion. This was replaced with a long view of history in which past and present are sharply distinguishable and whereby people see time as a long succession of events forming a seemingly endless chain of cause and effect. The "cosmological" sense imparted by the timeless and spatially limitless orientation of the universality of the Roman Catholicism gave way to fixed, temporal and limited places with specific identities and finite communities. Thus, religious universality gave way to cultural particularism and national consciousness. This last feature was mostly a product of the decline of the Church and the gradual process of secularization. Anderson refers to imagined communities in the sense that people came to see themselves as part of a culturally unique community whereby even though each member knows relatively few others in the community and will never know even a fraction of them, still "in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” (15) These communities are distinct features of modernity in that their sovereignty is territorially delimited by boundaries, shaped by secular powers and, despite persistent and obvious inequalities of all types, are perceived by the members as "a deep, horizontal comradeship" for which people are willing to kill and be killed less out of hate, according to Anderson, than out of love for the imagined communion felt with the other members of the nation. (16) Key to this cultural-political transformation for Anderson is the sudden appearance of what he calls "print capitalism" in the Sixteenth Century during which time up to 200 million Bibles were printed in vernacular languages by Gutenberg's printing press. This was revolutionary in that it broke the Church's linguistic monopoly by allowing vernacular languages to replace Latin thereby creating national consciousness over Latin as a universal, supra-national and transcendent lingua franca with no particular national identity. It further led to the spread of literacy among common people giving rise to distinct cultural identities and nationalist feeling. The replacement of hand written manuscripts, written by Monastic scribes, with movable type led to the rise of "print capitalism" which not only led to the commodification of print-media with the proliferation of books and eventually newspapers but transformed Europe by creating a vast, and profitable, market in printed matter as more and more people became literate and outside the influence and powers of a politically declining Roman Catholic Church. Anderson goes so far as to credit print capitalism for the Protestant Reformation itself! Print capitalism gave rise to print languages which Anderson argues created national consciousness in three ways. First it deepened and expanded communication between speakers of a common language allowing a flourishing of ideas and greater contact. Secondly, it stabilized modern language by giving it a sort of uniformity or "fixity" to quote Anderson. The standardization gradually created through ongoing print media, not possible with the limited and varied hand written manuscripts on Monastic scribes, gave rise to the institutionalization of modern vernacular languages. Third, print capitalism allowed the creation of the language of secular administration or the notion of an "official national language." Anderson sums up his argument this way; We can summarize the conclusions to be drawn from the argument thus far by saying that the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. (49) Anderson's Nationalism as "Utopian" Indulgence In an interview in 2011, Anderson stated baldly, "I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements." The "imagined community" is for Anderson utopian because it is ultimately a mental construct. It is a socially defined and spatially delimited idea whereby all the members imagine they have a special and inexorable bond with countless other people they neither know or even encounter. Anderson is practically alone on the left in viewing nationalism as an essentially positive force. Far from being a negative influence and instigating belligerent and intolerant behavior toward "the other" nationalist feeling ensures good behavior. "You follow the laws because they are your laws," Anderson argues, "...not always, because you perhaps cheat on your tax forms, but normally you do." The pride that nationalism instills causes one to generally act well and not poorly or with intolerance toward others, stresses Anderson. Occasionally, nationalism may well manifest its ugly side but Anderson compares this to the functioning of the human organism. "Sometimes it is healthy, but occasionally it might become sick, feverous and do ill things. But normal body temperature is not 41¡C but 36.5¡C." And despite our increasingly global world, the attachment to our national identities grows stronger, according to Anderson. We react to globalization by clinging more and more to this imagined communal utopia and the identity it creates and reinforces rather than actually becoming global citizens. Anderson offers some anecdotal evidence that is rather convincing on this particular point. But what does the persistence of nationalism and the nation-state really mean in the global era? Is Nationalism Tied More Closely to Racism or Capitalism? How should progressives view the origins and persistence of nationalism? The standard Marxist view is that the nation-state and nationalism represent the emergence of industrial capitalism and the transition to the large scale, mass producing factory system from the older petty commodity production in small workshops by skilled artisans on a very local level. The sudden concentration of large scale factory production in big cities represented a new stage of capitalism and thus of history itself. One Marxist writer in International Socialist Review explains it this way; In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great struggles for national liberation represented attempts to overthrow feudalism and absolutist monarchy in the interest of removing economic and political impediments to the full development of capitalism. Capitalism was in the process of changing from being a mere sector of the economy into becoming the dominant mode of social organization. To consolidate this transition and to secure the ongoing conditions for reproducing capitalist society, a new form of state was required--one based not on personal allegiance to a royal family but rather on a shared language, a common territory, and the perception of a group history and destiny. The victory of capitalism over feudalism, first in Europe and later throughout the continents, thus entailed strong links with national movements: "For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose population speaks a single language,...[which establishes] a close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, and between seller and buyer." From the Sixteenth Century to the late Eighteenth Century, international trade consisted mostly of arbitrage, it was important for national coffers but had little overall impact on local or even regional economies. As factory systems of mass production emerged in the 19th century, international trade gradually became more regularized and had greater and greater impact on national economies. The author of the ISR article continues; Nationalism furnished the bourgeoisie of a specific territory with the ideological elements it needed to impose an official language and to lay down borders on the basis of a (usually invented) collective past. Moreover, there arose a tendency within the national movements themselves toward the formation of nation-states, precisely because nation-states could best satisfy the political requirements of modern--i.e., capitalist--society. For these reasons, all of the leading Marxist contributions to the debate on the national question have accepted that "the nation state is typical and normal for the capitalist period." Whether or not nationalism was tied up with the birth of modern racism, as suggested by Mosse and others, or not (and I think this is a vast oversimplification-the historic phenomenon need to be treated separately as having separate origins) it was certainly tightly bound up with the emergence of modern industrial capitalism. A specific type of national consciousness was required to create a state whose policies facilitated national scale production. Such a state would have to reliably promote industrial capitalism with such measures as tariffs, the control of borders and the movement of goods and labor, the centralized control of national currencies, the regulation of the financial system-particularly interest rates and banking reserves, the rationalization and unification of a national system of regularized taxation to allow the ongoing creation and maintenance of physical infrastructure and vital public services and a court system to enforce contracts. There would also need to be police and armies for local and national security. Far from the shrinking of the state's relevance under capitalism, the apparent "irony" is that the state necessarily became more powerful, more centralized and more regularly intrusive in everyday life as the capitalist system developed and expanded. We are thus not surprised that as capitalism moves further into the global era, and capital's historic laws of motion move ever more rapidly toward greater global concentration and centralization, Anderson (and others) should bear witness to the increasing relevance of the nation-state both in practice and in its place in the consciousness of average people. This whole discussion had its origins in the question of immigration reform and global labor arbitrage. Should the nation-state control its borders more and more in the global era? In an epoch of globalization labor too becomes hypermobile though not nearly as much as capital. It is estimated that three to five percent of the world's population currently resides outside their country of birth but it is also true that the total stock of foreign direct investment in the world is one third of total world GDP while the sales by the foreign affiliates of transnational corporations approaches half of global GDP! Capital is clearly more globalized than labor. This is no accident! The rapid rise of developing countries' share of world exports of manufactured goods shows that capital exploits labor less through the importation of cheap labor than by the export of capital in the form of foreign direct investment to where cheap labor already exists. Increasingly, the conservative representatives of capital try to control national borders and immigration. The increased pressure for greater immigration is less the result of capitalist demand for cheap labor than the inevitable dislocations created by capital's globalization of national economies through trade and investment. Control of borders is more of a demand by capital, not labor. One fear of capitalists is that if labor became as mobile as capital, labor shortages in the third world would place serious upward pressure on wages while the build up of the workforce (the reserve army of labor) in high wage countries would create growing pressures for all manner of social change including higher wages for the working poor as well as a restoration of the welfare state and its vital services! The demand for jobs programs and full employment would emerge. Political agenda that threatens the interest of capital would sure come to the fore through movement politics putting the status quo at risk. As the world becomes more proletarianized, capitalists increasingly insist that the control of global labor force mobility becomes as important as the decontrol of the global capital mobility. Bernie, whom I fully support, is a socialist. He should know all this and shape his political views accordingly!