sábado, 28 de dezembro de 2019

Nation-state, nationalism, instruments of capitalism (2/3)


Summary

1. How capitalism created the nation-state
2 - Nationalism as an instrument of ideological control
3 - To each nation a nation-state?
4. Capitalism magnifies the nation-state in its process of consolidation.
5 - The capitalist globalization reconfigures the role of the nation-state
5 .1 - Some segments taken from the domain of nation-states
6 - The State, local manager of the stratification of the Human beings

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3 - To each nation a nation-state?

If a nation-state arose only and "naturally" on the basis of a nation - characterized by ethnicity, culture, common past, religion, language or all - it would be necessary to explain why there are only about 200 nation-states and no more than 7000 corresponding to each specific culture/language binomial anchored in more or less specific territories. If so, one might wonder, where is the Monegasque nation, the identity of Liechtenstein, or that of each of the former English Caribbean colonies transformed into nation-states to serve as offshores to mafia for accommodation and money laundering? 

If this assumption were true, how many would be liberation wars, conflicts, massacres, deportations and refugee columns fleeing the repression powers (bit) welcoming of independence postures? How many would be arrested for separatism or fighters for the independence of their homeland? 

Refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean are fleeing economic disruption, banditry and, poverty and not as victims of the struggle of their cultures and ethnic groups to create a nation-state. And Rohingyas who flee to Bangla Desh do not do so by independentist drives.

Many of that cultures, have few members, specific mass or even will to build a nation-state for them; and they would certainly have the opposition of the host nation-state apparatus little given, by nature, to territorial losses. On the other hand, these subaltern cultures within a typical nation-state, with armies, police, a state-run nationalist propaganda apparatus, and a totalizing educational system, are repressed to fade away; or, accept them as generating elements of tourist attraction. 

Today, national liberation wars are scarce, after the golden age of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s. Tamils in Sri Lanka did not achieve independence after many years of war; native nations in the US are subject to tourist visibility, such as museum pieces; Kurds are gaining some autonomy in devastated Syria and Iraq; Palestinians remain confined to real outdoor prisons; the separation between Czechs and Slovaks proceeded peacefully despite their many affinities; Scotland expects better days to separate from formal Windsor tutelage; in Spain, Catalans, Basques and Galicians continue to have their own independence refused in the post-Francoist regime; and South Sudan recently split from Arab-based Sudan after a period of war… for oil sharing.

The decolonization of Africa was in many cases peaceful and, in the case of the Portuguese colonies, the colonial liberation wars ended in the mid-1970s, later of Algeria’s in1965; followed shortly thereafter by the collapse of the regime of the original population exclusion  in Zimbabwe; to which that regime gave a name that honored a racist businessman named Cecil Rhodes. In South Africa, the apartheid regime continued until the 1990s when it was established as a multi-ethnic nation-state with eleven official languages under the leadership of the outstanding figure of Nelson Mandela. At the same time, Namibia became a nation-state free of South African tutelage after a long liberation war. The ensuing conflicts in Africa, apart the massacres in Rwanda or the division into two of an artificial Sudan, had not origin in ethno-cultural issues; just power struggles, plunder (oil, gold, uranium, rare minerals… ) and migrants deals of transport to the Mediterranean, with western involvement, as is observed in the Sahel.

The nation-state in its genesis brought together nations and territories - by integration or absorption - by assigning national labels to each human being; however, this figure only applied in fact in Europe and, in the late eighteenth century in the United States as well, although in China and Japan there were also centralized nation-states, but within autarchic models, unrelated to the dynamics of capitalism.  

In parallel with the most extensive or intensive character of European colonial rule, the presence of his power began to wane in the transition between the eighteenth/nineteenth. After the creation of a slave and genocidal republic by European settlers - USA[1]- the pioneer Haiti - a republic of former slaves - emerged, followed by the independence of South America, where each nation-state was ruled by an immense variety of cultures and ethnicities but under the political and military hegemony of the Creoles, more or less direct descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. However, the Monroe doctrine - America for Americans - actually meant US suzerainty on the continent, with the conquest of the last Spanish colonies and the perennial habit of intervening in the "backyard" south of Rio Grande - with invasions, military coups, dictatorships, assassinations, and more recently through sanctions - with the support, tolerance or distraction of European nation-states.

Until World War I, war was the common means of creating or expanding nation-states, in many cases with very unstable borders, especially in Central Europe where the German Confederation and Austria shared the domain of the so-called Holy Empire (which was then a heap of hundreds of small and large landlords); and, in Eastern Europe dominated the empires, Russian and Ottoman, the last, in a usual struggle with the Persian Safavids, for control of Mesopotamia. In the western part of Europe were the maritime powers that controlled the colonial trade, with France in a position of two faces; on one hand, France had its colonial ambitions contained and reduced by the greater English power and, on the other, it was looking for a great European continental empire, centered in Paris, as two Napoleons (the original and the third) had tried to erect. Russia, meanwhile, expelled the Swedes from the eastern bank of the Baltic and became the main beneficiary of the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian electorate while extending territorially to Alaska… later sold to the US.

Europe stood out through the conquest, dispute, and occupation of colonial territories, as well as inter-imperialist wars or occupation of the weaker. Faced with decaying imperial powers in the late nineteenth century until World War I - Austria-Hungary and Turkey - with the aim of dismantling them, the idea of “each nation its nation-state” was defended, however impracticable that it would be in the Balkan  or the Middle East countries, given the territorial and cultural interpenetration of the peoples of these regions . At the same time, the imperial powers were dividing Africa among themselves, drawing boundaries with no concern in the face of the divisions they created within ethnic groups, peoples and tribes or, in keeping previous political structures, in North Africa or the Sahel. Africans were inferior beings, a concept properly defended by "scientists" involved in targeting of human races in and sterilization of mentally handicapped or for people with less handsome features. In America, after the US conquest of vast Mexican territories, a relative peace reigned in the South, in the Creole states; only the final expulsion of the weakened Spanish colonialists (from Cuba and Puerto Rico) was missing, as well as the English colonies (notably Canada); but the last belonged to the most powerful nation-state of the time.

Ataturk, after the break of the Ottoman Empire, took as far as possible the idea of national uniformity within Turkey; it has exchanged Greek populations in Asia Minor for Turkish inhabitants of Greece and the genocide of Armenian Christians, who could be… adopted by the Tsar of Russia at Turkey's expense. Still, to upset Turkey's “identity,” Kurdish nationalism remains, to this day without recognition for the constitution of a nation-state.

Shortly after the dismantling of the Turkish and Austro-Hungarian empires, Yugoslavia emerged as a mosaic of peoples with various religions and languages (which were close, unlike religions), with diverse communities very mixed and borders very difficult to draw; However, this time the great powers intended to give the whole a rational and viable dimension. To avoid “balkanization” the idea of “each nation, its state” was left behind. Despite this diversity, the Yugoslavs strongly resisted Nazi occupation, despite the support of the Ustachas (basically Croatian Catholics) to the occupier, in a fiercely anti-Serbian posture inherited from Austrian memory.

About eighty years later, again that principle of accentuation and exacerbation of the nationalist spirit returned to Yugoslavia as the product of various interests of entities alien to its people. Germany intended to widen the field of trade expansion by benefiting from the breakup of Comecon; pope Wojtyla wanted to integrate the former Austrian provinces of Catholic tradition (Slovenia and Croatia) in his ultra-reactionary crusade spirit against Belgrade and the Serbs, with traditionally good relations with Russia; and finally, the US (dragging the EU alongside it) again encouraged “balkanization” with the creation of a tripartite Bosnia-Herzegovina, FYROM (now Northern Macedonia), Montenegro and the creation of a territory (Kosovo) promoted to nation-state to receive the big military base Boldsteen where US can oversee the entire Balkan Peninsula, preventing against Russian influence on the Slavic peoples of the region. 

The same principle of “each nation, its state” was not, of course, followed in the decolonization of Africa; so the colonial boundaries were maintained, enclosing, in general,  in each one, many ethnicities and languages that, as a rule, have centuries, sharing in common the same space. For example in the Niger valley cohabit hundreds of ethnic groups and languages. The creation of nation-states by the colonial powers did not end this cohabitation, complemented with some languages of communication between distinct communities; the strangeness was the existence of borders and the presence of indigenous political classes as delegates of the former colonizers - the so-called "black skin, white mask"[2]. The same happened with the Quechua language, spoken by indigenous peoples from Colombia to Argentina, along with the Spanish language introduced by the colonizer.

It would be insane to apply the identity principle to Africa. First, because it would result in a confused and debatable redefinition of spaces and peoples; secondly, the colonial nations sought to maintain their preferential influences and business in the independent territories, as well as the continuation of mining exploitation and plantation regimes. On the other hand, the small westernized elites, heirs of the colonial administration, did not want to open the dossier of the pre-colonial ethnic groups, which would restrict their powers to the cultural and ethnic nuclei from which they came; or lose their role as intermediates face to Western capital in a broad space, supra-tribal. Particularly, it was required to them to provide a stable operation of markets ... and loot. Thus, the only cases of future partitions would come - after long and violent conflicts - with the Ethiopia/Eritrea, Sudan/South Sudan separations and, unrecognized by the 'international community', in the Somalia/Somaliland case. 

The British Indian Empire was initially divided into four nation-states, all far from ethnic, cultural or linguistic oneness. With the notable exceptions of Japan and Korea, the same is true in almost every Asian country. Indonesia is another great mosaic of languages and ethnicities but, the Dutch colonizers never even tried to install the use of their language, accepting the continuity of Malay, traditional language of communication in the region; The Dutch confined the use of its language in the upper circle of colonial administration.

Geopolitics is a game of economic, financial and logistical interests and makes peoples and nation-states as instruments of dispute, whether more intense or destructive, as political classes manage to - or fail to - instill the venom of nationalism and exclusion of the Other, for the benefit of indigenous or globalized capitalism.

Most cultures or languages do not aspire to the constitution of a nation-state, and for various reasons: 

·        Many, they think if dispersed by several nation-states, each of those, is contrary to cede part of its territory to one of its minorities; also, is hard to a nation-state to admit its minority will join a group of people with the same culture but, living in a second nation-state; and, in addition, it would be hard to accept the emerging, of a third nation-state as a product of that agglutination. Indeed, the sharing of Jammu-Kashmir between India and Pakistan reveals that neither of these countries will give up a millimeter of territory, either to the other or to the creation of a new state sovereignty.

·        As a rule, a nation-state has its state structures occupied by ethnicities, unique or strongly majority cultures, with the monopoly of the police, military, judicial apparatus; and it is usually within this dominant culture that local or national economic power also is linked. The minorities only rebel if discriminated, constrained in their life-enhancing desires to a social promotion; or, if under cultural, linguistic, or religious repression, as happen in Northern Ireland Catholic community, but not in the Hungarian Catholic communities in Serbia or Romania (both Orthodox), as in the Turkish minority in Bulgaria.

·        There are also cases where political power is based on minorities. One can quote to the Maronites in Lebanon, used by the French to create a separate political entity from Syria, following the First World War but since, outnumbered by the Shiites; or in present-day Syria whose political power belongs to Alawite minority. In the cases of Maronites or Alawites, there are identities based on religion (present or inherited from ancestors) but in the case of Afro-Americans the identification and segregation are based on the more or less present African origin, the skin color; the same is happening in Brazil. 

The relevance of immigrants, especially in Europe and the US, has grown and is marked by discrimination, exclusion, persecution; their acceptance is more problematic, the more different is the physical or cultural typology of them. Being a South American immigrant in the US has different social and political acceptance conditions towards immigrants from Europe and in Europe, there are obvious differences whether the immigrant is African, Islamic or from Eastern Europe. The discrimination of immigrants is always constructed by a packed narrative of prejudice as being opportunistic, to explore the social security systems, and be thieves, dirty, rapists, terrorists, disturbing the good  and heavenly peace in their place of adoption. Synthetically, it is called to this set of preconception, racism; and, by the way, is interesting to remember racism has its origin in the Iberian Peninsula[3]
 
Jews, for about two millennia - and despite their ethnic and social divisions - lived in well-identified communities without a nation-state, self-segregating themselves to remain a community or, being segregated and persecuted for political reasons, religious or popular envy, or as origin of popular discontent in the nation-states where they lived For centuries they never sought to constitute a nation-state until they took advantage of this fashion, in the late nineteenth century, to launch this project, emigrating a few thousand to Palestine, where for many centuries there was only a small Jewish community in harmony with the Islamic majority. Zionism, the racist doctrine of defending the Israelites as an anointed people, advocated an occupation of Palestine as their ancestral homeland and, with English support, they established themselves in that territory, expelling or segregating its occupying ancestors, victims of brutalities that can be compared with those of the Nazis. It is, therefore, a “scientific”, exclusionary and fascist nationalism, anchored in the support of the US and the political and financial power of Jewish-origin oligarchs. Only money and its resulting influence allow such "national" excrescence. 

Conversely, Gypsies have always been poor, segregated and wandering communities, pushed into ostracism, with a particular presence in the Balkans, where they developed a very interesting musical culture. No financial or political power offered them a territory to build a nation-state.

What is the nation-state? It is a contingency where other contingencies came to an end, with an apparatus called the State, with totalitarian rights of repression and plundering of “its” inhabitants, segmented according to the various performances defined by the State[4]. The State is filled by a hierarchy more or less mafia - the political class, in permanent liaison with the top of the range of capital; national and global. To color and brighten this sinister picture, they joined this nation-state with a hymn and a flag. 

4 - Capitalism magnifies the nation-state in the process of consolidation

Globalization, in its earliest form, began when Lucy's sons left the Rift Valley and set off to uncertain destinations; but losing, temporarily (thousands of years) each other's references[5]. And it was widening its geographical scope, including more and more human communities, mainly through the formation of empires that created the security conditions for the exchanges. Alexander of Macedonia wanted to conquer the world but was thwarted by the forests of India, the heights of Pamir and the fatigue of his troops. Later the Romans turned the Mediterranean into a Mare Nostrum stopping at the edge of the stormy Atlantic, behind the defensive wall against the Picts in the west, the Sahara in the south, the Rhine and the Danube in the north, and the confrontation with the Parthians in the east. Still later, the Muslim empires formed sea and land bridges with India and China, with Marco Polo, Venice and, Genoa linking Asia with the rest of feudal Europe. This distant commerce focused on luxury goods whose high price resulted in part of the total dimension of travel and the risks during it.

If one thinks of globalization in simple geographical terms, it was consummate with the deeds of Colombo, Vasco da Gama and Magalhães, followed by the unveiling of some corners, until the eighteenth century with Cook and, already in the twentieth century, with the explorers of the polar zones. Anchored in five European Atlantic countries - Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France and, England - globalization has developed war, trade, conquest, slavery, technological developments and a huge exchange of knowledge. From this chaotic, unscheduled evolution resulted in a new way of generating wealth - capitalism - which had as its essential instruments:

·        the nation-state, as an organizational model of people, goods and, capital, anchored in a well-defined space;
·        nationalism as ideology, form to agglutinate a specific and multifaceted population but excluding or suspicious of the outsiders;
·        and finally, the State, as the managing apparatus of wealth creation, keeping the population pacified by law or by repression.

As the world is an open space, the distant trade in luxury goods or spices desired by the wealthy - now most numerous - was highly profitable. Artisan production of goods, destined for a nearby area, typical of medieval times, gave way to production to distant destinations, unknown to their producers and on a scale that would not fit the capacities of medieval artisans, grouped in brotherhoods[6]

If there is no link between producer and consumer everything becomes dependent on the trader who defines prices, quantities and, (high) profit margins that allow large accumulation of money and the creation of a banking and financial sector. Traders and owners of a country proceed to a collective defense, as cartel (avant la lettre) face the  external competition, with the royal support for Indies Companies, holding the "national "monopolies" (read, of the richest merchants), extending the administrative functions of the kingdom, with the king to levy duties on imports and to defend national production from foreign competition. The national word became vulgar, precisely with the consolidation of the nation-state, as an attribute of all that is belonging to or an attribute to the nation-state. And each nation-state was like a fortress that, through cannon and commerce, took the world as a market, never losing its individuality. 

This protected space, with an administrative and military apparatus with a king at the top, gains uniformity and cohesion versus the outside, from which threats may arise; the relevance of borders and the call for war for territorial conquests for the capture of lands and people from markets emerges. Kings increase their power with a broader administrative area - treasury, customs, army and navy, police, courts, and administrative and labor control legislation - far beyond what was required in feudal landlords. Great drivers of these transformations were the rich traders of global transactions, with the East Indies, the West Indies, or engaged in the African slave trade, notably from the seventeenth century.

The demarcation of borders, the existence of an administrative and financial structure through an apparatus - State - in a well-defined and well-defended space, materializes the nation-state, a fortress-state. For example, in France, with the ordinances of Villiers-Cotterêts (1539), a national register of births and deaths is made from the registers of religious structures; and along with the usual Latin, the French language was adopted, which would become the only one used, after the French Revolution (although there were many versions of it). On the other hand, these ordinances contained the prohibition of the brotherhoods of arts and crafts, typical structures of the feudal era, taken as surpassed by globalization and consolidation of the implicit logic of the market.

What has come to be called the national bourgeoisie establishes an intimate relationship with the State, personalized in a king or equivalent (Cromwell) as the leader of the nation-state; a cohesive set against the outside or in the repression of disgruntled social strata. The presence of the state apparatus is an essential requisite for increasing the wealth and power of the richer traders who may be called capitalists - they own moving capitals, arm ships, trade and order fabrics, weapons ... especially for sale outside, nearer or farther.

Capitalist production requires a device (State) to its service, a territorial delimitation and cataloging of the population as nationals, keeping out as foreigners, people with any distinction towards people belonging to the nation. It must be noted that China, initially with an administrative organization, technology and greater wealth than Europeans, has never shown interest in developing trade with these "barbarians." And because of their size, China understood do not develop foreign transactions since the fourteenth century, mocking objects Westerners later had, for exchange purposes. The big problem arose in the nineteenth century when the "barbarians" forced China, at the threat of its cannons, to collaborate in enriching foreigners by buying opium.

The Netherlands stands out as heir to a commercial and manufacturing tradition with roots in the Middle Ages and with the freedom of thought it consolidated, after a long war against the claims of Spain; the last, anchored in the typical power of heritage in feudalism sink financially in constant wars in the defense of its very fractioned possessions in Europe and encysts as the guardian of Catholic traditionalism, fighting the humanist ideas[7]. The treaty of Westphalia is followed by a long period of rivalry between France and England until the last assumes clear world leadership with the defeat of Napoleon and the Treaty of Vienna in 1815. After the Franco-Prussian War (1870) England shares global hegemony with Germany and the US, a balance that will break with World War I, when Germany loses all its colonies and the US overcomes England as the main power.  After World War II US strengthened its leadership in the western world and the first configuration of a world system - financial (Bretton Woods, IMF…), commercial (GATT / WTO) and military (NATO); but with the Soviet Union as a rival power, particularly in the military field. The UN appears as a descendant of the defunct League of Nations, as a common denominator among the nation-states, strengthening the role of these as sovereign elements framing the population; however, with a directory of major powers - the USA, France, Great Britain retains, the USSR and China (first as an ally of the West and then under the current form of the People's Republic, positioned alongside the USSR). 

Published:

Nation-state, nationalism, instruments of capitalism (1ª part)
 
To be continued:
Nation-state, nationalism, instruments of capitalism (3/3)


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[1] Symbolically, the first US president, George Washington was a wealthy owner of immense numbers of slaves.
[2]  Title of a Franz Fanon’s book
[3]  Racismos – Francisco de Bethencourt
[4] O Homem, ser social e fragmentado (Man, social and fragmented being)
[5]  The 20 million people in Mexico caused by the arrival of the Spanish, measles and, smallpox (in addition to the superiority of the latter), mainly due to Mexicans having no contact with other humans. since the Bering Strait was flooded again after the last ice age.
[6]  Curiously, certain relatively privileged professional categories are once again assumed as true brotherhoods, in spite of the open and free-market logic contained in the neoliberal discourse.
[7] At the most prestigious Iberian university - Salamanca - Augustinians and Trinitarians in the 17th century get involved because some considered Adam imperfect after God had removed a rib (to create his wife) and others understood that the same God has filled the hole with meat (!) 

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