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
///+\\\
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)
This and other documents, here:
[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
[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 (!)
