The State in Transition: Reimagining Political Space 9780585082233

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The State in Transition 〫

Critical Perspectives on World Politics 〫 R. B. J. Walker, Series Editor

The State in Transition Reimagining Political Space 〫 edited by

Joseph A. Camilleri Anthony P. Jarvis Albert J. Paolini

Published in the United States of America in 1995 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 1995 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The state in transition : reimagining political space / edited by Joseph A. Camilleri, Anthony P. Jarvis & Albert J. Paolini. (Critical perspectives on world politics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55587-538-1 (hc : acid-free paper) 1. State, The. 2. International relations. 3. World politics. I. Camilleri, Joseph A., 1944– . II. Jarvis, Anthony P., 1960– . III. Paolini, Albert J., 1963– . IV. Series. JC11.S76 1995 320.1—dc20 94-38877 CIP British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

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Preface Part 1 The Problem of the State 1

2

Locating the State Anthony P. Jarvis & Albert J. Paolini From International Relations to World Politics R. B. J. Walker

3

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Part 2 Identity and Political Space 3

4

5

6

7

Nationalism in/and Modernity Sanjay Seth

41

Rethinking the State of the Nation Irmline Veit-Brause

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The Authentic State: History and Tradition in the Ideology of Ethnonationalism Stephanie Lawson

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The Stars on China’s Flag: Appropriating the Universe for the Nation John Fitzgerald

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State, Civil Society, and the Political Subject in a Divided Society: Reimagining Political Relations in Northern Ireland John D. Cash v

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CONTENTS

Inadequate Providers? A Gendered Analysis of States and Security J. Ann Tickner

125

Part 3 Globalization and Political Space 9

10

11

12

Problematic Paradigm: Liberalism and the Global Order James L. Richardson

141

Symptoms of Globalization: Or, Mapping Reflexivity in the Postmodern Age Anthony M. Elliott

157

Manipulating Space in a Postcolonial State: The Case of Malaysia Loong Wong & Beverley Blaskett

173

The World Economy and an Economically Active State: From Economic Radicalism to Neoliberalism in Mexico Stephen R. Niblo

189

Part 4 Reflections on the State in Transition 13

State, Civil Society, and Economy Joseph A. Camilleri

209

The Contributors Index About the Book

229 231 243

Preface

This book had its beginnings in the almost certain knowledge that the state is in transition. As we thought about it further, it became clear that it was not just the state that was in transition, but also the very contexts within which it has been located. The state, long assumed to be the sovereign definer of political space, is changing, as is the world within and without. As such, not only the constitution of political space becomes problematic but also the very categories used to describe, define, and understand it. In order to make some sense of this difficult process, we organized a conference—“The State in Transition”—at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. It is out of that conference that this volume emerged. The puzzle of the state in transition cuts across a number of aspects of the discipline of politics, and is of considerable relevance to many others. Our goal was to produce a volume that explores this puzzle from a number of viewpoints, one that would be useful to students of international relations, politics, and perhaps more generally. We hope the result is a wide-ranging exploration of the most important aspects of this puzzle, offering useful suggestions about the likely trajectory of that most complex of human creations—the state. There are a number of people we would like to thank. Those who at the conference gave papers that are not included here enhanced the quality of the debate and helped refine our understanding of the issues. R. B. J. Walker was of great help in making initial suggestions about the shape of the volume. The conference itself was made possible by the financial assistance of La Trobe University through the office of the vice-chancellor, the then School of Social Sciences, and the Department of Politics. We also acknowledge the work of Liz Byrne and Marilu Espacio in providing organizational support for the conference and preparations for this volume: their efforts can only be described as prodigious. In addition, the publisher, Lynne Rienner, and her staff have been of unfailing assistance in

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PREFACE

seeing this volume through to completion. Finally, we are grateful for the support of Rita Camilleri, Judy Walsh, and Rosa Frassoni. Joseph A. Camilleri Anthony P. Jarvis Albert J. Paolini

PART 1 THE PROBLEM OF THE STATE

1 Locating the State Anthony P. Jarvis & Albert J. Paolini

Twenty-five years ago, little new or interesting was being said about the state. It was either ignored as irrelevant by mainstream North American political science or taken as the assumed point of departure for the study of international relations. This polarity is not as curious as it might at first seem. For a long time scholars observed a division of labor.1 The liberal preference for weak states at home and strong states abroad meant a minimized emphasis in political science on the state, while the external dimensions of state power were dealt with by a predominantly realist International Relations. Today, with the state as the focus of investigation by so many disciplines, the situation could hardly be more different. So many new things are said about the state that it is difficult to know how to make sense of the puzzle the state represents. This is not, however, just a shift in the scholarly demarcation of the study of the state. The world, too, has changed. The indications of change and transition are plentiful. The patterns of world politics are undergoing major and possibly permanent transformations through the various, and at times competing, processes of global integration (capitalist/liberalized markets, communications technology) and fragmentation (ethnic, religious, or class conflict). These transformations have increased our awareness of the inadequacy of the traditional institutions in world politics, the global dimensions of what were once considered domestic problems, and the nature of community, autonomy, and sovereignty. At the center of these transformations lies the role of the state; its relationship to these contemporary dynamics; and the question of how far it can provide satisfactory solutions to an emerging agenda of genuinely transnational issues: ecological destruction, AIDS, terrorism, and the growing migration of peoples fleeing repression or ethnic unrest. Indeed, the state remains a clearly visible feature on the modern political landscape. This century has been marked by the proliferation of the sovereign state as the principal form of political community. Modernity is

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built on the state form as a way of organizing and defining political space. It is the sovereign territorial state that lays claim to define the boundaries of the political. States partition the global political space into separate polities and the international is constituted only in the relations between states. There exists no empty space between states. The space between them is traversed and patterned only by specific political transactions. We are thus left with a vision of the global political space as constituted entirely and exclusively by states. The state defines both the inside and the outside. What then is the contribution of this volume? Why do we need to reimagine local, national, and international space in the context of the state in transition? What are we alluding to in the first place by claiming that the state is in a condition of transition? In fact, we cannot deny the dramatic rise in the number of developments challenging the state’s claim as the sole definer of political space. The patterns, movements, and very construction of world political space have become ambiguous. The intensification of what has been called “globalization” is forcing us to reconsider that most central assumption of modernity—the construction of political space and process represented by the nation-state. The problem becomes how to conceptualize the complex and reciprocal relationships now present because of changes in the international system, both at the individual and collective level. A resolution of this problem requires not only a reconceptualization of the state but also of other categories used in understanding local, national, and international politics and a reimagining of the nature of political space itself. The analytical starting point for this argument is that world politics, rather than international politics, is the appropriate focus. The very notion of world politics is denied in traditional understandings of international relations because it signifies the existence of forms of politics other than those of the state.2 International politics is simply what it says: it refers to the specific transactions that take place between nation-states. World politics is something different: it is the multilevel interaction of all actors and groups, characterized by multiple forms of association, both patterned and unpatterned. 3 In essence, it suggests a different patterning of political space. It would be impossible to explain or understand this transformation if the analytical starting point were simply those transactions taking place between states. This transformation, as we have seen, is about the shifting boundaries of political space. Traditional notions perceive political space as bounded by the state; but by focusing on world (or global) politics we signal a move to an expanded understanding of the extensivity of politics. Some argue that the changes under way are so significant that we need a new term. The nature of world political space can no longer be characterized by the idea that there is an international politics; rather, we currently have a postinternational politics.4

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The aim of this volume is to go some way toward the task of both exploring the nature of this transition and the possible ways of reimagining political space. This is a complex task, but the transition alluded to above suggests two broad sets of questions about political space and the state: those concerned with identity and those concerned with globalization. It is around these that the structure of the book is organized. In Part 1, this introductory chapter is followed by R. B. J. Walker’s exploration of the problem of transition and the difficulties it presents in imagining a politics and life without the various dichotomies upon which the familiar categories of state, self, and citizen depend. The six chapters in Part 2, “Identity and Political Space,” pick up this concern and deal with the fundamental questions of identity that arise from a state in transition. This part of the book explores how attachments to nation and ethnie bear upon the construction and definition of political space. These chapters analyse, conceptually and through case studies, how identity is constructed through processes of nationalism and the symbolic manipulation of space. The chapters in Part 3, “Globalization and Political Space,” provide a detailed analysis of the impact of a globalized political space on the state. While globalization affects the construction of political space at all levels, states may, in turn, respond by attempting to reconstruct political space in unpredictable ways. It should be noted that while Chapters 3 through 12 have been placed in these two categories, what they have to say is often relevant to both themes: the division is therefore somewhat arbitrary. In discussing both themes, identity and globalization, reference will often be made below to chapters from either section, Part 2 or Part 3, in order to indicate useful connections for the reader. Finally, the volume concludes with an effort by Camilleri to locate the state in these various developments and to characterize the trajectory of the state as it struggles to adapt and survive.

THE STATE IN TRANSITION

The act of recognizing that the state has reached certain limits in the face of globalization and internal fragmentation takes us only part of the way in accounting for a transition. The world has indeed been transformed and states are more or less effective in responding to these pressures and demands, yet if we are making a claim about some unique facet regarding the nature of the state within this contemporary phase, we would be underestimating the very real sense in which the state always has been in transition. In this context, the title of this volume is something of a misnomer: The State in Transition does not imply that the state was ever static or settled, except perhaps in certain theoretical encapsulations. Such a historical account would certainly be impoverished. The state has been in motion, evolving, adapting, incorporating, since its inception. Notwithstanding the

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difficulties in pinpointing its precise advent, whenever and wherever it has evolved, it has constantly had to accommodate both human and institutional demands on its form and function. Richard Ashley’s comment that the state forms part of a “never completed story” in the domestication of political space,5 a practice that is “always in the process of becoming” but never totally completed, is surely a truism in this respect, although Walker may be correct in arguing that such a claim is now quite “unprovocative.”6 Nevertheless, it bears repetition and indeed informs many of the chapters in this book, if at times only implicitly. John Fitzgerald’s account of the changing nature of the modern Chinese state is instructive here. The Republican, Nationalist, and Communist movements in China have had to mold quite distinctive states to further their claims of Chinese unity. Fitzgerald writes: “The political history of twentieth-century China may be seen as a series of experiments in reimagining the nation in varying configurations of race, region, and social class with the single aim of ensuring the survival of the state under a variety of readings of the international state system.”7 Rather than being a given political unit, the state has been viewed as an “artful creation.”8 Similarly, in Chapters 7, 11, and 12, in their respective analyses of quite diverse states—Northern Ireland, Malaysia, and Mexico—Cash, Wong and Blaskett, and Niblo converge on at least one Hobbesian maxim put forward by Walker: The state is “never simply there. It has to be made to work.”9 The projects employed differ; the effects are varied; but in each case the state is surely always in some condition of transition. The same could be argued for the various constructions of nation and nationalism that have been put forward in varying forms to sustain or indeed undermine claims to statehood, although we do not seem to have had as much difficulty in accepting their essentially malleable nature in light of Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities.” Sanjay Seth (Chapter 3) points to the inherently ambiguous and Janus-faced nature of modern nationalism, especially when it employs the state as a particular answer to a universal dilemma. However, the state is no less ambiguous and Janus-faced in its attempt to mediate the unending changes and complexities of modernity. Given, as Veit-Brause (Chapter 4) informs us, that “there is no uncontentious foundational relationship between nation and state,”10 the state is constantly on the move in framing an ethos to address the claims of modern nationalisms. This characteristic of the modern state can be understood only if we take into account its temporal and spatial mutability. Both Tickner and Camilleri tell us (Chapters 8 and 13) that the state varies and evolves across time and space. Seth and Walker view the state as modern resolutions to enduring human collective anxieties, with Walker adding that it has specifically horizontal, territorial, and spatial elements that attempt to define what constitutes the political and Seth arguing that the nation

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“grounds” the state.11 The temporal aspect of the state formations is obvious: states have varied over history and have changed in form to meet new challenges. The spatial dimension has been perhaps less appreciated. States carve out space, be it visibly geographic (hence the claims to specific boundaries and territories), or, in the manner outlined by Cornelius Castoriadis,12 “imaginary” (reflexive claims to identity and subjectivity). In fact, the state has served as a primary category in the modern understanding of political space through its ideas of citizenship, sovereignty, and the national interest. Walker views it as the definitive marker of the “political”: “the categories through which we might attempt to pose questions about the political are precisely those that have been constructed in relation to the state.”13 Wong and Blaskett tell us that the “notions of political community and political space are conjoined.”14 By dint of spatial definition, politics occurs only in relation to the state. This fusion of state/politics signifies that in the context of the current transitions in the world, the state will remain deeply implicated in any redefinition and reorganization of political space at the local, national, and global levels. While in many respects they are in the box seats, states are vulnerable to other processes and actors—even those that are excluded on the basis of their not being strictly political. Ecology is a case in point. All this suggests a condition of flux in the context and actions of the state as definer of political community and the boundaries of political space. While the statist paradigm as a whole has monopolized our understanding of the political, different types of states employ specific strategies and practices in their continuing efforts to (re)define political space. Some are obviously more successful than others; and here we need to take account of asymmetrical relations of power as one of many variables affecting outcomes. Yet all engage in this constant articulation of what should constitute the proper focus of political allegiance as a key determinant of life as a political being. At times, the effort is clearly driven from above, as John Cash illustrates in his case study of Northern Ireland, where the manipulation of certain unconscious ideological rules (revolving around an inclusivist or exclusivist mapping of space) are deployed in the construction of subjective and intersubjective relations. The explicitly psychological content of such rules signify a deeper process of reimagining state and civil society in Northern Ireland. The enduring controversy about the state is a direct reflection of this flux and the adaptive capacity demonstrated by states. Two aspects in particular require explanation. Firstly, states themselves are changing as they functionally respond to changing circumstances and requirements; in turn, this gives us a different view of their possible trajectories. This brings us to the second point: these changes and adaptations give us a different view of how we earlier thought of the state. They lead to the conclusion that, having more evidence about what states have done and are doing under

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THE PROBLEM OF THE STATE

conditions of transformation, lends us an insight about how we might need to revise the theory of the state. The experience of the transformation of world politics reveals how inadequate are available theories of the state to make sense of these changes. So, as states and their power contexts have changed, the theory of the state has had to develop. Although some chapters in this book spring from or reach out to other modes of scholarly analysis, our initial reference point is the statist paradigm that has exercised a particular stranglehold on international relations theory. It is in the sinew of international relations that the concept of the state, trapped as it is in its realist moorings, is in particular need of rethinking. Walker refers to international relations as a “discourse of limits” in which only certain questions can be asked and a general silence prevails over key concepts such as the state, security, and power.15 This intellectual closure has served not only to ossify these key concepts, but to insist on traditional parameters and boundaries that increasingly fly in the face of contemporary developments in the (post)modern era. The very real changes of late modernity, often contradictory and ambiguous, call into question the traditional form and function of the state and in turn its interaction with other modalities of human association such as the nation. Thus, as indicated at the outset, an obvious reason to rethink the nature of the state and characterize it as in transition is to recognize the transformed shape of contemporary world politics. This becomes particularly pressing in light of the tendency in international relations to cling to an archaic understanding of the state. An attempt to locate the state is double-edged if discovery is a prelude to reconsideration. The rather bold claim of this volume is that, both conceptually and empirically, the modern state is in transition and hence ripe for rethinking. However, this assumes a certain knowledge of what is happening “out there” and a more subtle implication that we can somehow coherently read this transition and perhaps even clearly point to various directions in which the state is supposedly moving. Yet the seeming innocuousness of such a claim belies more awkward considerations that are not prone to simple resolution or, indeed, observation. As R. B. J. Walker cautions us in Chapter 2, we have a sense of the state in motion, but exactly where it is going and, indeed, where it has come from remains “painfully obscure.”16 This invites us to take care with any easy or generalized declarations about the state in transition. It also reminds us of the importance of interrogating our motives in any questioning of the status of the state. We need to remain vigilant in wanting to engage with the state, for not only is it a problematic concept to begin with, but one of central importance in bounding our lives in an interaction with a whole series of markers and signifiers such as nation, ethnie, culture, and identity. Thus, to question the relevance of the state, or to reimagine its space, or to suggest alternatives, is to enquire into our very relationship with ourselves

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and the society we live in. There are pitfalls as well as advantages in such an exercise, not the least being the danger of reification of the state on the one hand; and perhaps the promise of a better future on the other. How do the chapters of this book address the feeling of a transitory, perhaps even withering, state? The response, not surprisingly, is not uniform. No serious attempt is made to dismiss the state or deny its continued relevance along the lines of some recent postmodern analyses; and a call for reimagining the limits, possibilities, and space of the state is certainly made by Walker, Camilleri, J. Ann Tickner, Veit-Brause, Fitzgerald, and Elliott. But even when we are implored to look beyond the traditional boundaries and conception of the state in order to make sense of an increasingly complex world, the state, both conceptually and institutionally, remains central to analysis. This may be due, as Walker suggests, to the state forming a “hermeneutic circle” within which we struggle to escape.17 Alternately, there is the danger that, in striving to deconstruct and critique concepts such as the state, we make them the continued focus of our attention and thus serve to reinscribe their centrality.

IDENTITY AND POLITICAL SPACE

It seems that we have come some way to accepting Michel Foucault’s call for “cutting off the King’s head” in analyses of power and sovereignty.18 Foucault was concerned that power remained state-centric in political analysis; it tended to be located in some central point that ignored the new “micro-physics” of power operating at levels and in forms that go beyond the state.19 The literature pointing to a more differentiated world system of power relations in which the state is but one, albeit important, player, is growing. Despite the currency of this Foucauldian perspective, there are significant rejoinders and reminders in this volume to the “withering state” thesis. Stephanie Lawson (Chapter 5), for one, reminds us in her account of ethnic groups seeking to construct “authentic” states that there is little in ethnonationalist projects “that threatens orthodox assumptions about the desirability of statist configurations as the basis for the ideal political community.”20 From the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka to the Serbs in former Yugoslavia, while the idea of a modern centralized state acting as a melting pot may no longer be viable, the commitment to self-determination in a “purer,” particularistic form fits quite easily with an inclusive, bounded conception of statehood. Indeed they are seen to sustain each other. There is a widespread feeling, however, that the state can no longer sustain our needs, contain our anxieties, or resolve the perennial dilemmas and ambiguities of many imagined communities. In this sense, the state in transition has rendered the very construction of identity problematic. This is essentially the question that the chapters in Part 2 address: How has the

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state been involved in the construction of identity and in what ways will attempts to construct identity continue to involve the state? The chapters by Seth and Veit-Brause deal with the central problem of nationalism. Seth examines the paradox of nationalism—its ability to construct identity by straddling the claims of the universal and the particular in the identity of the nation. In this sense, nationalism suggests the tensions of modernity in its very nature. It is this resolution that is under pressure. This is what Walker identifies as the sense that “the state is no longer able to claim to resolve all ontological contradictions in space and time, or to effect those practices that particular states constitute and legitimize by virtù/virtue of this claim.”21 Efforts to accommodate unity and diversity, self and other, inside and outside, flounder. According to Walker, “leakages prevail.”22 Within a more collective understanding of identity, both Seth and Veit-Brause inform us that the subject is prone to more paradox and ambiguity: a certain slippage at the heart of modernity that renders a retreat into the particular (nationalism) increasingly problematic. This is not to infer that ethnic or nationalist projects have lost their allure; and Lawson, in fact, gives ample evidence to suggest the case may be otherwise. However it may be, as Camilleri notes, that in an age of heightened pluralization and relativization, the break with traditional modes of association is never complete; indeed, several competing logics can coexist. This can be read as both a sign of their declining utility in the long term and (in light of this) an indication of their anxious contemporary appeal. In any case, what has become evident is that the congruence between state and nation, never precise, and indeed straddling the very binary oppositions of modernity, is shakier in the face of globalization. So much so that the individual’s recourse to national or ethnic identity indicates an unsettled, insecure subjectivity. As an expression of selfhood and the avenue of mediating the individual’s relationship to the increasingly fractured state, the ambiguous nation is a fragile attachment. The issue is taken up in Chapter 4, where Irmline Veit-Brause argues that, as a paradigmatic unit of modern political organization, the state will always suffer “a permanent tension” or latent provocation: the nation.23 The point of departure for Veit-Brause is the nature of the link between nationalism and the state. Is the relationship one of logical necessity or of simply historical coincidence? Other leakages in the state’s inclusiveness are apparent: ethnonationalist projects (Lawson) and ethnicity generally; ecological imperatives; free-market policies; certain ideological projects underpinned by unconscious processes, such as those John Cash observes in Northern Ireland; and even instituted fantasy networks embedded in technoexpert systems (such as the Pentagon), which through a process of splitting, project images of a hopelessly fragmenting outside world in order to allay internal fears. The state may well be in transition because the various leakages undermine the relationship between its function and ethos. In a global

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framework of increasing contradiction and paradox, the state has, or so it is claimed, significantly lost its utility: it can no longer deliver on its ontological promises. In Chapter 6, John Fitzgerald views the problem as ethical: in attempting to reconcile claims of the universal and particular, unity and diversity, the state, at least—in the Chinese context—is involved in a constant negotiation between ethics and history within which contemporary discrepancies between the state and its ethical claims may have reached “critical mass.”24 The experience of ethnonationalist movements and postcolonial societies indicate that, at least in some respects, the state is still able to resolve ontological dilemmas and affect certain practices that constitute the legitimacy of their claims. In China, where the demands of a changing world order, free-market reforms, and tensions between center and border regions have produced a legitimacy crisis in which the Communist party-state “no longer has the stage to itself”;25 any attempt at radically reconsidering the ethical foundations of the nation-state are prescribed within limits set by the commitment of successive Chinese states to the ideal of state sovereignty. The need for unity has a powerful hold on the collective imagination. The Communists may no longer “do just as they please without bringing their own identity and legitimacy into question,”26 but this does not imply that the state itself is necessarily incapable of adapting to new demands. Emergent forms of local and international community certainly call for “a reasoned response to new limitations in the provenance of the state that these developments must inevitably entail.”27 Yet, as Fitzgerald reminds us, there is “plenty of precedent for such ethical reasoning in China’s own past.”28 In other words, there is no reason to believe that a further negotiation between state, ethics, and history is unlikely. Yet even if ontological or ethical dilemmas are profoundly unresolved, for example where the masculinist apparatus of national security inadequately provides for the security of women in society, it is by no means evident that the structure of the modern state needs to be abandoned. This point is taken up by J. Ann Tickner in her gendered analysis of states and security. In moving toward a more comprehensive notion of security—that is, not solely military protection from the outside, but protection from assault, rape, a degraded quality of life, and the lack of basic material needs that especially affect women and children within states— Tickner argues that solutions should be built from “the bottom up, rather than the top down.”29 By this Tickner means that the resolution of the security dilemma can come from within the parameters of the state. Although, as she writes, it is true that “many states are perpetrators of largescale physical and economic violence, often against segments of their own populations whose only recourse may be the international community,”30 Tickner does not believe that we should give up on the state entirely. Citing

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the Scandinavian experience, Tickner points out that state practices are not uniform and that at least within these states there exists the scope to develop the type of nongendered policies that provide for better equality and more security for all citizens in the long run.31 Tickner’s optimism here is partly borne out if we look at the position of women’s groups in the Third World. Rather than giving up on the state and investing in international and transnational associations, many of these groups are actively engaging their own states to redress their problems. This is not to suggest that the results are any more just or the strategy more effective (after all, such groups can simultaneously operate locally and transnationally), but to indicate that the state continues to exercise a certain utility and ontological significance for subjects active in defining their political community. Questions of legitimacy and political space, of ontological ambiguities and limits, indeed our very desire to interrogate the state in transition and rethink the boundaries of political community, hinge centrally on the issue of identity and the constitution of subjectivity. As stated previously in this introduction, to engage critically with discourses about the state is simultaneously to enquire into ourselves and society. “This must be the case,” argues Walker, “because our knowledge of the status of the state is so entwined with our self-construction as subjects and citizens.”32 We cannot make sense of the state unless we ask with what it is that we, as reflexive beings, expect, desire, or imagine the state will provide us. Whether it be at a national, ethnic, or individual level, the question of subjective identity is crucial and logically prior to any understanding of the state and its limits or possibilities. Indeed, this very question occupies many of the chapters in this volume. The various “symptoms of globalization” identified throughout this volume—the increased risks of late modernity; the contradictions of nation and ethnie; the appeal of global communities; the lack of ideological alternatives; the insecurity of living within traditional boundaries—point significantly to the state of the subject. The self, under challenge from various angles, is in the process of rethinking and perhaps even reimagining its relationship to the central markers that have defined its identity. Autonomy may indeed be in trouble, although the autonomous subject may always have been something of a mythical creature. At the very least we know that the state can no longer fully provide the conditions for selffulfillment. It is no coincidence that two of the chapters in this book concern themselves directly with the level of the imaginary in attempting to make sense of these processes. For it is here, in the continued capacity for individual and collective self-reflection, that a fundamental reworking of the state is possible. Both Cash, in Part 2, and Elliott, in Part 3, implore us to bring the “human element” into account and take seriously the role of the unconscious in understanding political identity and relations. In Northern

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Ireland, where subjectivity and intersubjectivity (that is, political identity and political relations) are continually being reworked, reimagined, and reinstitutionalized, the ideological rules that come into play, be they inclusivist in character (i.e., inclusive of both Catholic and Unionist identities) or exclusivist (i.e., emphasizing difference and irreconcilability) are contingent upon human action. Moreover, they are contingent in the sense that “no particular outcome is inevitable and within which the rules for organizing subjectivity and intersubjectivity are constantly being fought over by political actors and movements, including the state.”33 Although subjects “always act with an already organized subjectivity,” they draw upon the rules of structuration that are “more or less deeply embedded in social institutions and social structure.” In drawing upon these rules, subjects are capable of reproducing, modifying, or “very occasionally” transforming these rules (for example, from an inclusivist ethos to one that is exclusivist) and “the depth of their embeddedness.”34 Elliott takes up the theme of the transformative possibilities of human subjectivity with his notion of “critical self-reflection” or “creative reflexivity.”35 Departing with much social theory on this creativity of the imaginary, Elliott argues that modern experience is “reflexively highly mobilized”; that is, “self-transgressive in that it is continually open to internal monitoring, revision, and restructuring” within a given social context.36 Subjects are capable of transforming themselves and their social lives precisely because they can engage with the deep structures of desire, imagination, and unconscious representations. Where imagination is inhibited or repressed, creation is not possible. Thus, the capacity for critical selfreflection is connected in an essential way to individual and collective autonomy. However, subjectivity is not forged in a vacuum and here Elliott acknowledges that one of the central symptoms of globalization is that the “instituted reflexivity” of late modernity “displaces and condenses the possibility for this type of reflectiveness.”37 There are limits to reimagining political and social relations, yet this does not necessarily signify a retreat into the statist paradigm as the likely condition of postmodern living. There is, instead, an as yet unresolved struggle between human autonomy and the conditions of late modernity. Cash suggests the outcome of this struggle will surely be a key factor in any project of reimagining subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Whatever the obstacles, the human capacity for self-transformation, so often overlooked in the social sciences, is offered as a fundamental ingredient of living within the state in transition. Elliott ends his analysis with a call for new prospects and objectives in reactivating the project of critical, collective self-reflection. Although not couched in the same psychoanalytical terms, J. Ann Tickner takes up this call in her attempt to construct a new meaning for citizenship. Arguing for a more democratic model of security that is inclusive of both men and women, Tickner posits a shift in the focus of political

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identity from the sacrifice of the few, privileged men to an ethic of collective responsibility and caring in which the strict boundaries between public and private give way to a situation in which men and women participate equally in both these realms. There are issues that need to be addressed further here. For instance, why is the state necessarily the best forum for this reworked sense of citizenship? In terms of our discussion of identity, what strategies can be employed in tackling the structured gender inequalities in society? One possibility that Tickner does not take up directly but which follows on from our discussion of Elliott and Cash is the capacity for critical self-reflection at the level of the imaginary and the concomitant possibilities of the transformation of intersubjective gender relations. The work of Julia Kristeva and Jessica Benjamin, among others, would be instructive here. The capacity for reshaping existing gender identities and practices within those public domains traditionally associated with male-dominated rationality (a process that has been under way at least from the rise of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s) can be read, according to Elliott, as an indication that the “processes of imaginary transformation establish new symbolic possibilities from which a variety of gender issues come to be addressed anew.”38 A gendered reworking of security, no less than an inclusivist construction of political relations in Northern Ireland, presumes the centrality of the imaginary organization of subjectivity. Thus, the state of the subject becomes instrumental in any discussion of the subject of the state.

GLOBALIZATION AND POLITICAL SPACE

A key theme of this book is the impact of globalization on the construction of political space. Two central features comprise globalization. First, there is a seeming increase in interconnectedness. Second, there is the apparently declining significance of borders. Frequently, it is the increase in the intensity of interconnectedness that results in the decreasing significance of borders. In society, the local, the national, and the global have become intimately related. They have become connected in ways that events in one part of the world may greatly affect far distant communities. Forms of interdependencies have grown so that political, economic, and social events have ramifications far beyond the immediate and the local. It is no longer possible to think of politics as taking place simply within the limits of the state. Politics is an activity that crosses borders and renders traditional distinctions between domestic and international politics doubtful.39 Robert Reich claims We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century. There will be no national products

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or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will no longer be national economies, at least as we have come to understand that concept. . . . Each nation’s primary political task will be to cope with the centrifugal forces of the global economy which tear at the ties binding citizens together . . . (as) borders become increasingly meaningless in economic terms.40

Examining this quotation from Reich helps to explain precisely what is meant by interconnectedness. It is useful here to draw a comparison with the idea of connectedness. The assumption of connectedness is typically made about the activities, actors, and processes that take place within the bounded political and physical space of the state. Our assumptions of what constitutes significant connections are almost entirely erected on these assumptions of the nation and the state.41 At the heart of these assumptions is the idea of sovereignty. The discourse of sovereignty, at its most basic level, is about determining the limits of political organization and the extent of the legitimacy of a particular political authority. The medieval solution to that problem is the location of sovereignty in God. The modern solution, expressed in various formulations, is that of the sovereign state. Sovereignty, whatever its location within the state, represents the limits of a specific political space. Sovereignty, the state, and connectedness are related concepts. Similarly, world politics and interconnectedness are related concepts. At its most basic level, globalization challenges the assumptions of the bounded sovereign state. It does this by creating an unavoidable and alternative form of political space whose only limit is the globe.42 Globalization presents the existence of alternate and radically different forms and patterning of political space. It also highlights the importance of process. It is the capacity of process to generate different structures and patterns of political space that is essential to globalization. Thus, even where the role of the state is central, as in some case studies mentioned above, the articulation of political space is undertaken, increasingly, in an environment of competing forces, both local and global, and hence interactive compromise and adjustment are part of the spatial bargaining. This acts continually to challenge the state as the prime marker of political attachment, if not, in some contexts, seriously to undermine this previously monopolized space. The various social movements that make up an emergent global civil society are indicative here. The interconnectedness between world polity, economy, and civil society, which Camilleri argues is the predominant feature of late modernity, has crucial implications for the individual state’s capacity to map out its own space. The resurgent, some might add triumphant, liberal-capitalist paradigm discussed by Richardson (Chapter 9) is a further brake on the state’s autonomy. In a global economy wherein one paradigm narrows the agenda, dominates institutions, and the issue of North-South relations becomes invisible, the discursive strategies open to states, particularly in the Third

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World, are surely limited. Richardson’s argument suggests that this is one of the difficulties of the disappearance of alternative ideological paradigms in the present period. States attempting to resist the multiple challenges of globalization have little to sustain a challenge to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy of the free market. Stephen Niblo’s case study of Mexico (Chapter 12) can be read as emblematic of this constraining of economic and social options. Lamenting what he calls “almost an exhaustion of alternatives”43 in the late-twentieth century with the strengthening of neoliberalism, Niblo charts the gradual infiltration of international capital into Mexico and the resultant conversion of the economically active state into the economically rationalist one, with all sorts of negative implications for the organization of Mexican politics and society.44 In this example, space has taken on a much more global orientation, even though the Mexican state has its hands ostensibly on the national levers and various local forces resist increasing neoliberalization. The long-term implications for the nature of political space of an increasingly integrated world market revolving around a hegemonic Western liberal paradigm are profound; at least on the surface, they signal the lessening of the state’s role. The strategies deployed in Malaysia can perhaps be read against this grain in that, while Malaysia has opened its doors to the liberal paradigm (TNCs, free-market policies), it has attempted, with some success, to procure a distinctive geopolitical space centered around its anticolonial, anti-Western, pro–Third World voice. Wong and Blaskett argue (Chapter 11) that in doing so Malaysia has sought to extend its reach spatially in adopting a high profile for itself globally while domestically “limiting its exposure to the public gaze.”45 In this sense, the state in Malaysia claims to resolve its internal tensions by “privileging the presumed coherences within in order to discipline the differences without.”46 If Malaysia can be held up as any guide, the conclusion that may be drawn is that the construction of political space will be in large measure a discursive struggle between global forces, internal dissent, and the state’s traditional concern with stability and unity. The outcome of such a struggle is by no means certain to go the way of the global if, in Walker’s terms, states like Malaysia can make their claims to legitimacy and sovereignty stick.47 In the postcolonial world, the indications are that our predominantly Western assumptions about globalization and the concomitant decline of the state require caution. Wong and Blaskett warn of constituting yet another Eurocentric perspective in assuming a unilinear withering away or subordination of the state in postcolonial states such as Malaysia. They argue that the prevalent scenario positing a progressive, worldwide transition from the state’s “uncontestable sovereignty to a condition of weak and dependent variable in the global political contest”48 may indeed constitute a valid observation in some parts of the world, but that at least in Malaysia

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such a progression is in question. As an active agent in redefining its political space, the Malaysian state does not necessarily follow a Western pattern. The specific context and experience of such peripheral states needs to be fully taken into account in any future theorizing regarding the reach and power of the state. Otherwise, we may be guilty, according to Richardson in his Chapter 9 analysis of globalization and the liberal paradigm, of creating “blind spots,” particularly regarding the South, in our understanding of the state. The state may be in transition, but the specific nature of this transition varies from a Western to a postcolonial environment. For that matter, the transition may not necessarily constitute a decline for the state, as is suggested in much of the literature on globalization. The conclusions of the volume, expressed by Camilleri in the final chapter, stress the complexity and difficulty of reconceptualizing the state. The state will continue to be a way of organizing political space, but it is inconceivable, from the vantage point of our present transition, that it will remain either in its present form or that it will be the sole definer of political space. The state may remain in some form, but perhaps the most important question is alongside what other ways of organizing political space will the state be forced to coexist? In what fundamental degree will the emergence of other claims to define political space be met with changes in the state itself? It is to these questions that the contributions in this volume are addressed as a way of understanding both present and future configurations of political space and the trajectory of the modern state.

NOTES 1. See Richard Little, “Liberal Hegemony and the Realist Assault: Competing Ideological Theories of the State,” in State and Society in International Relations, Michael Banks and M. Shaw, eds. (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). 2. See R. B. J. Walker, pp. 29–30 in this book. 3. McGrew, for example, argues that “the concept of global politics . . . transcends the traditional distinction between international and the domestic in the study of politics as well as the statist and institutionalist biases in traditional conceptions of the political. It also suggests that there is an identifiable political system and a global political process which embraces a worldwide network of interactions and relationships between not only states but also other political actors both above the state and below it.” See Anthony McGrew, Paul G. Lewis, et al., Global Politics: Globalization and the Nation State (Oxford, England: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 2–3. 4. James Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 6. 5. Richard Ashley, “The Geopolitics of Political Space: Towards a Critical Theory of International Politics,” Alternatives 12, no. 4, p. 423. 6. Walker, p. 34 in this book. 7. John Fitzgerald, p. 93 in this book.

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8. Ibid., p. 99. 9. Walker, p. 26. 10. Veit-Brause, p. 70 in this book. 11. Seth, p. 48–49 in this book. 12. See Castoriadis, “The Imaginary in the Modern World,” in The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 13. Walker, p. 24. 14. Wong and Blaskett, p. 175 in this book. 15. See Walker, p. 34. 16. Walker, p. 21. 17. Walker, p. 26. 18. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1 (London: Penguin, 1979), pp. 88–89. 19. Ibid., p. 89. 20. Lawson, p. 87 in this book. 21. Walker, p. 35. 22. Ibid. 23. Veit-Brause, p. 62. 24. Fitzgerald, p. 101. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., p. 102. 27. Ibid., p. 103. 28. Ibid. 29. J. Ann Tickner, p. 134 in this book. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., pp. 135–136. 32. Walker, p. 34. 33. Cash, p. 109 in this book. 34. Ibid., p. 108. 35. Elliott, p. 169–170 in this book. 36. Ibid., p. 167. 37. Ibid., p. 170. 38. See Anthony Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992), p. 257. 39. Anthony McGrew argues that “in the late twentieth century politics can no longer be understood as a purely local, national social activity but must be conceived as a social activity with a global dimension. This invites abolition of the traditional distinction between domestic and international politics, between the foreign and the domestic. It also demands a certain conceptual readjustment in thinking of politics as an activity which stretches across space (as well as time) rather than as a social activity which is confined within the boundaries of the nation-state or at the international level as an activity between governments.” See McGrew, “Conceptualizing Global Politics,” in McGrew, Lewis, et al. (note 3), pp. 2–3. 40. Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 3. 41. Ibid., pp. 3–9, for a further discussion. Also see David Held, “Democracy, the Nation-State and the Global System,” in David Held, ed., Political Theory Today (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 197–235. Held argues that the traditional assumptions made about the workings of democracy rest on now doubtful assumptions about the boundedness of the state. Held argues that democratic theory presupposes the sovereign, separate nation-state; that is, a community that

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“governs itself and determines its own future” (p. 202). However, “global interconnectedness of political decisions and outcomes raises questions which go to the heart of the categories of classical democratic theory” (p. 203). 42. See particularly John Gerard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47 (1993), pp. 139–174. 43. Niblo, p. 189 in this book. 44. Ibid., pp. 196–205. 45. Wong and Blaskett, p. 184. 46. Walker, p. 35. 47. Walker, p. 36. 48. Wong and Blaskett, p. 173.

2 From International Relations to World Politics R.B.J. Walker

The state, we know, is in a state of transition. We may state with some confidence that its status is uncertain; at least, this is the judgement that seems to be offered by extensive and proliferating literatures on global political economies, emerging technologies, and planetary ecologies.1 We certainly know that it is in a bit of a state. Scholars know. Journalists know. People in the taverns and markets know. Yet what any of us knows by knowing this remains painfully obscure. After all, we know about the state and its transitions as subjects of the state. The very language in which we speak about the state is scarcely separable from the practices through which the state has been constituted historically, or through which we have been constituted as subjects of the state, or through which we continue to reconstitute our states of subjectivity. The confidence with which we sometimes question the status of the state is as easily shaken as it is affirmed. Tomorrow’s news ratifies contradictory histories. The emperor is not the only one short of clothes, and no one can claim the state of innocence from which one might easily distinguish between the naked and the authoritative. To say that the state is in transition is to suspect that our received wisdom about what it means to make claims about the state and its transitions is in some disarray. This suspicion seems to me to be crucial. It is one that I want to pursue here through a series of brief considerations of several aspects of the relationship between contemporary claims about the fate of the state and the historically constituted categories through which we have come to understand and accept these claims.

CITIZENSHIP AND VERTIGO

The state is in transition. The empirical trends sketched by emerging literatures are now perhaps all too obvious, and all too open to conflicting 21

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interpretations. Too many questions are provoked by this brief statement of what we all supposedly know. What is this being that is changing, mutating, transforming, becoming other than it was once supposed to be? What was it once supposed to be? Is it the same thing now? The same there as well as here? What is the range of new possibilities hovering into view, demanded by emerging necessities, cobbled together in the multiple confrontations and vagaries of temporal contingency, or construed in dreams and reveries? There are no doubt many practical problems arising as a consequence of the uncertain status of the state in the modern world: problems of policy; of uneven developments; even of survival.2 No doubt, too, these problems seem urgent and concrete, far removed from arcane meditations about what the state might be. Such problems have been framed too often in relation to claims about the state that are themselves rendered quite unproblematic, as if we really do know what it is, where it is, where it came from; who is, or should be involved in it; whether it is animal, vegetable, or mineral, fire, earth, air, or water. Yet this is simply not the case. The nature of the state, and not least its relation to “nature,” is subject to, and object of, considerable controversy.3 The state, it turns out, might well be classified among the mythical beasts. A peculiar beast, too; one that affirms separation and autonomy as a condition for participation, and threatens anarchy as a condition for community: a peculiarity that permits the corollory claim to the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” that Max Weber has famously bequeathed as the standard definition of what a state is supposed to be.4 What does it mean to be in a state of transition, in motion from one condition to another, especially at this moment when, depending on the prevailing view, history is over, modernity speeds faster than even the modernists thought possible, or capitalism is busy exploding all established trajectories of space, time, and identity? To say that the state is in transition is to encourage the disciplinary attentions of political theory, political economy, sociology, cultural analysis, and the rest, while simultaneously putting all of these staid cells of statist epistemology into considerable disarray. It is also to threaten metaphysics, theology, and imminent vertigo. Above all, to claim that the state really is in transition is to admit that we know neither where nor who we are—at least not with much confidence. There may be enough in the canonical texts, the famous definitions, and the terrible discourses of nations to provide some bearing on questions about what the state is, or was, supposed to be. Much has been said about it. Much has been committed in its name. There may be good reasons to celebrate its achievements, or to cringe at the barbarisms it has sustained. But whatever else one takes it to be, and whatever one’s judgement about it, the state has provided the modern world’s most powerful answer to all questions about who and what we are as political beings. Other answers

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can still be remembered or imagined. In some places they retain considerable vitality. But the state offers an extraordinarily powerful answer to questions about the political: elegant, tenacious, capable of multiple elaborations, and now inseparable from our reproductions of self and other in psychologies, histories, cultures, economies, genders, and desires. It asserts that we are, first and foremost, citizens.5 We are what we are within—subjects and subjectivities. The state is within us as much as we are within it. Only as citizens, it insists, can we become human. Only as citizens can we become secure, free, developed, democratic, peaceful. Privileging this answer has become the condition under which we can become anything else, whether as individuals, equals, communitarians, possessors, producers, reproducers, believers, lovers, or competent communicators. At least, this is the official story, and like all official stories it has a certain narrative advantage. Hobbes, the authoritative authorizer of the state as author, would have been very pleased. The texts, definitions, and terrible discourses may offer only an opaque account of what this answer involves and how it is sustained—for it is, to put it mildly, replete with ironies, contradictions, and tragic consequences. It has at least, however, provided some ground from which to construct a plausible politics in an uncertain, that is, modern, world. At least it provides some sense of who we are, and what we might die for. To pose questions about transitions and possible futures is to admit that this answer, and all that it implies, is losing credibility. Some may see this as a sign of hope, others as reason for despair. Yet if not citizen, what? If not even this tenacious but always precarious foothold in an uncertain world, what is to become of us, whoever us is?

HOBBES AGAINST THE REALISTS

The problem is thus not simply empirical, especially not in the sense that there is any scarcity of evidence from which to construct claims and counterclaims about the state or status of the state. There is certainly far too much evidence to scupper all notions of some permanent essence of statist politics. The prevalence of such notions in some specialized and privileged sites of modern political discourse—the Anglo-American theory of international relations being the most privileged—is rooted in metaphysical and ideological rather than in empirical interests. It tells us a lot about, but does little to explain, some of the crucial practices of modern states.6 The apparent persistence of states is precisely part of what is puzzling; not something that can be taken for granted. Moreover, this evidence depicts too many phenomena, too many trajectories, and too many contradictions. The brutality of facts is still often affirmed in discourses about the state, but there are few other sites in which facts are so fragile

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and elusive, so susceptible to the marauding attentions of competing theories and ideologies. It is surely no accident that claims about the permanent or empirical necessities of state are so often articulated through analogies of the utmost banality. Nor is it just that the surfeit of evidence intensifies the problem of interpretation. Theoretical schemes for interpreting claims about the state are notoriously prolific, but also notoriously unsatisfying. Overgeneralizations, unicausalities, reductionisms, and ahistorical reifications still take their toll on the credibility of an ever-burgeoning literature. It is all too easy to speak of the theory (in the singular) of the state (also in the singular), and not only because it invokes a convenient label for what are known to be quite diverse phenomena. The state, like that God it both supplants and invokes, has been able to claim to have solved all the mysteries of unity and diversity, and the label serves to confirm the achievement. Yet, despite the continuing recourse to some Weberian lowest common denominator, who now really believes there is a theory of the state, except as a regulative ideal—an ideal, that is, that mimics what it seeks to explain? Problems of empirical evidence and theoretical coherence are certainly not trivial: important literatures have been devoted to them. The state has been disaggregated and reaggregated, structuralized, functionalized, instrumentalized, institutionalized, and historicized; read as territoriality and as relative autonomy, as domestic product and as systemic actor. All scholarly faiths are welcome. However, the density of empirical and theoretical analysis of what states are and do cannot disguise the highly problematic character of the state as a historically specific answer to questions about the character, location, and indeed the possibility of the political. Moreover, the categories through which we might attempt to pose questions about the political are precisely those that have been constructed in relation to the state. The state, after all, affirms the illegitimacy, indeed the impossibility, of any transcendent ground from which the political might be engaged. Politics is that which occurs within the state. Elsewhere there might be relations or faiths, anarchies, barbarians, or the existential abyss, but not politics. To speak of liberty, or obligation, or rights, or society, or laws, or democracy is to do so in (often tacit) reference to life within the state. To claim that the state is in transition, and that it is therefore necessary to reengage with fundamental questions about who and what one is politically, is to court possibilities that are explicitly condemned by claims about the state as the site of all political possibilities. Other accounts of the political may still be alive in the interstices of the official story, but even they must be understood, to a greater or lesser degree, as products of statist discourse and its characteristic denials of any other option. Some involve attempts to escape from politics completely; to

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subsume all questions of temporal possibility under some transcendent truths of religion, science, or natural law. Some involve the assertion of claims once made possible by politics as now somehow beyond politics, as with many attempted universalizations of humanism, rights, ethics, community, or Enlightenment. Few, if any, of these accounts are without interest or productive controversy, but they enter into contemporary political life on terms largely set by the claims of state. Some feed the characteristic dualisms of statist politics, whether as private escapes from public perils or the truths that might speak to power. Some merely strengthen the well-worn rituals of co-optation, as when the impossible dreams of a common humanity sustain the violence necessary until we all become human; or when nationalism is framed as the discourse of emancipation from imperialist domination.7 Claims that the state is in transition have attracted all too many assertions that some other form of politics is ready and waiting to be applied to the violence and injustices of the present. All too often, these alternatives turn out to be part of the political practices that make the violence and injustices of the present possible. Hobbes especially affirmed that his was the only alternative. He went to considerable trouble to ensure that we would erase all traces of absurd speech in order fully to understand his train of necessary consequences. Forget the revelations, the essentialisms, the resemblances. Trust Euclid. In this he might be read as a mere salesman for the powers of deductive logic. But he can also be read as an expression of the logic of a sovereign reason that constructs its own alternatives simply to prove that there is no alternative. Be free, but be sure that you do what you must do. Pursue your own desires, but maintain your natural right and allow it to drive you toward universal reason. For Hobbes, there must be no way out. So sign on the dotted line. You may look forward to Kant’s categorical imperative, or Weber’s iron cage, or even Kafka’s castle, but the gates of modernity are firmly locked, or so Hobbes seems to have hoped. All claims of escape are but illusion; judged, of course, from the stance of that sovereign presence that is itself the work of illusion made real. As architect of the artifice, Hobbes, however, seems especially sensitive to the frailty of his achievement.8 A name is, after all, only a name. Nominalism requires some authority to make the name stick, to guarantee the correct interpretation in the face of impending Babel. The sovereignty of states was itself supposed to be the authority that would make all names stick, while resting only on the dubious guarantees of contract; a contract, moreover, that required a scarcely credible convergence of reason and fear to save protobourgeois individuals from their nightmares of unregulated competition. Translating an abstract social calculus first into an account of natural condition and then back into abstract sovereign law, Hobbes portrayed the sovereign state as the solution to all troubles—theological,

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ontological, and political—or at least as the primary solution that would in turn permit other solutions. Yet it was a nominalist solution: one rooted ultimately in the arbitrary character of all names; a solution that is quite at odds with all those attempts to use Hobbes’s own name to affirm the brute realities of political life or to save the achievements of modernity from those contemporary nominalists who have given up completely on the man who wound the clockwork. As Hobbes saw well enough, and others soon saw even more clearly, what legalese can put together, legalese can quickly tear apart. Absolute sovereignty slides into legitimate revolution. Absolute authority has itself no absolute ground to stand on. What counts is the degree to which people can be persuaded to underwrite the sovereign power; can be persuaded by the proper curriculum, by the proper religion, by civic education. Hobbes does not often get counted among the canonical theorists of ideology or power/knowledge, but he certainly understood its crucial role in a world without firm foundations—a world cut off from the Great Chain of Being. Moderns have known this for getting on half a millennium, though have preferred to think of it as a problem for nonmoderns, pre- or post-, lost in their relativisms while we bask in our certainties. The Great Newtonian Insurance Company soon proved to be a wise and profitable investment, serving to underwrite the a priori conditions of space and time, and encouraging Kant to rewrite Hobbes in a more optimistic style. Hobbes, no fool, remained closer to the skeptical temper that is, paradoxically, the vital spirit of modern philosophy, whatever his Euclidean dreams and Galilean visions. The sovereignty of states, he knew, is a very odd phenomenon: a claim to absolute power/authority that was itself arbitrary; thinkable only in some thought experiment of a timeless world capable of switching instantly from natural condition to abstract principle in the shake of a utilitarian/Protestant calculation. The sovereignty of states, Hobbes knew, is never simply there. It has to be made to work. It is a practice that serves to identify the character, location, and legitimacy of political authority, especially the authority to judge what is authoritative. So, claims about the state and its transitions might attract empirical investigation or theoretical elaboration, but there is no avoiding the degree to which we struggle to think about the status of states within discourses that both sustain and are sustained by the state. Moreover, these discourses have a peculiar character; one in which the stipulation of what is, of the way things are, is inseparable from the practices of legitimation, from the procedures through which we are persuaded that the way things are indeed must be. The hermeneutic circle may be difficult to avoid in any circumstances, but it is especially vicious in the discourses of the modern state. Hobbes’s analysis of the sovereignty of states remains of great interest in this respect, for it is in relation to claims to sovereignty that the state remains especially mysterious.

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PRACTICES OF SOVEREIGNTY

The sovereignty of states is certainly a very odd phenomenon. Everyone seems to want it. Those who claim to know it all tell us that sovereignty is just what we have, though some may have more of it than others. International law, at least some of it, also affirms the aspiration as the reality. We are all among the proud peoples of the United Nations with its crucial principle of domestic jurisdiction. Moreover, sovereignty seems to have been around for as long as anyone can remember. Even so, for such an established fact of life, and for such a cherished ambition, there is a disconcerting uncertainty about what sovereignty is, where it is to be found, where it came from in the first place, and what is happening to it now. In this, sovereignty is much like the state it is supposed to define, or express, or delimit, or whatever sovereignty is supposed to be or do in relation to the state. Yet the puzzles of the state have attracted constant attention. The state is on the active agenda of essentially contested concepts. Sovereignty, by contrast, is a puzzle that works because it has become so unpuzzling; so unspeakably boring; so essentially uncontested except among small coteries of scribes in dusty places. The magic of its conjuring tricks no longer provokes, or even entertains, though provocations against this or that sovereignty stir up many passionate, even violent emotions. Conflict has never been the only source of terror, and the essential incontestability of the principle of sovereignty has certainly been no guarantee of a quiet life. Indeed, the contrast between the quiet incontestability of sovereignty as a principle and the violence that is deployed in its name is surely one of the crucial distinguishing characteristics of modern politics. The claim to state sovereignty serves, in part, as a crucial modern myth of origin, though its own origins are still obscure and contentious. Some trace its ancestry back into the darkest recesses of human history, although most sightings remark on its specifically modern appearance. Some claim that it is disappearing before our eyes, though the disappearance seems only to enhance nostalgia for its previous apparent presence. It also serves as a claim about ontological status: a claim about the being that has been constituted out of nothing; the form that is constituted out of emptiness, even though its being, and its constitutive powers to constitute, are anything but obvious or transparent, despite the crystalline sharpness of old Hobbes’s prose. Its own status as a claim about ontological status is in considerable doubt. Some claim it to be simply a principle—a phenomenon of law or theory. Indeed, it seems to be so: abstract, remote from the cares of everyday life, safe for the codifiers of political necessity. Some claim it to be an institution: the primary and constitutive institution of the society of states that permits humanity to more or less coexist in its global condominion. Others—no doubt correctly as well—claim that sovereignty is really a

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practice: something that does not simply exist, but that is constantly becoming, or becoming undone, and doing so precisely in the interstices of daily life as well as in the rituals of pomp and state. Whatever it is, or was, sovereignty is all these things and more, even though all these things are not easy to reconcile in some grand ontology that can proudly affirm the way things are. The modern claim to sovereignty crystallized out of tremendous social and cultural upheavals in early-modern Europe. Its elegant simplicity seems quite incongruous with the complexity and brutality of the conditions that brought it into being. It undoubtedly solved enormous problems, both of principle and of practice. Most obviously, it offered an elegant resolution of many of the problems bequeathed by the collapse of hierarchical forms of power and authority. Though some sense of sovereignty might be traced back rather a long way, modern sovereignty can be understood as a specifically modern—horizontal, territorial, spatial—resolution of problems that had once been resolved through hierarchical schemes uniting the finitudes of temporal existence with the infinities of eternity. Once upon a time, the gap between the finite and the infinite had been bridged by angels—though mathematicians, more familiar with tortoises and hares, had long argued that the gap could never be bridged at all. Gradually, the mathematicians came to govern the sensibilities of a culture more impressed with objectifications than with resemblances. From Renaissance perspective to the fixing of Galilean and Cartesian dualisms as a form of spatial distancing, European culture made the most of the gap that had proved so troubling to the theologians. Europe became a culture of separations, of distancing, of straight lines, sharp boundaries, bounded properties, and subjectivities. The process was slow, uneven, violent, and it still looks rather murky to the historian’s learned gaze. Claims about the sovereignty of states are inseparable from this broader shift, and they carry the enormous ontological weight that might be expected of something capable of resolving grand puzzles about the finite and the infinite; something that could replace the angels as a marker of the margins of human existence. Three ontological resolutions of the intellectual crisis of early-modern Europe—all three, variations on the relation between the finite and the infinite, as this was bequeathed as a problem by both Greek and Christian sources—have been especially crucial to the lasting significance of sovereignty, whether understood as principle, as institution, or as practice. These involve the relationship between universal and plural (one system, many states; universality inside the particular; the impossibility of universality, “anarchy,” between the particularities); self and other (identity and nonidentity; friend and foe); and space and time (history within the domesticated space—contingency out there in the wilds of geopolitics).9 These resolutions have encouraged the framing of all alternatives as dead ends. They have permitted the constant repetition of discussions about the presence or imminent absence of sovereignty in the modern

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world.10 It is precisely this characteristically modern resolution of all philosophical options in space and time that have been the focus of so many challenges, whether framed as concrete practice or as critical theory, to the forms of politics that have crystallized into the common sense of scholars and nations. It is in this context that it is at least possible to specify some very general sense to claims about the state being in transition. For in order to advance claims about universality in human affairs, it is not obviously helpful to do so without coming to terms with the conditions under which prevailing claims about universality have emerged in the context of a historically specific particularity that has in turn affirmed its own capacity to resolve all relations of universality and particularity. Many currents of contemporary social and political theory continue to pay dearly for their contempt for theories of international relations in this respect. Similarly, if one aspires to a world that is somehow less warlike, or less domineering, it does not seem helpful simply to assume those concepts of self and other that are always in danger of lapsing into the politics of sovereign selfrighteousness that, for all the secularism of the claim to sovereignty, turns politics into a potential struggle between the saved and the damned. Moreover, if one senses that the state really is in transition, then it seems less than useful to try to map its potential motion on the grids of space and time that states affirm in their territorial histories and their historicized territories. If one is drawn to explore what any of these challenges to the statist resolution of all mysteries might mean, it is certainly necessary to be very suspicious of the practices through which the claim to sovereign identity in space and time is affirmed as the way things are among the necessities of power and policy. Suspicions about the ontological resolutions expressed by the principle/institution/practice of state sovereignty, and about the practices through which states affirm these ontological resolutions as an account and legitimation of their own being, are especially crucial in the context of claims that the state is in transition because claims about transition, about time, change, and continuity are already encoded within claims about the sovereignty of states. Bluntly, according to the discourses of state sovereignty, states either are or they are not. Whatever their federalizations, devolutions, or democratizations, states express a formal absolutism—the famous claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a particular territory. Bluntly also, because states are, other forms of politics cannot be. Specifically, because states are, because states monopolize what it means to be political and where one can be political, it is not possible to make claims about world politics, except as a way of describing relations among states. For politics supposedly occurs within. Only after it occurs within might one establish some connection with a common humanity, a common religion, a common habitat; and then only through the mediation

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of the state. Similarly, local politics can only be a derivative of that supposedly authentic politics that is monopolized by the state: a mere administration of lesser things. World politics is rendered impossible in principle; local politics is merely rendered irrelevant, given the claim that the state is where politics occurs. In this account, politics is where it occurs. Statist politics is a spatial politics—one in which all puzzles of temporal possibility are fixed on the terrain of the territorial state. Of course, it is easy to see how claims about world politics might be articulated as something other than a pattern of relations among states. Claims about the worldwide organization of economies, technologies, societies, and even cultures are commonplace. Claims about world politics are also familiar enough. Local politics, too, is not as unimportant or derivative from states as it has been made to appear. Nor is it clear that all relations between the locale and global articulations of human affairs are mediated by the state. Quite how states, with their fixed territories, are supposed to respond to economies, technologies, and cultures that are obsessed more by speed and temporality than by distance and territoriality is a question that pushes the capacities of the modern political imagination beyond its carefully bounded limits. The claim to state sovereignty, however, tells us that beyond these limits there is nowhere else to go and no one else to be. If the state is in transition, it must be trying to turn into what it already was. At least, this is the official story, and it still has a certain narrative advantage, though its power to persuade seems increasingly incongruent with too many other stories that people now tell themselves in order to make some sense of what is going on.

ESSENTIALLY DOMESTIC CONCEPTS

Contemporary social and political theory is full of grand controversies. The differences they express are no doubt both considerable and important. Yet the range of shared assumptions is often more telling than the divisions that generate such heat. This is a point that has been made many times before, as when specific controversies are said to occur within some shared discourse of bourgeois society, patriarchy, modernity, the West, and so on. It is, moreover, a point that often leads from the skillet of parochialism to the fire of caricature and overgeneralization. Even so, it is important in the present context to take note of the extent to which so much contemporary social and political analysis—and not least that which claims to have something to say about bourgeois society, patriarchy, modernity, and the West—is informed by shared assumptions about the state as the home of the phenomena being analyzed. A great many literatures could be considered to be paradigmatic of the tendency for universalizing claims, or even critiques of prevailing universal

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claims, to be made with very little attention to the particularist conception of community that is assumed as the basis for universalization. Consider, for example, the characteristic limits of democratic theory; or the neoKantian ambitions of Jürgen Habermas; or the analyses of subjectivity, or even the state, in writers like Foucault; or a great many, though by no means all, accounts of a feminist political analysis; or both sides of the never-ending debates between communitarians and individualists; and so on. Of course, there are exceptions, but there are remarkably few literatures that are not vulnerable to the charge that they take an account of a sovereign statist community as an unquestionable given; or, by projection, as a laudable ambition. The same might be said for the disciplinary construction of the modern academy, with its clear-cut distinctions between those disciplines that affirm an outside, notably international relations (spatially) and anthropology (temporally), and those disciplines of the inside such as sociology, politics, economics, and geography that readily extend themselves to encompass the world as a whole. Contemporary social and political analysis remains profoundly domestic in its categories and preoccupations. For the most part, this is hardly surprising, given the entrenched strength of the statist account of what and where politics can be. What is surprising is the extent to which so many literatures seem not even to recognize that this might be a problem.

A DISCOURSE OF LIMITS

A complementary conclusion emerges from an examination of the rhetorical structure of what has come to be known as the theory of international relations. Five characteristics of the modern theory of international relations seem to me to be especially significant in this respect. Three of these characteristics have been an object of critique for some time; and two of them have become more obviously problematic as claims about the uncertain status of the state have become more pressing. It is in the literature on the theory of international relations that the state has been most likely to be portrayed as both a simple and an absolutist phenomenon. The fetish for billiard balls may have given way to the charms of the utilitarian calculus, but bold caricature and broad brush strokes are, in this context, considered to be a virtue, not a vice. Moreover, it is in this literature that the state is most likely to be portrayed as a thing—a straightforward material object. Despite the perennial invocation of Hobbes’s name, it is in this literature that Hobbes’s nominalism, and his portrayal of sovereignty as a problem, is most often substituted by an often lovingly naive realism. Furthermore, to the extent that this literature attempts to engage in a more critical analysis of the state, it is more or less forced to engage with an especially congealed terrain of theoretical dispute. Here, the notorious

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hold of a simple dualism between political realism and political idealism or utopianism is the most self-evident problem, though quite how this simple dualism works as an uncritical substitute for critical analysis is not as straightforward as it might seem. It can be understood, for example, as an expression of the three key philosophical resolutions effected by the claim to state sovereignty—one/many, self/other, and space/time—but one that conflates, reifies, and projects the available options into a simple polarity that is open to theological accounts of good and evil, psychological accounts of tough and tender, and antiepistemological accounts of the way things are. The very simplicity of its philosophical prose obscures the rhetorical complexity of the way it works. From this perspective, the discursive structure of the modern theory of international relations can be understood as an expression of the claim to state sovereignty rather than as an attempt to explain the consequences of state sovereignty. A fourth characteristic of the modern theory of international relations has been noted rather more sporadically. It involves a characteristic pattern of emphasis and silence about several crucial concepts—both the emphasis and the silence signifying considerable difficulties in the attempt to rework these concepts in relation to claims about the uncertain status of the state, or the emergence of other accounts of the relation between the global and the local, or the universal and the particular. The concept of security provides perhaps the key example of a concept that is ever-present in the literature of international relations theory. To the extent that anyone knows what it means, it refers to the security of states. Complaints about the inadequacy of this understanding of security now arise from many directions, not least those invoking notions of a planetary ecosphere, a global economy, or the collective humanity now threatened by global processes and technologies of mass destruction. Quite what security might mean in any of these contexts is anybody’s guess. The familiar invocations of national security may be obviously inadequate, but so, too, are most attempts to reframe what any other kind of security might be like. Claims about national security have the decided advantage of referring to a specific understanding of who is to be made secure—citizens of states—even though it seems sensible to be sceptical about the capacity of policies framed in terms of national security to offer a plausible way to ensure the security of citizens of states. Claims about other notions of security have the decided disadvantage of not really knowing who is to be made secure. Part of the difficulty of so many attempts to specify the contours of an alternative security policy lies in the way they tend to shun questions about political subjectivity as impractical, a stance that simply fails to understand how tight the hold of entrenched theoretical attitudes is on the conditions under which alternative security policies can be framed. Apparently practical policy is not an acceptable substitute for politics, especially in this context.

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If the concept of security framed around the claims of the state are difficult to avoid in the theory of international relations, concepts that cannot be easily rooted in such claims are difficult to find. The concept of culture, for example, is subject to a double translation: first into nation, the statist repository for cultures as ways of life; and then into values, as an expression of the irreconcilable clash of different ways of life that thrive in their statist containers in a competitive and relativistic universe. The emergence of forms of cultural politics that do not seem to be containable within statist boundaries, whether in the form of global commodification or of a politics of religious or ethnic identity, poses considerable difficulty for theories of international relations, which already know how culture is supposed to be articulated in the great schemes of power politics and utilitarian calculation. Yet whatever the significance of the resurgence of nationalism in so many places, contemporary patterns of cultural politics suggest a very complex field of possibilities, and certainly not one that can be captured through an overlay of compartmentalized statist interests. Attempts to work through the implications of various kinds of feminist theory suggest a similar pattern of excluded subjectivities. Two main themes emerge here, apart from the more obvious sociological observations about the gendered construction of international relations as an academic discipline. First, attempts to bring claims about gender into the theory of international relations occur in the context of claims about political identity that are already gendered. The most familiar account of this problem emphasizes the importance of claims about a unitary subject that is abstracted and universalized in the early-modern era. This abstract individual is open to several readings as an expression of specific historical interests—not least, the possessive subject of early-modern capitalism. Readings of its gendered construction build on a long tradition of ideology-critique in this respect. Nevertheless, while it is relatively easy to show that theories of international relations that build on accounts of the universal subject that inform, say, Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty portray and legitimize a gendered account of political life, the implications of this observation are more difficult to discern. Feminist critique in this context necessarily opens up fundamental questions about sovereignty, subjectivity, and identity that put the very idea of a theory of international relations into some question. Indeed, it may well be possible to argue that a feminist theory of international relations is a contradiction in terms, precisely because the universal subject expressed in the claim to state sovereignty already affirms a political ontology in which all questions about gender identity are resolved in favor of the claims of sovereign “man.” Questions about exclusion thus necessarily lead to questions about the status of the subject that is to be included or excluded. Given this more than slight difficulty, it is not surprising, second, that many attempts to engage with questions about gender in this context tend

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to ignore the usual category schemes of the theory of international relations and work instead with an implicit account of a broader structure of world politics. Thus women in general come to be examined in broadly sociological terms. In this context, two other problems arise. One involves the usual danger of overgeneralization and the reification of the experiences of particular groups of women. One involves the resort to sociological categories. Both difficulties point to the problem of politics. For even though it is possible to describe global tendencies and broad trends, their political character is not simply given by either claims about global patterns or shared experiences. Again, therefore, questions about the silences of the theory of international relations theory lead to some very difficult questions about political identity. The fifth important characteristic of modern theories of international relations involves their capacity to fix firm limits upon the kinds of questions that can be asked and those that cannot. The shadowy presence of two writers—Max Weber and Carl Schmitt—is, I believe, crucial in this respect—Schmitt for his rewriting of Hobbes in his account of sovereignty as the capacity to decide the “exception,” and Weber for his affirmation of the modern principle of autonomy in the face of inexorable historical change, even at the cost of a nonrational decision on behalf of the power state.11 Like the claim to state sovereignty that informs it, the theory of international relations is a discourse of limits. It marks the extremity of that political space that the political theorists and their derivatives can take for granted. Given this nice division of labor, claims about a world politics have nowhere to go, even though by the spatial framing of a polity within, and an anarchy outside, the modern state encourages us to think we should be going somewhere.

NEITHER HERE NOR THERE

The state is in transition. Yet what any of us knows by knowing this remains painfully obscure. This must be the case, because our knowledge of the status of the state is so entwined with our self-construction as subjects and citizens. We cannot stand offshore and observe it from afar. To read Hobbes is to encounter our own subjectivity. To engage with the practices of states is to engage with one’s own practices of self-constitution. There are two senses in which the claim that the state is in transition is quite unprovocative. It might simply invoke a critique of the tendency to reify the state as an ahistorical structure, a reminder that the state is a matter in motion, a complex practice at work, even if much of the work is devoted to encouraging the illusion of majestic continuity. Or it might invoke those familiar philosophies of history that have established such a close liaison with the claims of state and the yearning for some reconciliation

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of that humanity that was so rudely sundered with the collapse of empire and its theological legitimations in early-modern Europe. In this case, the impossibility of the yearning—there never was a humanity that can now be reconciled, and one that might now be envisaged is not likely to succumb to either theological or secular erasures of human diversity—merely tends to affirm the reifying practices of states keen to insist on their monopoly on all ontological possibilities. Critiques of reification are always useful, and many influential literatures on the modern state could benefit considerably from them. Philosophies of history that affirm the necessities of state are clearly of more limited value, though they still dominate so much of the literature on contemporary transformations. However, to say that the state is in transition is now surely to grasp at rather more than either of these two ways of approaching the problem. To say that the state is in transition must mean that the state is no longer able to claim to resolve all ontological contradictions in space and time, or to effect those practices that particular states constitute and legitimize by virtù/virtue of this claim. Although it is not possible to stand on high and hand down blueprints from above, it is possible to stand where we are and engage in a multiplicity of struggles to resolve these contradictions in a manner that subverts the state as a discourse of limits without affirming alternatives that merely reconstitute those limits. The trouble with ontological contradictions, of course, is that they always seem so abstract: just like the state. However, as with the state, it is not too difficult to discover that seeming abstractions can do an awful lot of damage. States claim to resolve the relation between unity and diversity: the community of states and the rationality of state. The claim often, or always, may have been spurious, but its plausibility is now wearing exceptionally thin. On the one hand, patterns of group identity threaten to overwhelm the accommodations of state and nation. On the other, patterns of inclusion and exclusion have long since escaped the bourgeois categories of national classes. States claim to resolve the relationship between unity and diversity by privileging their presumed coherences within in order to discipline the differences without. For the most part, the categories of modern political analysis merely consecrate this pattern of self and other framed by the territorial boundaries of the state; and the legitimation of the violence is supposed to secure the peace at home. Yet the spatial metaphors of here and there are now too obviously nostalgic. Leakages prevail. Theories of the political that do not problematize the distinction between inside and outside that have made modern accounts of the political possible ought to be treated with profound suspicion. States resolve the relationship between unity and diversity by constructing temporal order inside and coping with temporal order outside. In good, modern fashion, time is tamed in spatial containers; the early-modern

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privileging of spatiality has become the condition under which modernity can be specified as a culture of historical self-consciousness. Even geopolitics is increasingly understood as a chronopolitics. Speed and simultaneity have undermined the solidity of territorial space as the condition under which states can construct their orders and histories in a condition of temporal flux. Most of all, states achieved their legitimacy in large part through their capacity to make all these claims stick. The precise practices through which this has been achieved are, of course, enormously diverse. Yet in a crucial sense, the state is its own ideology. Its claim to sovereign identity is in part what it is and what makes its nominal existence seem real. Although the legitimation crisis of the modern state can be tied to many of its functional incapacities in relation to many structures and transformations, the capacity or otherwise of the state to sustain its legitimacy will depend in the long run on the extent to which it can continue to make these claims stick or participate effectively in other constructions of the relationship between universality and particularity. From this point of view, it is possible to develop a reading of aspects of emerging forms of world politics that do not lapse into the familiar rituals of presence and absence, of here today and gone tomorrow. This is not to say that these readings always fill one with optimism and hope. However, they are less depressing than the interminable oscillation between utopian dream and realist capitulation that has characterized so much analysis of the status of the state in this century. From this point of view, too, it is possible to see where some of the more crucial theoretical problems lie. Not least, whether in Hobbes, Kant, Weber, or Schmitt, the problem of the state has been framed in relation to a modern conception of an autonomous subject. To say that the state is in transition is to pose the possibility that the claim to autonomous subjectivity is in serious trouble. Analyses of the state, or of world politics, that wish it were otherwise are doomed to repeat its play of histories, of hopes and tragedies circumscribed by the boundaries of territorial space. It remains to be seen whether there can be a politics that is neither here nor there, though intimations that there can are sometimes glimpsed among the wreckage of the here and now.

NOTES 1. Some sense of the diverse expressions of this judgement can be gleaned from Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1992); R. B. J. Walker and Saul H. Mendlovitz, eds., Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1990); Ernst-Otto Czempiel and James N. Rosenau, eds., Global Changes and Theoretical Challenges (Lexington:

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Lexington Books, 1989); James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds., Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Michael Klare and Daniel Thomas, eds., World Security: Trends and Challenges at Century’s End (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991); Richard A. Falk, Robert C. Johansen, and Samuel Kim, eds., The Constitutional Foundations of World Peace (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Richard Leaver and James L. Richardson, eds., The Post–Cold War Order: Diagnoses and Prognoses (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993); John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism (London: Pinter, 1991); Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1992); Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Richard O’Brien, Global Financial Integration: The End of Geography (London: Pinter, 1992); Peter Dicken, Global Shift: The Internationalization of Economic Activity, 2d ed. (London: Harper & Row, 1992); David Held, “Democracy, the Nation-State and the Global System,” Economy and Society 20, no. 2 (May 1991): 138–172; Andrew Linklater, “The Problem of Community in International Relations,” Alternatives 15, no. 2 (spring 1990): Stephen Gill, “Reflections on Global Order and Sociohistorical Time,” Alternatives 16, no. 3 (summer 1991): 275–314; and Timothy Luke, “Discourses of Disintegration, Texts of Transformation: Re-Reading Realism in the New World Order, Alternatives 18, no. 2 (spring 1993): 229–258. 2. Rajni Kothari, “The Yawning Vacuum: A World Without Alternatives,” Alternatives 18, no. 2 (spring 1993): 119–139. 3. Recent attempts to survey the primary theories of, and controversies about, the state include Andrew Vincent, Theories of the State (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1987); Kenneth Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe (Oxford, England: Martin Robertson, 1980); Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Robert R. Alford and Roger Friedland, Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State, and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Patrick Dunleavy and B. O’Brien, Theories of the State: The Politics of Liberal Democracy (London: Macmillan, 1987); David Held, Political Theory and the Modern State (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1989); James A. Caporoso, ed., The Elusive State: International and Comparative Perspectives (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1989); John A. Hall and G. John Ikenberry, The State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, and Post-Marxist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in Their Place (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1990); and Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990). 4. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 78. For a discussion of the consequences of Weber’s focus on territorial monopolization rather than on the prior construction of spatial inclusion and exclusion that makes such monopolization possible, a key move that is repeated by contemporary Weberian and non-Weberian analysts alike, see R. B. J. Walker, “Violence, Modernity, Silence: From Max Weber to International Relations,” in David Campbell and Michael Dillon, eds., The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 137–160. 5. For two rather different readings of this as the central problem of contemporary international relations theory, see Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1982); and R. B. J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988).

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6. R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 7. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed Books, 1986). 8. For a recent discussion that reemphasizes the themes of scepticism and artifice in Hobbes, see Richard Flathman, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1993). On the broader context informing Hobbes’s scepticism, see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 9. Walker, Inside/Outside, (note 6), especially Chapter 8. Given the strength of contemporary claims about the priority of empiricist epistemologies in the analysis of emerging forms of political life, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that these ontological resolutions are reinforced by the articulation of epistemological options that presuppose the same account of spatial distancing expressed by claims to sovereignty. The gap between subject and object came to be framed in terms of the same Euclidean straight lines required for an account of sovereignty as territoriality. In fact, epistemology as we have come to know it in the post-Cartesian era can be usefully understood as a territorial affair; as yet another fixing of the world as a line from here to there, a spatial framing that, like the theory of international relations, runs into enormous difficulties coming to terms with phenomena expressed in temporal form. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that accounts of appropriate method that depend on a territorially conceived account of epistemology have not been especially imaginative in responding to claims about the spatiotemporal transformation of contemporary political practices. 10. Walker, “Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice,” in Walker and Mendlovitz, eds, Contending Sovereignties (note 1), pp. 159–185. 11. This argument is pursued more extensively in my Inside/Outside (note 6), and “Violence, Modernity, Silence” (note 4).

PART 2 IDENTITY AND POLITICAL SPACE

3 Nationalism in/and Modernity Sanjay Seth

The state and the nation define and dominate the political landscape of modernity. Historically their emergence is almost coeval, and they are closely related in many ways. The relation of the nation to the state, and of nationalism to the modern era of which it is so important a part, will be one of the themes explored in this chapter. Modern as both state and nation indisputably are, the former nonetheless appears to be much more in harmony with the logic of modernity than the latter. The modern state is usually seen as being part and parcel of the historical processes that created and that define modernity—the centralization of power and authority, the emergence of capitalism, processes of reification and rationalization, and so on. By contrast, that national particularism should have thrived in an age that has articulated its key ideas in a universalistic language seems deeply paradoxical. This chapter is first of all an attempt to examine and think through this paradox. The paradox and the bemusement it generates are well captured by John Dunn when he writes, “The prevalence of nationalism is a moral scandal because the official ethical culture of almost the entire world is a universalist ethical culture.”1 Because nationalism is sharply at odds with the rationalist and universalist ethical culture of modernity, and yet thrives in the modern world, nationalism, according to Dunn, “is the starkest political shame of the twentieth century.”2 But what sort of a blot on modernity is this, that is so much part of modernity? I suggest that, in part at least, the paradox is only an apparent one, arising from a failure in our understanding. In fact, nationalism is neither a premodern survival nor a part of the modern era that is simultaneously a negation of modernity; rather (like the modern state that it serves to legitimate or “ground”), it is very much part of the modern age, as an “answer” to questions relating to boundaries and identities that become pressing only in the modern era. This does not mean that we can “domesticate” nationalism, happily reinserting it into a singular logic of the modern. The disruptive force of the

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paradox remains, for nationalism is not consistent with the Enlightenment culture that forms the bedrock of modern conceptions of politics. It does not lie outside of the logic of modernity, but neither is it a ruse of Reason, one of the detours by which the march of modernity is only made more secure.

UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR

The National Convention elected by the French people in 1792 was entrusted with the important task of drafting a new constitution to replace the Constitution of 1791. In the course of debates on this issue in 1793, Robespierre condemned the new Declaration of Rights, which had been drafted in April by a Girondin-dominated committee, for conceiving of the French nation as “a human herd planted down in a corner of the globe.”3 He proposed that this shortcoming be redressed by the inclusion of some additional articles, including the following: 1. Men of all countries are brothers, and the different peoples ought to help one another according to their ability, like citizens of a single state. 2. All kings, aristocrats, and tyrants, of whatever kind, are slaves in rebellion against the human race, which is the sovereign of the world.4 For Robespierre there was nothing anomalous about declaring that people of different states had a moral obligation to help each other as if they were members of the same state, and doing so in a national constitution. More generally, in the course of the French Revolution, the invocation of universal principles and the simultaneous glorification of the French nation did not seem contradictory. Indeed, the two elements seemed to go hand in hand: defense of la patrie was defense of the revolution and its ideals, and to be an enemy of tyrants and a champion of liberty was also to be a lover of la Grande Nation. Yet clearly there was an anomaly here—one that became evident at critical moments in the history of the Revolution. One such moment was during the debate over whether or not to declare war against the reactionary powers. Could a national army be the instrument for the spread of universal ideals? Here it was Robespierre who cautioned against using the armies of revolutionary France to export liberty, not only because a war policy would play into the hands of the court, but also because, he prophesied, “nobody takes kindly to armed missionaries.” 5 Robespierre, we know, displayed greater prescience than the enthusiasts of revolutionary war. French armies did “export” new ideals and principles, but—as later with the Napoleonic armies—they also awakened nationalist feeling that frequently turned against the French. But here it appears that Robespierre’s prescience did not arise out of his principles, but despite them. For if all men were born to liberty, why should men not welcome it, whatever the vehicle that brought it to them? And why should the political

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divisions of the world, frequently boundaries drawn and enforced by tyrants, make any difference? Was not Anacharsis Cloots more in tune with the universalistic ethic of the French Revolution when he championed a revolutionary war that would unite the “entire human family” in a single republic, under the banner of liberty, with Paris as the capital of the globe?6 The fundamental principles in the name of which the French Revolution was fought, and which it proclaimed, were universal ones: the Rights of Man and not simply the rights of Frenchmen. The Revolution was possessed of a universal soul, or so it appeared to many of the revolutionaries, and to observers and interpreters such as Hegel. At the same time, the French Revolution was also an inaugurating moment in the history of modern nationalism. This seminal event in modern history was product and bearer of ideas and forces that are still shaping the modern world. It also contained within it a tension, one that was also one of the legacies the Revolution bequeathed to the modern age. This was the tension between its ethical/ political universalism and its nationalism. The coexistence of a universalistic ethic and particular political communities is, of course, by no means unique to the modern age. A fundamental aspect of the intellectual and cultural revolution initiated by Christianity was precisely an ethical universalism of a type unknown to the Greeks and only partly prefigured in the Hellenistic monarchies. In the words of Saint Paul, “There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male or female: for ye are all one man in Jesus Christ.” However, membership of a universal or potentially universal human community was not subversive of obedience to a temporal ruler. Saint Paul’s injunction to Christians to “render unto Ceasar his due” was an affirmation of this. Later, after the fall of the Roman Empire, when Christian communities were to be found beyond the boundaries of any single political community, the statement was additionally interpreted to mean that each Christian could render his caesar his due, and yet maintain his membership of a community not encompassed by any one state. This distinction between the universal and the particular was not, of course, unproblematic. The history of church-state relations in the medieval period indicates how problematic it was: the doctrine of “two swords” codified this tension, without resolving it. For the conflict between ruler and church was not only a conflict between two sources of authority, spiritual and temporal, but also, thereby, between two forms of community—the potential universality of Christendom and the particularistic loyalty and obedience owed to the temporal ruler. Even so, this tension was not of the same order as that which characterizes the modern age. For while membership of the church recognized no borders, the division of political authority was itself regarded as ordained

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by God. In the theocratic notion of kingship, the king ruled by the grace of God, and it was he who had ordained a division of political authority on his earth, just as he had ordained a hierarchically ordered society of estates and orders.7 While feudal notions of obligation and loyalty contradicted the theocratic conception in many ways, on this point they had the same effect: both served to particularize political authority. The rediscovery of Aristotle and the Christian-Aristotelian synthesis effected by Thomas Aquinas also particularized—or, more accurately, naturalized—the political community. Later, patriarchalist doctrines located the division of peoples and political dominions in the division of the earth among the sons of Noah.8 The ways in which the universality of man and the particularity of political community and political authority were reconciled varied, but they had in common the fact that they ascribed political particularism to the will of God. Thus no ruler seeking to bolster or extend his authority could do so by invoking a rule of “politics” beyond God, or by denying the universality of Christendom. At the origins of modernity, and at its heart, lies the proposition that all men are born free and equal—a proposition very different from that which declares that all men are possessed of an immortal soul. The universalism of the modern world is of a particular sort, and it is one that renders political particularism deeply problematic. How this is so we can illustrate with reference to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, two thinkers living in an age when the notion of the “natural” equality and freedom of all men was first being propagated, and some of its implications were being worked out.

UNIVERSAL MAN AND THE POLITICAL STATE

Thomas Hobbes In Chapter 42 of Leviathan, Hobbes locked horns with everyone’s stalking horse, the Cardinal Bellarmine. Hobbes denied the existence of a “Christian Commonwealth” possessed of political authority: “For it is evident that France is one Commonwealth, Spain another, and Venice a third &c. And these consist of Christians; and therefore also are severall Bodies of Christians; that is to say, severall Churches: And their Severall Soveraigns Represent them.” 9 The disproof of the cardinal’s contention was partly an empirical one; writing with the fragmentation of the church and the sovereignty accorded to the state by the Treaty of Westphalia as his background, Hobbes pointed to the existence of states with absolute authority over their own territory and subjects as a self-evident “fact.” And just as it was evident that the temporal ruler did possess power, so, Hobbes

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argued, it was apparent that ecclesiastical authorities had not been granted the power “to Command, and to Judge, and to Punish”10—“but onely a Power to proclaim the Kingdom of Christ, and to perswade men to submit themselves thereunto.”11 Hobbes did not, however, deny that the pope held power by virtue of God’s grace in order to argue that it was kings who had been invested with such authority by God. The sovereign’s power was rather the power once possessed by all men in the state of nature, which they had relinquished in covenanting a commonwealth into existence. Thus the second of the cardinal’s “grosse errours” was his assumption that the tendency of “the Members of every Common-wealth, as of a naturall body,” to “depend one of another” somehow proved his contention that temporal officers were dependent upon spiritual ones. In a commonwealth, men do cohere, Hobbes wrote, “but they depend solely on the Soveraign, which is the Soul of the Common-wealth; which failing, the Commonwealth is dissolved into a Civill war, no one man cohering to another, for want of a common Dependance on a known Soveraign.”12 Here we are at the heart of Hobbes’s theory. The commonwealth is, precisely, not a “naturall body,” but one created by men from the state of nature. It is free and equal men who create the commonwealth and sovereign, but any bonds of community exist only in and through that sovereign; subjects are united to each other only through their common subjection to a sovereign and his laws. If the sovereign authority collapses or becomes ineffective, the bonds of community dissolve and men revert to a state of nature, strangers and potential enemies of one another. But this raises a question. If any given community is man-made and thus artificial, indeed so artificial that it has no existence independent of the sovereign, why should it ever have been that particular community (France, or Spain, or Venice) in the first place? If the political community is a creation of men escaping the inconveniences attendant upon the state of nature, and if all men are alike in their desires and powers, why should they have covenanted particular commonwealths into being, rather than a universal community, ruled by a world-sovereign? Hobbes did not directly address this question, and it is difficult to see how he could have provided any adequate answer to it within the terms of his theory, given his resolute denial of any natural community, or even any natural bonds of community. The only possible answer one can imagine would be to invoke practicalities—limits of size, geographical barriers, and so on. But even here, the logic of Hobbes’s argument could have led him to suggest that a plurality of states, once created, would then “covenant” into a single state. However, this is far from being Hobbes’s conclusion. On the contrary, and as is well known, Hobbes pointed to the international arena as a prime example of a state of nature, one where “Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency,

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are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another . . . which is a posture of War.”13 Nowhere did Hobbes suggest that this state of nature was one that men (or their sovereigns) could leave behind them.14 John Locke John Locke also begins with the premise of free and equal men in a state of nature, who voluntarily contract into political society. However, according to Locke the state of nature has a “law of nature” to govern it, and thus men are not constantly at war with each other. When men contract into society, they do not leave these laws behind: the law of nature, being divine and anterior to human, civil law, continues to operate, and serves, among other things, as a “standard” defining the ends and limits of political power. The Lockean sovereign does not, like the Hobbesian one, distinguish right from wrong, but rather is subject to preexistent and eternal standards, from which the sovereign cannot legitimately deviate. Indeed, part of the sovereign function is to enact the natural law into positive law, and enforce it. Further, the contract that brings society and government into being is a two-stage contract: Locke’s community does not depend entirely upon the sovereign for its continued existence, for it does not revert to a state of nature if its sovereign is defeated or overthrown. For Locke, by contrast with Hobbes, the sovereign power was not everything: it neither wholly defined nor determined the existence of community, nor did it rule free of any restraints. But none of this means that Locke was able to explain and justify the creation and continued existence of particular political communities any more than was Hobbes. Indeed, his failure to do so is in some respects more marked. According to Locke, in the state of nature “Mankind are one Community, make up one Society distinct from all other Creatures.”15 In a prepolitical state, men constitute a single community. This is not only because they are all free and equal, but also because they are all subject to the law of nature, which issues in the injunction that every man, to the degree consonant with self-preservation, is duty-bound to do “as much as he can, to preserve the rest of Mankind.” 16 That all men are free and equal is for Locke not simply a factual proposition but one with moral consequences, arising out of the law of nature. How and why, then, was this universal community replaced by particular political communities? If men contracted into political society because the state of nature was unsatisfactory, why did they contract into a plurality of such societies? In the Second Treatise, after declaring that in its original, prepolitical state mankind was a single community, Locke goes on to write:

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And were it not for the corruption, and vitiousness of Degenerate Men, there would be . . . no necessity that Men should separate from this great and natural Community, and by positive agreements combine into smaller and divided associations.17

To the extent that this throwaway remark constitutes any sort of explanation at all, it harks back to the idea that political authority and division are consequent upon the Fall, are at once part of the punishment for fallen man, and a means devised by God to allow degenerate men to live together with some measure of civility. But this explanation sits ill with Locke’s general theory, in which prepolitical men are not necessarily “degenerate,” since God has provided them with Reason by which to discern the law of nature; and in which the creation of political society is a positive act, and one that men bring about through choice. The effect of explanations grounded in the Fall had usually been conservative—to enjoin absolute obedience to existing rulers. The whole intent of Locke’s political philosophy was otherwise. For Locke, the statement that all men were free and equal had a moral import, for it implied that men ‘naturally’ formed a community in which they were obliged to assist one another. The passage to political society implied maintaining and reinforcing the natural laws operative in the state of nature in all respects other than this one. This exception is not adequately explained or justified; for while Locke can explain why men should opt out of the state of nature, he cannot explain why this act should also replace the “great and natural” community of all men by “particular Political Society . . . separate from the rest of Mankind”18 except in the most gestural way, and in the terms of a worldview that he was in other respects seeking to replace. Nor did Locke conceive that these particular political communities might eventually unite, replacing the natural universality of the state of nature with a political universality codified in positive law. For Locke as for Hobbes, the international arena was the archetypal state of nature.19 At the beginnings of the modern age, “Once the belief gained currency that individuals were not ‘naturally’ arranged unequally and in subordination one to another, but, on the contrary, were ‘naturally’ free and equal, some enormous questions emerged about their mutual relationships.”20 Important among these, Carol Pateman goes on to write, was the question “of how and why any free and equal individual could legitimately be governed by anyone else at all.” To this question, Hobbes and Locke each provided his own answer. But if men were naturally free and equal rather than naturally born to subjection, it followed that they were also not naturally divided into separate political communities. If all men were born free and equal in a state of nature, the implication was that prepolitical man was a universal man. While Hobbes and Locke sought to explain why (or under

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what circumstances) political obligation was owed to society and state, they offered no explanation, let alone a compelling justification, as to why this particular state had come into being and was the one to which obligation was owed. In short, there is a monumental inconsistency in early liberal theory: an unexplained gap between the universal man, which is its point of departure, and the citizen or subject of a state, which is its point of arrival.21 This inconsistency did not go unnoticed by critics. Sir Robert Filmer, for instance, pointed out in an essay originally published in 1680 that if “by nature all mankind in the world makes but one people . . . born alike to an equal freedom from subjection,” and if kings were chosen by men rather than by God, “it follows that natural freedom being once granted, there cannot be any one man chosen a King without the universal consent of all the people of the world at one instant, nemine contradicente.”22 Furthermore, if the arguments as to why obligation (rather than simply obedience) is owed to the state are found to be unconvincing, there is nothing to fall back on but individualistic and even egoistic premises. If the liberal state is not endowed with some existence and legitimacy beyond the self-interest of those who have created it and constitute it, the state becomes nothing more than a mutual-benefit society. But we do not assign any great moral significance to a mutual-benefit society, and men and women do not fight for and die for them.

THE MODERNITY OF NATIONALISM

They do, however, fight and die for nations. This is part of the explanation for the importance, and power, of the idea of the nation: it gives the modern state or would-be state, the state of free and equal citizens, a grounding it would not otherwise possess. The essence of nationalism is political particularism. Particularism, because nationalism identifies a “people,” distinct from others; political, because it requires that this particularism receive political expression, in and through a state. For nationalism, the state is the political expression and guardian of a community that exists anterior to its state, but that exists best when it has its own state. Nationalism is an answer to a peculiarly modern dilemma, sketched above; namely, how to explain and legitimate the existence of a plurality of political communities, and give to membership of a political community an ethical dimension. Once the state is a nation-state, political obligation is supplemented by loyalty—a loyalty due, not merely to a set of political institutions, but to one’s “people.” Vertical ties to a set of political institutions are grounded upon horizontal ties to one’s fellow countrymen. To describe nationalism as an answer is not to suggest a causal explanation: nationalism did not arise in response to a theoretical lacunae or

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impasse. No doubt a variety of factors, economic, sociological, and other, went into its making. But the nation is not an objective fact, but rather an artifact, and while economic and social developments may explain how the modern nation became possible, they do not explain its historical necessity, in the Hegelian sense. For that, we must look to its meaning, and not just its causes. If nationalism “grounds” membership of a state, how it does so varies. There are no objective criteria by which one can define what is and is not a nation, and all attempts to devise such criteria have met with conspicuous failure. Definitions have yielded to typologies that, as they grow more complex, become less useful; and at the end of the day, there are still more exceptions than instances covered by the rule. The reason, to reiterate, is that nations are not objective facts (though that is usually how nationalists present them); rather, they are constructs. Whether or not a body of people is a nation depends, above all else, on whether they see and feel themselves to be such. As Ernst Renan put it, “The existence of a nation is . . . a daily plebiscite”;23 or in the words of Benedict Anderson, the nation is an “imagined community.”24 The ways in which the nation is imagined display great variety, for nationalism is eclectic and endlessly inventive. A shared language, religion, ethnicity, culture, race, territory, geist, history, and so on have all been invoked as the defining feature(s) of the nation. It is a feature of most, though by no means all, nationalisms that they point to premodern and even primordial ties as the essence of the national community. However the idea of nationalism itself is anything but premodern or primordial. Premodern forms of community did not have to manifest themselves politically, least of all in the form of the modern state. Yet nationalism depends on, and is parasitic upon, the modern state. The increasing differentiation of public and private spheres in the late medieval/early-modern period, and the decline of medieval systems of rule “structured by a nonexclusive form of territoriality in which authority was both personalized and parcellized within and across territorial formations” in favor of “territorially defined, fixed, and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate dominion,”25 were among the historical processes that provided the preconditions for the emergence of the modern state. They also underpinned the emergence of nationalism. As personalized forms of authority were increasingly replaced by impersonal forms of subjection, these latter required new forms of legitimation and criteria of membership. Overlapping forms of membership (of village, guild, parish, etc.), hitherto integrated into larger collectivities through vertical chains of authority, now had to be conceived anew as parts of the larger whole that was the state. That is, it was only after the modern state came into existence that nationalism could be conceived. It was once the state had been imagined that the possibility, and need, of imagining the nation arose. Nationalism is modern

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because the state is modern—though, as I will suggest later, the relationship is not one of uncomplicated complementarity. Nationalism is modern in another and related sense. It “grounds” the particularity of the modern state, but it is by no means pure particularism. On the contrary. While nationalism is by its very nature particularistic, and while it often locates the particularity of the nation in premodern characteristics, the categories in terms of which its project is conceived are eminently modern and universalist. Freedom, self-determination, and so on are not only key words of the universalist culture of the Enlightenment and of its liberal and socialist progeny; they are key terms in the nationalist vocabulary. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the concept, citizen. To be a citizen rather than a subject is to be born to freedom rather than submission; but the citizen who possesses such freedom simply by virtue of being a man or woman is always nonetheless the citizen of a state. The modern citizen is at once universal and particular, child of Enlightenment and of the age of nationalism. Once again the French Revolution, product and bearer of modernity, graphically illustrates this combination. The Revolution made citizens of subjects; that is, it transformed subjects of a king into citizens of the French nation. Nationalism, then, is not a denial of ethical universalism, but rather a particularistic (and, as I shall argue below, problematic) way of construing it. Just as nationalism is not simply a romantic “denial” of the “soulless cosmopolitanism” of the Enlightenment (which, in any case, tended to be internationalist rather than cosmopolitan), so it is not a simple rejection of liberalism and democracy. Many nationalisms are illiberal and undemocratic, of course, as are many nation-states. Nationalism does not specify any particular form of government, such as democratic government. It does, however, speak the language of self-determination and self-government, and necessarily so; for nationalism claims to specify the community that is to be the self.26 It thus construes the relation between community and state in terms that are, in one sense, democratic, or at any rate populist. Whereas for the purely liberal state, or sovereign but nonnational state, it is membership of a state that defines a people, for nationalism the state is the state of the people, for it is the phenomenal expression of their unity, and guarantor of it. The effect of this is to introduce a certain ambiguity into the heart of the modern state, for as Rob Walker notes, “Sovereignty is . . . always seemingly in motion from the state to civil society.”27 This ambiguity can also become the site of a tension, for if nationalism can ground the state, the principle of popular, national sovereignty can also overflow and come into conflict with that of state sovereignty: the will of the sovereign people may diverge from that of the sovereign state. Further, if nationality can legitimate a state, it can also function to delegitimate it; for if nationalism is not a matter of objective fact but rather of sentiment, then no state is

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immune from the claims of subnationalisms. That is one reason why nationalism has proved so dynamic and unsettling a force, and why nationstates, even as they invoke the idea of nationality, seek to limit its sphere of operation, lest it rebounds on them.28 It is important to establish the modernity of nationalism, for nationalism is caught up in the ideas and ideals of the modern age, and should not be read as a denial of modernity, and as an atavistic reaction to the discontents that it generates. Tribal feeling, xenophobia, and the like may have a long history, and they may be mobilized for nationalist purposes, but they are not the same thing as nationalism; for nationalism is the demand that every community must constitute and express itself politically, in the form of a state. Nationalism is an answer to a question that becomes pressing only in the modern world; it is also, itself, a modern answer. This is not to “defend” nationalism; to suggest that it harmonizes with the ethical universalism of post-Enlightenment thought, or with liberal and democratic ideals. That would be absurd. Clearly, there have been and there are many types of nationalism, and many faces to any particular nationalism.

THEORIZING NATIONALISM

It is these varied aspects of nationalism, and the diversity of nationalisms, that have made it the subject of such varied and contradictory responses. In 1789, and more so in 1848, nationalism appeared to many liberal and socialist thinkers as part and parcel of the story of liberty. According to John Stuart Mill, while to distinguish sharply between one’s obligations to fellow countrymen and to men in general was “more worthy of savages than of civilised beings,”29 it was the connection between liberty and the national principle that gave the latter legitimacy. For in Mill’s judgement, “it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.” 30 For Lord Acton, by contrast, liberty was best served by disassociating it from nationality: freedom was best secured through “the coexistence of several nations under the same State.”31 The trend toward making nationality the basis for state boundaries tended conversely to promote revolution and despotism, and thus Acton adjudged nationalism to be “a retrograde step in history.”32 At the conclusion of World War I, a conflagration that itself had more than a little to do with nationalism, President Wilson’s Fourteen Points sought to make explicit the connection between nationalism, liberalism, and peace, though the recognition of national aspirations was not extended to the colonial countries. At the end of the World War II, and in the shadow of the death camps, nationalism seemed to many a denial of civilization, let

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alone of liberty. But the postwar era also signalled the beginnings of decolonization, and the colonial nationalist movements seemed deserving of liberal support, especially since such movements sought only that which European countries had secured for themselves, and moreover in most cases did so in the name of liberal and/or socialist ideals. The abject failure of so many European liberals and democrats to extend such support perhaps testified to the strength of their own national egoism. In more recent times, an eminent student of nationalism, Elie Kedourie, has also been a bitter critic of it. Nationalism, according to this conservative critic, arose in response to the breakdown of an old world, in the face of combined economic, political, and intellectual changes. Nationalists were usually marginal figures, passionate young men given to conspiracy theories, for whom the boundaries between the world of imagination and the world of reality were blurred. Nationalism has been allied with irrationalism and political messianism—at one point, Kedourie writes that nationalism “ultimately becomes a rejection of life, and a love of death”33—and it has wrought enormous havoc upon the world. John Plamenatz acknowledges that some nationalist movements are illiberal and hostile to democracy (in his view, these are most commonly found in Eastern Europe and the non-Western world), but even such nationalism, he writes, is “part of a social, intellectual and moral revolution of which the aspirations to democracy and personal freedom are also products. It is connected with these aspirations, and even serves to strengthen them and to create some of the social conditions of their realisation, even though it often also perverts them.”34 Which, then, is it? Is nationalism part of the story of Reason and liberty, or its negation? The answer, of course, is both, and neither. Nationalism has been illiberal as well as liberal, generous and expansive as well as xenophobic, democratic as well as undemocratic, future oriented and backward looking. That it should variously be characterized as inherently progressive or essentially reactionary tells us more about the position of the judge than about the phenomena itself; for it would seem that, depending upon where one stands, some aspects of nationalism may be in shadow while others are brightly illuminated. In recognition of this, another pathway to understanding the phenomenon has been to construct a typology that has explanatory force and normative value. Perhaps the best-known such example is that provided by Hans Kohn, who distinguished between two basic types of nationalism: “While Western nationalism was, in its origins, connected with the concepts of individual liberty and rational cosmopolitanism current in the eighteenth century, the later nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia easily tended towards a contrary development.”35 John Plamenatz has made a similar distinction between Western and Eastern nationalisms. The former is of those peoples “who for some reason feel themselves at a

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disadvantage but who are nevertheless culturally equipped in ways that favour success and excellence measured by standards which are widely accepted and fast spreading, and which first arose among them and other peoples culturally akin to them.” The latter is “the nationalism of peoples recently drawn into [a] civilisation hitherto alien to them, and whose ancestral cultures are not adapted to success and excellence by these cosmopoitan and increasingly dominant standards.”36 This Eastern nationalism “is both imitative and hostile to the model it imitates, and is apt to be illiberal.”37 These variations are, for the most part, explained sociologically. For instance, so called Western nationalism, it is argued, has proved more liberal than its Eastern counterpart, because in the West the state preceded the nation. So called Eastern nationalism proved illiberal because the economic and social conditions that allowed for nationalism and liberty to coalesce did not yet exist; and so on.38

NATIONALISM IN/AND MODERNITY

If those assessments of nationalism that characterize it as an essential component of the march of liberty or as its negation are equally one-sided, efforts to divide the phenomena into two or more types are beset by another set of problems. Empirically, they are highly suspect: there are Eastern nationalisms that have Western characteristics, and vice versa; moreover, many—a great many—nationalisms defy characterization in these terms altogether. Furthermore, such exercises invite the suspicion that they are little more than an attempt to depreciate the liberation movements of weaker and subject peoples. More fundamentally, to seek to distinguish types of nationalism in this way is to fail seriously to understand the phenomenon. For it is not that nationalism tends to be either progressive or reactionary, depending upon the conditions under which it arises and operates, but rather that nationalism is simultaneously universal and particular, appeals to nature and to culture, is atavistic and modern, liberal and illiberal, democratic and undemocratic. Nationalism, as observed earlier, is an answer to a modern dilemma; but it is an answer, not a solution. It encapsulates the binary oppositions of modern thought and culture—nature/culture, universal/particular, and so on—but it does not permanently reconcile, let alone transcend, the tension between them. Where the accent falls, varies; and it varies in part according to historical conditions, the temper of nationalist leaders, and so on. Nationalism may be presented as a “moment” in the development of a more universal ethic. For Mazzini, duties to one’s nation were a subset of duties to humanity: family and country were like “two circles drawn within a greater circle [i.e., humanity] which contains them both; like two

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steps of a ladder without which you could not climb any higher, but upon which it is forbidden you to stay your feet.”39 Closer to our times, an “Eastern” nationalist, Jawaharlal Nehru, urged his countrymen to conceive of their struggle as a struggle for a democratic and socialist nationhood, rather than as a narrow and exclusive assertion of particularism. In the New World, and perhaps most evidently in the United States, it is not “natural” or even cultural particularity that defines the nation, but rather liberal ideals, which are seen as the essence of its identity (though such ideals have not always been extended to all, and there have always been competing, nonliberal constructions of the nation). On the other hand, nationalism, it need hardly be said, has also taken the form of an exaltation of “blood, soil and the Fuhrerprinzip.”40 Nationalism, as its critics often point out, is “backward looking,” and necessarily so, for the particularity or particularities that are pointed to as the defining feature(s) of the people must be shown to have a respectable lineage. Yet, that the search for the primordial should require an appeal to history is revealing, for “history” is very much a sign of the modern. And an appeal to history is characteristic of nationalism, even if, to quote Renan again, it is getting one’s history wrong that is essential to the making of a nation.41 Even where the nation has been defined in terms of nature (e.g., race) or geist, history has usually been seen as that stage where the unity of the race or geist was confirmed and enacted. More generally, nationalism invokes the past while looking to the present and the future. Tom Nairn urges us to picture nationalism as being like the two-faced Roman god Janus, with one face looking forward to the future and one back to the past. It is through nationalism, Nairn writes, “that societies try to propel themselves forward to certain kinds of goals (industrialization, prosperity, equality with other peoples, etc.) by a certain sort of regression —by looking inwards . . . resurrecting past folk-heroes and myths about themselves and so on.”42 Even the most expansive nationalism is particularistic, else it would not be nationalist; and even the most exclusivist nationalism draws upon modern values and categories that are universalist. Even the most liberal nationalism, because it is nationalist, contains within it illiberal aspects and potential; and even the most illiberal nationalism claims to embody or represent “the people,” and speaks of their right to self-determination and freedom. Even a rationalist and historicist nationalism cannot avoid appeal to essentialism in identifying national identity;43 and even the most irrationalist nationalism makes its truth-claims in the language of modernity, such as by appealing to history and/or science. Nationalism, then, is eminently modern, but it is a deeply ambiguous aspect of modernity. The two main heirs of the Enlightenment, liberalism and Marxism, have had great difficulty in understanding nationalism precisely because it is ambiguous and contradictory. As theories indebted to

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the universalism of the Enlightenment, seeking to discern the logic of modernity and impose order upon the modern world, liberalism and Marxism have been confounded by the continued importance of nationalism and nations. The case of liberalism has already been discussed. Some liberals believed that the nation would decline in importance in the face of the triumph of universalist ideas, aided by the solvent of commerce, for these would put an end to the irrationality of national egoism and war. Others have, by and large, made their peace with the idea of nationalism, arguing that, at least where the “right” circumstances exist, the nation-state is the necessary form in which the universal ideas of equality and liberty are realized. Marxism has, if anything, fared worse. Marx was, of course, an internationalist, declaring that proletarians had no country. At the same time, Marx saw Socialism as being achieved through revolutions in European nations. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote, Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.44

Here Marx and Engels recognized the importance of the fact that Europe was divided into nation-states. Indeed, they went so far as to state that this would determine the “form” of the class struggle, while reasserting that its “substance” remained universal. Why this international struggle and universal goal should take a national form, however, was not explained; but there is no “of course” about it. Here as elsewhere, Marx and Engels treated the nation as a brute reality of modern existence, a given datum of such weight that it shaped (but did not affect the intrinsic character of) the class struggle and the proletarian revolution. This given was not explained or even investigated. Since the time of Marx and Engels, Marxism has sometimes been at a loss in the face of nationalism, as at the beginning of World War I, when proletarians of different nations slaughtered each other on the battlefield; or and especially in its Leninist version, it has recognized the power of nationalism and sought to woo certain nationalisms,45 in which case, as Hobsbawm observes, socialist movements and states have themselves become nationalist.46 Whatever the form its failure has taken, there is no shortage of Marxists willing to testify to its failure, theoretical and political, in the face of nationalism.47 This is despite the fact that nationalism is no intellectual challenge to the liberal or Marxist traditions. Even as sensitive a student of it as Benedict Anderson refers to its “philosophical poverty and even incoherence.” 48 It is perfectly true that the nature of nationalism is such that it does not permit of the sort of rationalism and consistency that is normally

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thought to be a defining characteristic of great thought. In this way, as in others, it is not an ism on a par with liberalism and Marxism. But this is also why it has proved so important, and why it is interesting and revealing. Once we cease to ask of it that it show us its Hobbes, its Kant, or its Marx, we can begin to recognize that, if modernity is itself an ambiguous, complex and contradictory thing, then nationalism expresses/embodies some of these tensions and contradictions. To understand nationalism better is to know our modern world better, not only because nationalism has played such an important part in the history of the modern age, but also because of its peculiar relation to modernity, and to the modern state, that it at once grounds and yet threatens to undermine. Nationalism is not directly a commentary upon modernity, an attempt to interpret it, in the way that liberalism and Marxism are. But it is an integral part of modernity, if an unsettling and uneasy part of it. Nationalism straddles the binary oppositions through which the modern is thought and lived, and partly because of this, it is deeply revealing about the modern age.

NOTES This chapter is the revised version of an article that originally appeared under the title “Political Theory in the Age of Nationalism” in Ethics and International Affairs 7 (1993), published by the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. 1. John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 63. 2. Ibid., p. 57. 3. Speech to the convention on April 24, 1793, quoted in J. M. Thompson, Robespierre vol. 2 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), p. 41. 4. These two articles appear as nos. 34 and 37 in the alternative declaration of rights drafted by Robespierre and read to the convention on April 24, 1793. See Thompson (note 3), p. 41. Robespierre did not succeed in having these clauses incorporated into the Jacobin-inspired Declaration and Constitution adopted on June 24, 1793. 5. Quoted in F. Gauthier, “Universal Rights and National Interest in the French Revolution,” in Otto Dann and John Dinwiddy, eds., Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon, 1988), p. 31. 6. Gauthier, ibid., p. 30. Or was Francois Robert not more in tune with the nationalism of the revolution when he urged his countrymen to “forget the universe,” for Frenchmen had become free precisely in order to “love the motherland”—quoted in Clive Emsley, “Nationalist Rhetoric and Nationalist sentiment in Revolutionary France,” in Dann and Dinwiddy (note 5), p. 43. 7. On theocratic kingship, see Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, 2d ed. (London: Methuen, 1966), Part 2. 8. See Sir Robert Filmer, “Patriarcha,” in Patriarcha and Other Political Works, P. Laslett, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), especially III and IV. 9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, C. B. Macpherson, ed. (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 602. 10. Ibid. For Hobbes, of course, the church lacked absolute authority, even

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over spiritual matters. 11. Ibid., p. 525. 12. Ibid., p. 602. 13. Ibid., pp. 187–188. 14. One reason given for this was that the international state of nature was not destructive of civilized life in the same way that the “domestic” state of nature was. See Hobbes, ibid., p. 188. 15. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, P. Laslett ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, student edition, 1988), Second Treatise, Section 128, p. 352. 16. Locke, ibid., 6, p. 271. 17. Ibid., 128, p. 352. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 14, p. 276. 20. Carol Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation (John Wiley, 1979), p. 13. 21. If space allowed, the same could be shown, I believe, for the Enlightenment. George D. O’Brien, for instance, concludes, “Given the view of a common, intuitable human nature, Enlightenment politics can give no satisfactory account for the plurality of states.” O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History: A Contemporary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 113. 22. “The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy,” in Filmer (note 8), p. 285. 23. Ernst Renan (1882), “What Is a Nation?” in A. Zimmern, ed., Modern Political Doctrines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 203. 24. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) 25. John G. Ruggie, “Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47, no. 1 (winter 1993): pp. 150, 151. The absence of any sharp differentiation between public and private, and the personalized nature of rule in a world of overlapping and complementary hierarchies, was of course a characteristic of the feudal order. It was reflected in, among other things, the fact that the distinction between private and public law had no material force, and in the fact that the administration of justice, rather than being separated from landownership, attached to the demesne. See A. E. Tay and E. Kamenka, “Public Law—Private Law,” in S. I. Benn and G.F. Gaus, eds., Public and Private in Social Life (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1983). 26. Here I am borrowing from E. Kamenka, “Political Nationalism—The Evolution of the Idea,” in Kamenka, ed., Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1975), p. 14. 27. R. B. J. Walker, “Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice,” in R. B. J. Walker and Saul H. Mendlovitz, eds., Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1990), p. 173. See also Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Ch. 8, and I. Veit-Brause, Chapter 4 in this book. 28. Similarly, the international order, despite having been shaped by nationalism, is by no means unreservedly committed to the national principle. It is characterized instead by a “pragmatic reconciliation between the prescriptive principle of state sovereignty and the popular principle of national self-determination.” James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 45. 29. Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government” (1861), in Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government, H. B.

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Acton, ed. (London and Melbourne: Dent, 1972), p. 393. 30. Ibid., p. 392. The reason for this, Mill goes on to say, is that “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.” 31. Lord Acton, “Nationality” (1862) in his Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 150. 32. Ibid., p. 158. 33. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 3d ed. (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1961), p. 87. 34. John Plamenatz, “Two Types of Nationalism,” in Kamenka (note 26), p. 36. 35. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1945), p. 330. 36. Plamenatz (note 34), pp. 33–34. 37. Ibid., p. 34. 38. For an interesting and critical discussion of this way of proceeding, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed Books, 1986), Ch. 1. 39. Guiseppe Mazzini, The Duties of Man and Other Essays (London and New York: Everyman’s, 1966), p. 41. 40. Kamenka (note 26), p. 20. 41. Renan (note 23), p. 190. 42. Tom Nairn “The Modern Janus,” in his The Break-up of Britain, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1981), p. 348. 43. For a discussion of this, see my “Nationalism, National Identity and ‘History’: Nehru’s Search for India,” Thesis Eleven, no. 32 (1992), pp. 37–54. 44. In Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, D. Fernbach, ed. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1973), p. 78. Marx and Engels go on to say that “the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation,” although, they immediately add, “not in the bourgeois sense of the word”: p. 84. 45. For the theoretical reformulations undertaken by Lenin in this area, and their political implications, see my “Lenin’s Reformulation of Marxism: The Colonial Question as a National Question,” History of Political Thought 13, no. 1 (spring 1992): 99–128. 46. Eric Hobsbawm, “Some Reflections on ‘The Break-up of Britain,” New Left Review, no. 105 (Sept.–Oct. 1977), p. 13. 47. Nairn, (note 62). He writes: “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure” (p. 329). Similarly, see Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978), p. 93. 48. Anderson (note 24), p. 14.

4 Rethinking the State of the Nation Irmline Veit-Brause

After the momentous events in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the issue of state- and nation-building has moved back to the political agenda in the center of Europe. The events are too obvious to require recounting in detail. Observers speak of a revival of nationalism, a regression to atavistic social impulses, and a relapse into barbarity. Confronted with the acute and most brutal assertions of exclusive nationalisms in Eastern Europe, the world community demonstrates its inability to cope—intellectually and politically, not to mention militarily. Claims for national independence and the proliferation of nation-states seem to challenge central assumptions of globalization theories, especially the contention that the nation-state is largely dysfunctional in an era of trans- and postnational politics and the globalization of fundamental political and economic issues. Yet the thesis about the obsolescence of the nation-state1 offers no easy way out of the current dilemma. In fact, the current situation worldwide appears to be deeply paradoxical. The internationalization of the Western nation-state model has not only globalized this ordering device of political space (in turn proliferating nationalist secessionist movements): it also rebounded on the self-assured nation-states of the West, complicating, even fracturing, the political arena of the state through regional ethnonationalisms and multiculturalisms. In other words, the relationship between state and nation—that is, the fit between the functional system of political, institutional structures and the sentiments of community, solidarity, and legitimacy that sustain them—is undergoing profound transformation. In essence, we are witnessing a reassessment both of the function and the ethos of the body politique. The congruence of structure and culture postulated in traditional conceptions of the nation-state is been challenged in more ways and more places than many West European commentators—their eyes fixated on the crucial date of 1989 and on the regions liberated from the iron hand of state Socialism—are prepared to admit or care to remember. The key is how to 59

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reconceptualize the relationship between state and nation knowing that both the state and the nation are involved in profound transformations. To put it differently, the central issue is how to conceptualize more adequately the quality of social relations encapsulated in the concept of nation. We need to reexamine the conventional codefinition of nation and state, exemplified most strikingly by K. W. Deutsch’s dictum: “A nation is a people who have hold of a state.”2 Closely connected with this issue is the adequacy of the conceptual language available for empirical analysis and political discourse. The notorious ambiguity of analytical terms, not least nation, derives from their origins in past political discourses.3 The core concepts of such analysis— nation-building, nationality, national identity, nationalism—carry overtones of praise or condemnation. Evaluative and prescriptive connotations are inextricably intertwined in theoretical formulations.4 Questions of historical semantics connect with a third important issue. It has to do with how far historical and, more recently, anthropologicalethnographic research, and the theoretical systematizations built upon it, have helped us to understand nation-building, nationalism, and the formation of “national identities”5 as part of, or obstacle to, the project of modernity.6 The current ambivalence toward the above-mentioned revival of nationalism attests to a fundamental ambiguity about such a question. Functionalist interpretations tend to explain the “nationalist imperative” as the essential thrust of the process of modernization,7 while culturalist-anthropological approaches, centering on the concept of ethnicity, tend to cleave cultural and political identities—nationality and citizenship. The critique of the state8 and the insights of sociological and anthropological analyses into processes of identity formation appear to have moved on separate tracks. Yet, the problem is the ease with which political language passes from ethno-cultural identity to nationality, pointing to the presumed correlation between the cultural homogeneity of a political community and the stability of its polity.9

NATION, STATE, AND NATION-STATES: ISSUES AND MODELS

The first question to ask is a conceptual-historical one: it refers to the emergence of the modern notion of the nation-state, with its essential codefinition of nation and state. A sociological rendering of this codefinition is, to quote just one of many examples, Anthony Giddens’s assertion “that ‘nation-state’ is equivalent to society.”10 This would normally pass as unobjectionable. Much of the critical focus on society has assumed societies to be entities bounded by the territorial borders of nation-states. Few have questioned the surreptitious assumptions and their methodologically limiting ramifications.11

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Indeed, few historicopolitical concepts are used in contemporary political and analytical language with greater nonchalance than the term nation-state. We speak of the United Nations when referring to the association of the global society of states. We speak of European nation-states. We would have referred to Yugoslavia before its breakup as a nationstate—a particularly successful federal one, at that. This unreflecting usage of nation-state as synonymous with the sovereign state assumes an unambiguous meaning of the concepts of nation and nation-state.12 There is one facet of uncontested meaning. It derives from the memories of an often forgotten past. This meaning is, so to speak, a relic—indeed, a precious relic—of past political battles, won two hundred years ago in the name of popular or “national” sovereignty. This meaning of nation-state refers to the actual or postulated democratic legitimation of political power exercised by the state, in contradistinction to the legitimacy by divine right sustaining the absolutist, dynastic rule of the ancien régime in Europe. Whatever actual political systems prevail today in the world of “nation-states,” we measure them against this principle of popular legitimation. In other words, with respect to the political legitimation of state power, all states are or ought to be “nation-states.” Even dictatorial regimes presume to speak in the name of the people. There is, in theory, no third position allowed. With respect to self-government by the people and for the people, and in this sense alone, the global state system is composed exclusively of socalled nation-states. Nation and state appear inseparable; the nation-state is the emblem of modern political thinking. Nationalism, understood as a quest for self-government by the people, is a fundamental feature of modernity. 13 In this regard, it would not even make sense to speak of a “return” to the nation-state. As Mayall stated in 1990: “Ostensibly, the world has been made safe for nationalism the permissive . . . and popular principle of national self-determination.”14 The reality is, as Mayall noted, considerably more complex. It is this taken-for-granted codefinition of state and nation that is just as likely to be severely challenged as a convenient fiction of political theory. The problems encountered by nation-building in the Third World have triggered the initial challenge to reexamine extant theories of nation-building, advanced from a functional-structuralist perspective. 15 Some twenty years ago, Walker Connor took modernization theory—and its application to development theory—to task for exactly this unthinking equation of nation and state.16 In launching his critique of the theoretical systematizations borne of modernization theory, Connor drew attention to the “nation-destroying” effect of “state-building” in the non-European world. By nation-destroying he had in mind the repression or enforced “nationalization” of culturally diverse ethnic groups living within common state boundaries. Connor could not have done so without separating the cultural units or “ethnic groups” from the politically organized populace inhabiting a defined state-territory.

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Underlying such critiques is a sensitivity for a totally different dimension of the notion of nation-state.17 We may, and indeed often do, define nation with reference to aspects other than the principle of political legitimacy. We may, for example, think of it as a cultural group with social boundaries unrelated, or not necessarily related, to the territorial borders of a state. This sliding in terminology has its historical roots. It is more than just a case of confused semantics that might be cleared up by fiat: by reserving, for example, the term ethnie for the cultural core of a nation. The fusion of conceptual categories in a single term is one of the reasons for ongoing political contestation. If we define nation with reference to distinct ethnographic features as well as the self-consciousness of an ethnocultural collective identity, and then ask the question, “How many states can today be classified as ‘true’ or ‘ideal’ nation-states?” the count is decidedly unimpressive. If one accepts this strict or culturally restrictive definition of nation-state, so that each nation-state comprises only one such ethnie and at the same time all those living on its territory, then at best 2.2 percent of the nation-states presently comprising the interstate system would qualify. The boundaries of any given cultural ethnie and the political boundaries of a state seldom coincide.18 More often than not, the social boundaries of culturally cohesive “nation-groups” and the territorial borders of given states are not congruent. There is little point in pursuing such taxonomic exercises, or the attendant problems of determining a cultural unit or ethnie, whether by reference to the conventionally cited, so-called objective, factors of nationhood, be it like language, religion, shared customs and beliefs, common descent, history, or destiny, or to the accompanying sentiment of attachment. All that needs to be demonstrated here is the near impossibility of unambiguously defining nation and nation-state. Nation, state, and nationstate belong to the class of essentially contested concepts. The evocation of the nation-state as the paradigmatic unit of modern political organization is likely to introduce a permanent tension into the state system as it exists. This tension can be traced back to a fundamental dilemma that lies in the heart of the liberal theory of popular or “national” sovereignty. The notion of self-government, political rule by and for the people, left the criteria of membership undefined. Who “the people” were was rarely explicated. The so-called Western model of nationalism theoretically assumed a compact, a voluntary choice, exercised by every individual wishing to live under a self-given constitution. Ernest Renan epitomized this conception in his 1882 definition of the nation as a “daily plebiscite,” even though the much-cited formula had more of the character of a normative idea than of an empirical description. When the early theorists of classical liberalism shifted their focus from legal-constitutional issues, and turned their attention to what one may

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call the ethnographic substrate of their constructions of the sovereign nation, they, too, betrayed a fleeting awareness of the affinity between nation in the sense of popular sovereignty and nation in the sense of a culturally cohesive community. “Language,” wrote John Locke, “is the great bond and common tie of society,”19 but he set aside the taken-for-granted bond of society when constructing his universalistic theory of political liberty. The inherent tension between universalistic constructions and sociopolitical realities was more clearly before the mind of the other theorist of classical liberalism, J. S. Mill. Putting the case, in 1861, for the new principle of national sovereignty, Mill asserted: Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race should be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they choose to associate themselves.20

Ostensibly, Mill’s thesis is essentially a defense of self-government; that is, of the proposition “that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed.” Yet, the supporting argument betrays an inkling of the fact that state on the one hand and nation, as “a division of the human race,” on the other are historically separable, and that “the various collective bodies of human beings,” united by a “sentiment of nationality,” could be distinguished on grounds other than common government. Mill faced up to the dilemma and explained his pragmatic choice by reference to “the present state of civilisation,” which, in his view, did not permit “keeping different nationalities of anything like equivalent strength under the same government.”21 Expressed in the language of today’s discourse on nationalism and the nation-state, Mill was arguing, with appropriate provisos, the case for the “culturally homogeneous” nation-state.22 The Western democratic model of nationhood is thus not so clearly distinguished, as has often been maintained, from the “ethnic” model of the nation that we associate with Central European, especially nineteenth-century German, national thought. There is no “pristine meaning” of nation; neither an exclusively political or voluntarist definition, nor, as Connor maintains, a meaning that identifies nation with “a group of people whose members believe they are ancestrally related.”23 It is the fusion of the democratic and cultural dimensions of the nation-state project that accounts for its potency and disruptive potential. The tension implanted in the (old) society of states was adopted as a guiding principle for the drawing of state boundaries. When Woodrow Wilson formulated the principle of national self-determination, the two

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conceptions of the nation-state were precariously fused, translating liberty into national liberation. It sanctioned the political aspirations of nationgroups for their own state. The conditions for the application of this principle were another matter, leaving much room for political conflict.

NATIONS REDESIGNING THE STATE SYSTEM?

The theoretical flaw might lie in the somewhat static view implicit in theoretical constructions that legitimate the nation-state as a foundational relationship between the logically and historically prior nation and the state of self-governing people. The theory of national self-determination tends to freeze a historically specific situation. It ignores that political or state actions had helped to create many of the cultural, social, and economic conditions enabling a people, self-conscious of their nationhood, to claim the right to “national” self-government. Sociologically oriented theories of nationalism in the modern age, like those of Ernest Gellner or Benedict Anderson, have tried to account for this sociohistorical transformative process.24 They interpret nationalism as the drive for bringing about the coincidence of state and nation. Gellner, approaching the issue from the perspective of modernization theory, speaks of the “nationalist imperative,” which he attributes to the structural transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. Modern industrial societies constituting nation-states with their extended and complex communication systems require a high degree of cultural homogeneity; that is, a common language, a uniform educational system, and a system of shared social values. Nation, in this sense, is not found, but made; not primordial, but socially constructed.25 In early-modern (Western) Europe, involved in every concrete historical process of nation-building, in the sociopolitical sense, was a simultaneous process of nation-destroying. It subjected smaller ethnocultural units or groups to the experience of nationalization and assimilation to the dominant national group, whether by rational choice or by force. France at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, was at the end of the nineteenth century an established nation-state with regard to the principle of the legitimacy of national sovereignty. However, in the sociological sense of the “nationalist imperative,” France started to become a nation only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 26 Great care must therefore be taken not to confuse state-making and nation-building. Once set in motion, the combined national-democratic transformation of statehood and nationalization of state societies produced decidedly ambiguous effects. The universalization of the principle of national sovereignty met with varied reactions, including resistance to the social process of nationalization. As the demonstration effect of nation-building spread

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eastward from Western Europe, it strengthened the self-consciousness of “nation-groups” and destroyed multiethnic empires. The emergence of these new “nation-groups,” which had claimed and achieved national selfdetermination almost overnight, created other groups conscious of their own “cultural difference.” The principle of national self-determination, once declared a universal principle of state-making, gave rise, by its own logic, to a proliferation of potential nations, especially as the definition of cultural identity, hence difference, could connect with many and varying factors. Moreover, when struggling to map the “imagined community” on to geographical territory, nationalist logic would naturally use a combination of cultural and historical claims to justify border demarcations favorable to the most expansive territorial claims. To cite a current example: the Kosowo, Serbian nationalists maintain, is and must remain Serbian because the soil in which Serbian graves lie belong to the Serbian nation.27 Against this historical backdrop we are beginning to see why the attempt to map state borders with territorial precision and presumed permanence along the elastic boundaries of group identities has the potential to set in train a fission process of the kind we have witnessed in former Yugoslavia. In practice, nationalist challenges to existing territorial states have been rarely condoned. While the largest wave of national liberation movements, which we associate with the decolonization process after World War II, brought independent national governments to power, thereby vindicating the right of national self-determination of the colonized against the colonizer, these modern Third World nation-states are, by and large, anything but culturally homogeneous. The state-nationalism of political elites had to contend with the ethnonationalism of unassimilated groups. Internal nation-building has proved to be one of the most arduous tasks facing states deprived of unified nations. In 1967, Walker Connor surveyed a long list of potential candidates for independent nation-state status.28 In 1990, despite well-publicized instances of state-nations of the decolonized world torn apart by major ethnic conflicts, it was still true to say that “territorial revision was very rare.”29 Yet in the very same year, 1990, major territorial revisions of the map of Europe were under way. The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe and of the dissolved union of Soviet republics were shaping their claims—seemingly against all odds. What then becomes of Karl W. Deutsch’s formula, “A nation is a people who have hold of a state”? It begins to look like a kind of definitional fiat. As an empirical proposition, it eliminates the states without “unified” nations or those still in search of their own unique “national identity.” As a formula with latent normative import, it is likely to prove an unworkable maxim, in that it does not specify which “people” have, or must be granted, the right to take possession of their own state. If a “people” can be equated with a group of “identifiable separate culture”—as Mayall

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suggests—then acting upon the principle of national self-determination, and upon that principle alone, might place no limit to national secessionism. Yet the prospect of eight thousand separate nation-states is an incomprehensible one.30 Indeed, the whole line of conventional argument leaves us in a predicament, succinctly summarized by Giddens’s observation that only “where political boundaries coincide with existing language communities is the convergence between the nation-state and nationalism a relatively frictionless one. In all other cases—by far the majority in the modern world—the advent of the nation-state stimulates divergent and oppositional nationalisms as much as it fosters the coincidence of nationalist sentiments and existing state boundaries.”31 The practical repercussions of regarding the relationship between nation and state as foundational and logically necessary, arising from nineteenth-century principles and culminating in the principle of national selfdetermination, appear today sorely tested. Confronted with the murderous assertions of exclusive nationalisms right in the heart of Europe, the world community stands at a theoretical impasse, so far as imagining pacification, let alone achieving it, is concerned.

NATION AND STATE IN TENSION: TRANSCENDENCE OR DISINTEGRATION FOR THE NATION-STATE?

The resurgence of nationalism acquires different meanings in different contexts, if we consider the importance placed on cultural identification and the claims for cultural diversity as varieties of (cultural) nationalism. In this sense, the political space occupied by the state itself, not only the state system, is being refigured by assertions of cultural plurality. The state, it appears, is in transition, because the reassessment of its functions is accompanied by redefinitions of community and its shared ethos. To illuminate this transition, we may refer to four phenomena that may be viewed as so many different manifestations of the fragile and mutable relationship between nation and state, between solidary community and institutional structures, and between ethos and function of political entities. The first phenomenon refers to a well-functioning institutional system in search of a communal ethos. In the last few decades, the slow but steady progress of European integration appeared as the most promising initiative for tackling economic, social, and ecological problems that exceeded the reach and capacities of individual states. European integration may be interpreted as a rational response to the processes of globalization. Significantly, the temporary stalling of the process has not succeeded in overturning the Maastricht Treaty. While the risk of failure has been averted, reservations shared by several of the member states regarding further

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political and economic integration (currency union, common foreign policy), and the tiny majorities secured in national referenda on the treaty have been widely interpreted as indicating the limits of a purely bureaucratic approach to the goal of European unification. The European Union, it is often explained, cannot progress further because Europe lacks “Europeans.”32 That is to say, the projected community still has not found the people ready to embrace Europe as an “imagined community.” By noting the absence of “Europeans,” observers are pointing to the need for, and actual reluctance of, the peoples of Western Europe to extend their sentiments of solidarity and loyalty beyond the borders of their own “national” communities. Despite the documented similarities in social structure, social aspirations, and lifestyles across Western Europe,33 neither objective necessities (i.e., the collective tasks ahead) nor social-structural congruence appear to translate automatically into a collective sense of European identity. The transition to a postnational or transnational sphere of politics requires a social learning process that is not so rapidly managed. The case of German reunification in 1990 offers us a second perspective on the fragile and mutable relationship between nation and state. For some, a reunified Germany is the most striking example of the return of the nation-state “once pronounced dead.”34 The consummation of reunification, in accordance with West Germany’s Basic Law, was enacted under and justified by the principle of national self-determination. Germany appeared to return to the status of a “normal nation.” But to interpret German unification as a successful attempt to make the cultural nation and the political borders of the territorial state coincide35 does not add much to our understanding. Relying on the unexamined concept of the nation-state, many commentators within Germany—not to mention those looking in from outside—objected either to the project of unification as such, or to its modalities, conjuring up the spectre of a “Bismarckian nation-state,” deemed anachronistic and dangerous given that the historical moment had moved toward a postnational era characterized by supranational organizations and “post-conventional” forms of patriotic identifications. 36 Given their historical experiences, Germans themselves were rather apprehensive about the “return of the demons” of nationalism.37 There are, however, other, less clearly perceived features of the unification process. The collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) did not mean simply the collapse of a totalitarian regime. It meant also the disappearance of a state that had striven in vain to forge its own socialist “class nation.” 38 Unlike the experience of other (Eastern) Central European countries, the nation-state in the GDR did not undergo internal transformation: it merely withered away, once the Soviet Union withdrew its military support. The state apparatus of the GDR had been strong; but the

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corresponding sentiment of attachment proved too weak. Function and ethos were manifestly out of gear. The second feature to be noted is that this alleged return to “normality” by the German nation-state was not accompanied by territorial claims based on the most favorable historical references. There was no attempt to return to pre-1937 borders. The Oder-Neisse border would remain, as acknowledged in the German-Polish treaties. Germany thus renounced one of the most troublesome demands of militant nationalism, and with it the reference to demographic, territorial, or historical justifications designed to enhance claims for the most expansive definition of the German nation-state. In another sense, German reunification did, of course, mean a return to the nation-state; that is, a state endowed with democratic legitimation through the union of the previously bifurcated nation (first constituted as a nation-state in 1871). In this instance, there was not even the troubling uncertainty about who was to decide who “the people” were or who should exercise the right to decide.39 In 1990, the people to exercise this right comprised a distinct political constituency demarcated by the state borders of the GDR. Insinuations that the process lacked legitimacy are ill-founded.40 Yet, what was particularly striking about “state of the nation” debates within Germany was precisely the confusion of terminology referred to above.41 While intellectuals debated the relevance or obsolescence of the (democratic) nation-state,42 the new Germany tended to present itself like a “Nation which does not want to be one.”43 In other words, while the functional requirements of a nation-state were quickly put into place after October 3, 1990, the ethos of communal solidarity was far from reestablished. The third phenomenon refers to the experience of Eastern Central Europe, where the rediscovery of old “nations” and new, special cultural group identities with the right to claim political recognition has so far had the opposite effect, fragmenting rather than consolidating state territories. Painful though it was, the parting of the Czech and Slovak Republics was accomplished comparatively peacefully. The splintering of multiethnic federated states into ethnically homogeneous territories, “cleansed” by force, poses a grave threat to peace. The principle of national self-determination is provoking a chain reaction of cell divisions to which there seems no rational limit. The ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia, the state once hailed as a model for the peaceful accommodation of ethnic diversity in a federal structure,44 has severely tested all faith in any rational application of the principle of national self-determination. It clearly offers no panacea for stopping violent disputes over territory. The international recognition of Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina as sovereign states did not resolve the conflict. The fission process has continued with three “ethnically clean” minirepublics within a multiethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina, each boasting nominal sovereignty, but far

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from enjoying even the semblance of autonomy.45 It is as if the people of Eastern Europe were trying to catch up with the nineteenth century, and in the process driving the principle of national self-determination ad absurdum. As one previously nondominant ethnic group acquires the accoutrements of statehood, the process itself creates new nondominant ethnic groups claiming the selfsame right. Western models and theories of nationand state-building, it has been argued, are impotent to stop this self-destructive dynamic.46 Complicated alternative models of democratic representation, taking full account of ethnicity,47 have been, it seems, overwhelmed by events in former Yugoslavia, especially Bosnia-Herzegovina, even before they had a chance of being put to the test. The problems posed by events in Central Europe are in striking contrast to the obstacles to further West European federation. Instead of finding a way of supplying the necessary ethos of group solidarity for an already functional system (i.e., the Economic Community), the East European situation raises the question as to whether ethnic attachment to a state can be harnessed in a way that is functionally viable, and therefore reasonably stable. The point is that cultural identity is fluid and changeable, if not altogether manipulatable. It cannot by itself provide clear indicators for territorial boundaries. Where the definition of what constitutes the “nation” that is claiming the right to national self-determination remains elusive, the only possible remedy lies in considerations of functional feasibility. The fourth phenomenon refers to the paradoxical effects of the process of globalization, to which reference has already been made. While 1989 and its aftermath have focused on the issue of ethnocultural identity previously ignored by large sections of mainstream sociological theory and empirical work,48 the “surge of ethnic sentiments and movements,” in evidence in the West for two decades before 1989,49 has received much less public attention. Yet these sentiments and movements have reshaped from within the political space of securely established nation-states.50 In immigrant societies, multiculturalism became such a highly valued policy response that the minimal conditions for effective citizenship became an issue for political theory. While the decline of assimilationist pressures is a liberating experience for those who do not identify with the mainstream culture, the formation of ethnic groups as emerging transnational actors51 has made the determination of “the national interest” a more precarious task than it once was. Moreover, the insistence on cultural difference and highly politicized ethnicity52 can easily move beyond the limit where the minimal consensual conditions for participatory democracy still apply. Taken to extremes, the basic human right to have one’s own “ethnic identity” respected has the potential of seriously fraying the fabric of the state’s civil society and domestic peace.53

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NATION AND STATE: ETHOS AND FUNCTION

The preceding analysis suggests that there is no uncontested foundational relationship between nation and state; no unproblematic relationship between institutional structures and communal sentiments. Yet, some such relationship appears necessary. Here the most one can do is to take some small step beyond the dichotomies characteristic of the polarized debate on nationalism and the nation-state, in which empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions of the arguments tend to coalesce. In the face of narrow-minded nationalists who feel they need to defend their way of life against the intrusion of “foreigners,”54 one needs to point out the empirical fact that a functioning polity needs less cultural uniformity and social conformity than they are inclined to insist on. Conversely, with universalists advocating an open-border policy and the right to free and unchecked immigration, one must recognize that a minimum of cultural competence and normative commitment is required for admission to citizenship.55 Even those who argue from a perspective of declared cosmopolitanism have difficulties in reconciling the “philosophical value conflict” in their schemes.56 Those prominent on the German left who pronounce the nation-state obsolete might have to be reminded that their own redefinition of collective identity in terms of “constitutional patriotism,” as Habermas has impressively done, is essentially a valid contribution to the social argument over the points around which national identity crystallizes.57 Elaborate democratic procedures cannot be safeguarded anywhere else but within the institutional structures of the nation-state. Indeed, it is “often ignored that democratic conditions and the ‘welfare state’ have, if anything, embedded European societies more deeply into their national states than they were before.”58 To the critics of “the poverty of primordialism,”59 one may easily concede the theoretical point that ethnicity and the collective identity of a group are cultural artifacts. Insofar as the distinguishing characteristics of the cultural identity of an ethnic group are sedimentations of past social practice, both the nation and/or ethnie may be said to be socially constructed. In this sense, not only modern nations but their “ethnic cores” are inventions, since every human institution results from purposeful human actions. Viewed diachronically, ethnicity as a group characteristic is malleable over time, depending on the social mechanisms available for the production and reproduction of the cultural practices. On the other hand, the critics of “primordialism” have to accept the empirical observation that “ethnocultural identity” as a characteristic trait of a given individual, born and socialized into a group endowed with a specific culture, cannot be easily or quickly changed. Viewed synchronically and from the perspective of one member of an ethnic community, the

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community is a “social fact”—in Durkheim’s sense—that cannot be changed. Nor can the habitus imprinted on its members be easily shed; it only can be modulated by adding more registers to it. The search for an essential “Polishness”60 for example, or for primordial essence of any other national identity appears to be theoretically futile. Social identifications depend on context. Identity defines commonality in the face of a specific or focused nonidentity. Every individual carries a wide range of multiple identities. The acceptance of multiple identities therefore appears basic for the modern condition. The “ethnonational bond” is one of the most elusive social constructions, though all of us possesses some tacit knowledge of its nature. Any attempt to pin it down empirically to one or other of the “indicators” of its essence, be it the myth of common descent (Walker Connor) or the myth of “the chosen people” (Anthony D. Smith) easily ends up giving too much credence to the manipulative rhetoric of the nationalists. The theoretical weakness lies in mistaking metaphors that express social relations for indicators of a sociohistorical reality. The kinship and extended family metaphor (on which Connor builds his interpretation of the ethnonational bond as deriving from a “perception”—even if untrue—of common descent) is a particularly treacherous one. As the evidence Connor draws upon shows, this approach lacks the capacity to establish a clear dividing line between ethnicity and racism. It seems that the so-called objective features of “ethnicity” or, to use the nineteenth-century term, of the cultural nation, are but so many metaphors for a particular quality of social relations and interactions. This quality is not confined to a once and forever delimited group. Ethnie does not describe the extension of a social collective, but the intensity of feelings, attachments, commitments, and obligations to relevant and/or familiar others. As a quality of social life, ethnic or national identification is modeled but not literally based on kinship or notions of common descent.61 By analogy, the great chance for a unified Europe lies in the fact that so many cultural boundaries crisscross the state borders of the European state system.62 The sentiment of communal attachment is value-laden—and somewhat promiscuous. Referring to a quality of social relations, it stands for the obverse to the model of the state as a mutual benefit society. Where such quality is totally denied or denounced, as in the rationalist-functional interpretation of state institutions, it takes refuge elsewhere. Yet, no political structure can thrive without the ethos and empathy for which we have yet no better term than nationhood. In short, a “sovereign nation” that cannot sustain the functional institutions of a modern state makes a vacuous claim. A postnational bureaucratic structure that is not sustained by a “sentiment” of community, loyalty, and solidarity, hence legitimacy, cannot function.

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ETHNICITY, NATIONALITY, CIVILITY

This attempt to rethink the state of the nation inevitably yields paradoxical conclusions. Nationality equated with membership of a state suggests a foundational relationship that cannot be maintained. Theories of ethnicity and identity suggest a disjunction between culture and state that risks losing sight of the conditions for effective citizenship. If it is true that modern citizenship requires both cultural competence and civil ethos, we need a new conceptualization in order to capture this quality that transcends the scope of ethnicity as well as nationality, yet keeps the spotlight on the quality of social and political relations encapsulated in both terms. We ought to focus on civility rather than on national identity. We will have to work toward, and think in terms of, a peculiar (for example) European civility that characterizes Europeans as citizens of Europe—or a peculiar Australian civility that characterizes all hyphenated Australians.

NOTES 1. Cf. A. D. Smith, “The Supersession of Nationalism?” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 31 (1990): 1–31. 2. Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Its Alternatives (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 19. 3. See Sanjay Seth, “Political Theory in the Age of Nationalism,” Ethics and International Affairs 7 (1993): 75–96; also his Ch. 3 in this book. 4. Quentin Skinner, “Language and Political Change,” in T. Ball, J. Farr, and R. L. Hanson, eds., Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 13ff. 5. Irmline Veit-Brause, “Identifikationsprozesse—theoretische Probleme der Nationalismusforschung,” in W. Veit, ed., Antipodean Enlightenments. Festschrift for Leslie Bodi (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 469–487. 6. For a searching critique, cf. Johan P. Arnason, “Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity,” in Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture (London: Sage, 1990), pp. 207–236. 7. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983). 8. E.g., Gianfranco Poggi, The State. Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Cambridge: Mass. Polity Press, 1990). 9. See Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Anthony D. Smith, “Chosen peoples: why ethnic groups survive,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 15 (1992): 436–456; also Bernhard Giesen, Nationale und kulturelle Identit-ät (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991). 10. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), p. 267. 11. A. R. Zolberg, “Beyond the nation-state; comparative politics in global perspective,” in J. Berting and W. Beckmans, eds., Beyond Progress and Development (Aveburg: Aldershot, 1987), pp. 42–69; and Roland Axtmann, “Society, globalization and the comparative method,” History of the Human Sciences 6 (1993): 53–74.

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12. For a sarcastic comment on the “habitual misuse” of nation for either a state or the population of a state, cf. Walker Connor, “The Nation and Its Myth,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 33 (1992): 48. 13. Edward A. Tiryakian and Neil Nevitte, “Nationalism and Modernity,” in E. A. Tiryakian and Ronald Rogowski, eds., New Nationalisms of the Developed West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 57–86; and John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982). 14. James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 50. 15. Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (New York: MIT Press, 1953, 2d ed., 1966); and S. N. Eisenstadt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Building States and Nations, 2 vols. (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1972). 16. Walker Connor, “Self-Determination: The New Phase,” World Politics 20 (1967): 30–53; Walker Connor, “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying,” World Politics 24 (1972): 319–355. 17. Anthony D. Smith, “State-Making and Nation-Building,” in John A. Hall, ed., States in History (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 228–263. 18. Gunnar P. Nielsson, “States and ‘Nation-Groups’—a Global Taxonomy,” in Tiryakian and Rogowski (note 13), p. 34. 19. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 vols. by J. W. Yolton, ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1961) Bk. III, i, 1. 20. Quoted in Mayall (note 14), p. 27. 21. Quoted in Mayall (note 14), p. 29. 22. For a severe critique of Mill, cf. Mary Dietz, “Patriotism,” in Ball, et al. (note 4), pp. 177–193. 23. Connor (note 12): 48. 24. Gellner (note 7); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 25. Cf. Jack David Eller and Reed M. Coughlan, “The poverty of primordialism: the demystification of ethnic attachments,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (1993): 183–202. 26. Eugen Weber, From Peasants into Frenchmen—The Modernization of Rural France (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977). 27. Gerhard Wettig, “Auswirkungen des Nationalismus in Osteuropa,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B10/93 (April 2, 1993): 33. 28. Connor (note 16): 35ff. 29. Mayall (note 14), pp. 63f. 30. Ibid. Cf. also James Mayall and Mark Simpson, “Ethnicity Is Not Enough: Reflections on Protracted Secessionism in the Third World,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 33 (1992): 5–25. 31. Giddens (note 10), pp. 219f. 32. Cf. Stanley Hoffmann, “Goodbye to a United Europe,” New York Review (May 27, 1993): 27–31; Kurt Hübner, Das Nationale. Verdrängtes. Vermeidliches. Erstrebenswertes (Graz-Wien-Köln: Styria, 1991). 33. Hartmut Kaelble, Auf dem Weg zu einer europäischen Gesellschaft. Eine Sozialgeschichte Westeuropas 1880–1980 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987). 34. Karlheinz Weißmann, “Wiederkehr eines Totgesagten: Der Nationalstaat am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 14/93 (April 2, 1993): 3–10.

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35. Gellner (note 7), p. 43. 36. Jürgen Habermas, “Können komplexe Gesellschaften eine vernünftige Identität ausbilden?” in Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), pp. 92–126. 37. Herfried Münkler, “Rückkehr der Dämonen?” Neue Rundschau 104 (1993): 9–18. 38. M. Rainer Lepsius, “Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland,” repr. in H. A. Winkler, ed., Nationalismus in der Welt von Heute (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), pp. 12–27. 39. Cf. Sir Ivor Jennings’s famous remark of 1956 in the context of United Nations debates on decolonization, quoted in Mayall (note 14), p. 41. 40. Peter Graf Kielmannsegg, “Vereinigung ohne Legitimität?” Merkur 47 (1993): 561–575. 41. I examined these debates in a paper, “Rethinking the state of the nation; the case of Germany,” presented at the Rewriting the German Past conference, University of Western Australia, September 1993. 42. E.g., Ralf Dahrendorf, “Die Sache mit der Nation,” Merkur 44 (1990): 823–834; Peter Glotz, Der Irrweg des Nationalstaats (Stuttgart: DVA, 1990); Jürgen Habermas, Die nachholende Revolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990); memories of late nineteenth-century talk of imperial Germany as the “unvollendete National-Staat” did not help to allay fears of potentially expansionist nationalism. 43. Christian Meier, Die Nation die keine sein will (Munich: Hanser, 1991). 44. Smith (note 17), p. 261. 45. David Held, “Democracy, the nation-state and the global system,” Economy and Society 20 (1991): 138–172. 46. Wettig (note 27): pp. 31ff. 47. Uri Ra’anan, “Nation und Staat: Ordnung aus dem Chaos,” in Erich Fröschl, Maria Mesner, and Uri Ra’anan, eds., Staat und Nation in multi-ethnischen Gesellschaften (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1991). 48. The theoretical malaise is particularly acute in Germany; cf., Karl Otto Hondrich, “Wovon wir nichts wissen wollten,” Die Zeit (September 25, 1992): 68. 49. Smith, “Chosen peoples” (note 9): 436. 50. M. Esman, ed., Ethnic Conflict in the Western World (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977); and Tiryakian and Rogowski (note 13). 51. John F. Stack Jr., “Ethnicity and Transnational Relations: An Introduction,” in ed., Ethnic Identities in a Transnational World (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981). 52. Cf. the arguments by Anthony J. Cortese, Ethnic Ethics. The Restructuring of Moral Theory (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990). 53. Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 54. Cf. Maxim Silverman, “Citizenship and the nation-state in France,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 14 (1991): 333–349. 55. H. R. van Gunsteren, “Admission to Citizenship,” Ethics 98 (1988): 731–741; Michael Walzer, “The distribution of membership,” in Peter G. Brown and Henry Shue, eds., Boundaries, National Autonomy and Its Limits, Maryland Studies in Public Philosophy (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981); and Michael Walzer, “Citizenship,” in T. Ball, et al. (note 4), pp. 211–219. 56. Thomas W. Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” Ethics 103 (1992): p. 73. 57. Irmline Veit-Brause, “The historian and national identity,” Australian Journal of Politics and History (1988, Suppl. ed.): 44–53; and Jürgen Gebhardt,

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“Verfassungspatriotismus als Identitätskonzept der Nation,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B14/93 (April 2, 1993): 29–37. 58. W. T. Eijsbout, “Borders and Democracy: The Schengen Treaties,” Yearbook of European Studies. Annuaire d’Etudes Européennes 6 (1993): 57–70, quoting p. 70. 59. Eller and Coughlan (note 25). 60. Connor, “Beyond reason; the nature of the ethno-national bond,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (1993): 376f. 61. It might be instructive to remember the case of nineteenth-century Germany and the passionate pre-1871 debates over national unification; cf., Irmline Veit-Brause, “Particularism—a paradox of cultural nationalism?” in J. C. Eade, ed., Romantic Nationalism in Europe, Humanities Research Centre Monographs 2 (Canberra: 1983), pp. 33–46. 62. Joep Leerssen, “Europe as a Set of Borders,” Yearbook of European Studies. Annuaire d’Etudes Européennes 6 (1993): 1–14.

5 The Authentic State: History and Tradition in the Ideology of Ethnonationalism Stephanie Lawson

Although most visibly and horribly evident in former Yugoslavia and parts of the former Soviet Union, ethnonationalism is a phenomenon that can be found flourishing in almost every corner of the globe. From the Pacific to Africa, variations on the theme “this land is our land” can be heard emanating from dozens of ethnically defined “nations” that reject the legitimacy of state borders wider than those of their own assumed historic space. In the wake of these developments, it is evident that both liberal and Marxist prognostications concerning the political salience of ethnicity have not been realized. Certainly, the idea that ethnically defined demands for an exclusive political space (whether in the form of a sovereign state or not) were simply irrational afflictions that would inevitably be cured by the forces of modernization seems no longer tenable. The universalist basis of both liberal and Marxist ideas in this respect has been challenged further by some recent academic exercises in postmodernist relativizing. In practical terms, various ethnically defined groups have been busily prosecuting much the same cause by attempting to deconstruct existing sovereign states through physical force. Taken together, these factors seem to signal, inter alia, the failure of the melting-pot hypothesis implicit in the modernist view of the nation-state.1 Following the escalation of ethnically defined conflict in the post– Cold War era, much of the literature on the subject has attempted to make sense of why it has happened and what can be done about it. While acknowledging the importance of these tasks, this chapter seeks only to provide a critique of certain elements of ethnonationalist thought in terms of its vision of the ideal political community and the ideal political space. Briefly, this vision entails a conception of the state as a political entity encompassing a single authentic community—the ethnos—and preferably containing few others. By definition, it posits the mythical nation-state as the only legitimate configuration, thereby resolving, at least conceptually, the ambiguities of state and nation. The normative imperative that follows 77

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from this conception is to turn the myth into a reality in the form of the ethnocratic state, and efforts toward this end have been evident in such historic projects as genocide. More recently, the pursuit of the authentic state has resulted in attempts at so-called ethnic cleansing. The ideology of ethnonationalism that underlies these exercises has been infused with the importance of history and tradition—elements that bear witness to the alleged justice of the present cause and its telos. Far from heeding the announcement of the end of history, then, ethnonationalists pursue their cause in the name of history. While many ethnonationalists may realize that this vision is not fully achievable in practice—due to economic, strategic, geographic, or demographic factors—it is nonetheless a vision that drives much of the logic, and passion, of ethnonationalist demands. These developments run concurrently with, but contrary to, another trend, characterized variously as globalization, internationalism, or supranationalism, that incorporates notions of interdependence and common security. Implicit in all these themes is the idea of a “commitment to political architecture larger than existing country or ethnic perimeters.”2 Among the outcomes predicted by contemporary globalization theories is the “withering away of the state” and, with it, many of the assumptions about state sovereignty that have long predominated in orthodox theories about international politics. Globalization theories may have some relevance for the analysis of certain economic factors and developments, including the consumption patterns resulting from Big Mac imperialism, but in terms of the present topic of discussion, expectations concerning the withering away of the state are likely to remain in the sphere of unfulfilled hopes rather than manifest in actual patterns of political development on the ground.3 As suggested above, many of the separatist or secessionist demands that have arisen in response to ethnic nationalism and its visions of an authentic political space in the form of a sovereign state hardly entail the dissolution of state borders or a weakening of the principle of sovereignty. Rather, the plethora of contemporary ethnonationalist movements points toward the persistence of the state as a desirable form of political space despite the presence of certain globalizing forces. In its strongest version, the ethnonationalist demand is for certain existing boundaries to be erased and redrawn around particular territories in order to produce different legal units in a new, revised system of sovereign states. Where the new proposed boundaries are seen as a remedy for past injustices, and are demanded in the name of self-determination, it may be especially difficult for liberal sympathies to be set aside. Moreover, it is a liberal interpretation of the value and legitimacy of cultural diversity that has given an implicit blessing to the ethnonationalist basis of Third World liberation struggles. 4 This directs attention, first, to the idea of self-determination, its normative dimensions, and the nature of the claims that underscore it.

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A NOTE ON SELF-DETERMINATION

Self-determination in the form of secession constitutes a form of political opposition that is directed against the legitimacy and authority of an existing state, and not simply against a particular government or constitutional regime.5 One of the broad issues raised by the normative imperative of ethnonationalism, therefore, concerns the presumption in favor of the status quo with respect to state boundaries, on the one hand, and the principle of self-determination on the other.6 Because the latter has been so closely associated with the decolonization movement, the justice of which is more or less taken to be self-evident, it has provided a strong moral foundation for the ethnonationalist cause that has an immediate appeal to liberal sentiments. This is reinforced by the natural antipathy in liberal thought to strong versions of state power and authority. Another liberal argument against defense of the status quo can be formulated through the consent theory of political obligation. Put briefly, a right to secede may be inferred if it is accepted that consent is a necessary condition for the legitimacy of political authority.7 The origin of this idea is to be found at the core of eighteenth-century liberal thinking, especially that of J. S. Mill, on nationalist themes concerning the ultimate derivation of authority from those who are subject to it. But these and other aspects of liberal thought have not produced a coherent theoretical framework from which any specific principles can be deduced, and the liberal tradition in international politics is certainly profoundly ambivalent about modern nationalism and the state.8 In any event, the idea that the principle of self-determination deserves automatic endorsement from a liberal perspective needs to be approached with a great deal of caution. As the following discussion will show, demands for self-determination based on ethnonationalist imperatives are commonly founded on premises that are anything but liberal. One irony emerging from this is that contemporary ethnonationalist demands have very often followed hand-in-hand with the wave of so-called democratization. Despite optimistic claims about the rosy future of democracy following the almost complete collapse of Communism, however, it seems that it is nationalism rather than liberal democracy that has a more secure ideological future. But it is a future that depends very heavily on a glorified version of the past. Whatever cultural markers, such as language, religion, customs, and so forth are used by the ethnos to define itself against others, the most basic foundation of identity for the group, as well as the legitimacy of its aspirations for the future, are embedded in the history and traditions of the group that purportedly give it its unique identity. This has long been a key element in nationalist ideology, despite its initial manifestation as a “rational” product of Enlightenment thinking. It is therefore worth exploring briefly the emergence of nationalism and the nature of the ideas that underpinned it in its earlier development.

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THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM

Nationalism is widely accepted as a modern phenomenon that emerged following the decline of European feudalism and the political transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that followed. Drawing on many of the justifications surrounding the French Revolution, these transformations were grounded in a significant change in political thought concerning the proper locus of legitimate authority. The nationalism of this period was a product of Enlightenment rationality, insofar as it endorsed the democratic notion of popular sovereignty that treated people as citizens of a nation rather than subjects of a monarch. At the same time, of course, the kind of authority described by Weber as “traditionalist” and “irrational” was rejected and, with it, the legitimacy of any allegedly divine sanction for monarchical rule. These general principles and ideas were embodied in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which announced that the essence of sovereignty was now to reside in that ill-defined entity, the nation. These developments provided, among other things, an impetus for the transformation of Kant’s notion of individual autonomy or self-determination, which he conceived as being the highest political good and therefore an ethically based categorical imperative, into a doctrine of national self-determination. As Kedourie remarks, however, a philosopher cannot be held responsible for all the developments that follow the launching of a new system of thought, and it was not Kant, but others, who later enlarged by many degrees the scope of his original doctrine of the autonomy of the individual will, and who drew from it the most far-reaching political conclusions.9 Much of the later work of one of Kant’s disciples, Fichte, constitutes a classic exposition of nationalism articulated through an organic conception of the state, together with an unequivocal endorsement of the legitimacy of realpolitik expressed in such beliefs as an absence of any right in the relations between states other than that of the stronger state.10 But the most important intellectual progenitor of nationalist doctrine is unquestionably Herder. Although he embraced the principles of the Enlightenment in his early career, he later rejected its universalism and advocated instead very particularistic notions of culture and locale as the primary elements of human identity. These translated readily into the idea of an authentic political community based on the cultural inclusiveness of the group and, by definition, the exclusion of others. In underscoring this, Herder adopted an organic conception of history and society through which he developed a theory of the Volkgeist, the roots of which were embedded in antiquity and nourished by the unconscious development of the Volk and its traditions.11 The formulation of these notions was an important step in nurturing the idea of an authentic political community, tied to a particular locale or political space, through invoking the mandate of the past.

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It was the German school of romantic thought, however, that developed the most explicit link between nationalism and traditionalist ideas. Although its exponents started out as extreme individualists, German romanticism quickly moved to the antithetical position. It began to emphasize the primary importance of linguistic and cultural traditions “in shaping individual character and civic morality” and this in turn produced “nationality,” turning down the path of reaction to the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment.12 Its ultimate quest was for a “true, harmonious community, an organic folk-community, which would immerse the individual in the unbroken chain of tradition.”13 It became a historicist cult that rejected any abstract universalist treatment of humanity in favor of recovering the tight-knit, autonomous cultural communities thought to have existed in the “golden past” of the Middle Ages.14 This led inexorably to the idea of the “sovereignty of culture” through which the closed cultural community not only celebrated its uniqueness but validated itself, above all, in its own idiosyncrasy.15 If nationalist ideology was initially a product, or at least a by-product, of the Enlightenment, the glorification of irrationalism in these versions of ethnonationalism clearly represents its antithesis. And since many of nationalism’s foremost intellectual devotees have been drawn from the ranks of those whose major aim has been to provide “their own nation with a history and a culture” rather than a general philosophical justification,16 it is not suprising that some critics have found that the political force of the ideology stands in sharp contrast with its philosophical depth.17 This becomes even more apparent when we look specifically at how ideas of history and tradition have been used in reinforcing the normative framework of ethnonationalism. In this context, the concept of tradition itself comes to function as an ideology in its own right, thereby lending additional force to the imperatives with which ethnonationalism is infused.

TRADITIONALISM AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

The most elementary understanding of “tradition” connotes anything transmitted or handed down from the past to the present. By itself, this carries no necessary normative force, but it is often accompanied by a strong sense that what has been transmitted from one generation to the next is worthy of respect and engenders feelings of duty and loyalty.18 Although it would be far too sweeping to claim that all traditions are explicitly normative, it has been argued that any tradition of belief contains an inherently normative element that is often presented with the purpose of eliciting agreement and affirmation. 19 This also implies that what has been received from the past is to be valued and carried forward into the future as a matter of course. This is the crucial point at which there develops a

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normative theory of the importance of tradition itself, without necessary reference to the substance of any particular tradition. Traditionalism emerges when the preservation of tradition becomes an end in itself and therefore acquires its own ideological dimension. The concept of tradition and the imperatives of traditionalism are linked closely with culture. In ethnonationalist ideology, these imperatives are linked not only to an identity derived from a cultural past, but explicitly with the political future of the bearers of a cultural tradition or heritage. This helps to sustain the view that the natural unit of human organization is not the legally defined sovereign state, but a culturally defined entity.20 The right to self-determination of a culturally defined nation, however, implies clearly that such an entity should have a sovereign state of its own, and so the legal and cultural elements become closely associated. This gives rise to the “normative nationalist principle,” which holds not only that homogeneous cultural units are the natural foundation of political life, but that cultural unity between rulers and ruled is more or less obligatory.21 It also underscores the point that ethnonationalism involves a great deal more than just cultural experience: it embodies a fusion of culture and politics.22 I should add that this has little to do with the idea of political culture, but has everything to do with the politics of culture.23 There are many examples of this kind of cultural politics involving ethnonationalism that could be chosen to illustrate the point. One has been provided in a study of politics in Sri Lanka, where, it is argued, the reification of culture has produced a widespread belief among the Sinhalese that they are a community because of their culture, and that one, without the other, will be destroyed. “In this conception culture is imbued with determining qualities. It is an orientation to the object culture which became increasingly accentuated in the circumstances of nationalist politics based in ethnicity and in the promotion of ethnic unity. The religion of nationalism . . . makes a fetish of culture.”24 This is directly related to the kind of traditionalism described by Balandier as revealing not so much the survival of “primordial groups,” but groups that have a “reactional existence” and whose major significance lies in a situation created in the postindependence period.25 It is in this context that tradition is best understood as a kind of group temporality perceived in terms of a cultural construct rather than as a simple chronological record of time: “Tradition is the past of a culture, as that past is thought to have continuity, a presence and a future.”26 The future of the group and its continuity with tradition is enjoined on its present carriers—a forward orientation that works to bind the fate of individuals to that of the group and so determines their joint trajectory. Nash goes on to draw out the more specific implications that this has for ethnonationalist identity. The group has strengths from the evident fact of its survival, and that strength is augmented if individual survival is but a link in group survival.

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In the forward motion of tradition, the elements of blood, commensality, and cult are those most emphasized through their symbolic markers. In brief, an identity is fashioned through name and symbol . . . and tradition is enshrined. Group and individual survival meld into a personal identity. These are the basic features when the differences between groups are the sort called “ethnic” and when this ethnicity takes place in a system of such differences in the political organization of a nation-state.27 These observations make an explicit connection between, on the one hand, an acute sense of a meritorious collective past, in the form of a historical tradition, and, on the other, the legitimacy of present claims to sovereignty over a given territory.28 This is often combined with a collective social memory that recalls past injustices—either real or imagined—and that demands their rectification. In turn, these factors are especially important for questions concerning the legitimacy of an existing state. For when a past injustice is perceived as having laid foundations of an “inauthentic” structure of sovereignty in the present,29 ethnicity is invested with the essential moral-cultural element in terms of which the establishment of a sovereign state for the group in question can be claimed—a state that reflects unambiguously the true nature of the political-cultural community. This conception of autonomy is clearly related to a post-Kantian notion of self-determination exemplified in the works of Herder, Fichte, and the German romanticists. Here, the ideal of authenticity becomes embodied in the ethnocratic state, which occupies an exclusive political space. In accordance with the historicist and traditionalist notions that underscore ethnonationalist ideology, the territorial boundaries of this state are frequently thought of as enclosing a “promised land.”

THE PROMISED LAND

The general idea of historical continuity from the past to the present is a vital element in establishing present claims to political identity, which then translate into territorial claims. Roger Just, in a study of the contemporary Greek ethnos, summarizes the importance to the ethnic psyche of being able to invoke the mandate of history in establishing the necessary links to remote origins of place, and thence to present claims to territorial space, as follows: Neither political incorporation nor present location are in themselves enough. “Origins” and the sanctity of history must also be invoked. It is not sufficient merely to live in a place or to be granted citizenship of it in order to claim the ethnic status associated with it. There must also be roots. One must be able to claim some historical rights to it as a place of origin; in short, one must be able to claim “its” history as part of one’s “own” history so that the individual claimant is somehow the product of some collective past.30

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In this formulation, tradition becomes “the banner of the ethnic nationalist,” insofar as it bears historical witness to present justifications of statehood. The banner itself is shouldered by a leadership that mobilizes popular support around an ensemble of appropriate symbols and myths, standing as authentic markers of political identity. Of course, the symbols and myths would have little impact if they did not resonate with familiar experience, but they are often tenuous.31 It has been pointed out that the truth content of “ethno-histories” is of relatively little importance compared with the drama and atmosphere they can create, and that to the participants themselves, it is usually useless to demonstrate that the assumptions giving rise to the “felt antiquity” of the ethnos are in fact false.32 In some cases, nationalist leaders have found it unnecessary to establish any link between objective truth and political “reality.” Mussolini’s nationalism exemplifies this very well. We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is a passion. It is not necessary that it be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.33

The power of this rhetoric is matched today by ethnonationalist leaders intent on reversing the alleged injustices of the past while demonstrating the exemplary victimhood of the ethnos. The genius of Milosevic, for example, is said to lie in his ability to shape a myth of Serb identity—a myth that is grounded in the medieval past and nurtured by a strong sense of historic victimization—and that clearly serves a vital political purpose in the present. The Serbs are profoundly convinced that they are more sinned against than sinning. Serbs talk about their nation’s suffering under Turkish rule and sacrifices in the two world wars as though they themselves had taken part in the 1389 battle of Kosovo, or personally fought against the Austrians in 1914. . . . They see only enemies . . . plotting against them, maligning them in the press, and killing their children. It is not important whether that judgement is real or not. What is important is that the Serbs passionately believe it.34

I have argued elswhere that there may be little point per se in debunking myths by revealing “real” histories.35 Certainly it would make not the slightest difference to the nationalism of leaders like Mussolini or Milosevic. Nonetheless, the study of processes involved in the construction of cultural or ethnic identities, including “inventions” and “fabrications,” can tell us much about the ideological foundations of ethnonationalism and provide an antidote to the crudest of primordial explanations. Another very good reason for maintaining a critical position on accounts of the alleged

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authenticity of an ethnos is the extent to which these serve the purpose of constructing and excluding others—as well as constructing themselves. An important purpose of identity markers, therefore, is to provide the means of defining those who belong to the group in question as well as those who do not belong. The primary symbolic marker is a name, which is placed in a system of names denoting exclusion and inclusion for each group.36 Thus, when Greek Macedonians accuse their neighbors in the former Yugoslavia of “trying to steal their history and traditions” by appropriating the name Macedonia for their own territorial space, 37 they are linking political authenticity explicitly with an unnegotiable historic identity symbolized by a name. This illustrates the point that the construction of identity is fundamentally an act of naming: naming is at the heart of an ideology that determines political affiliation.38 It defines the essential nature of the group and its authentic membership, as well as demarcating the boundaries that separate them from others. In this we find the classic construction and anathematization of otherness condemned by Edward Said in his analysis of Orientalism.39 This is the type of thinking that is so clearly at work behind contemporary expressions of xenophobia in Europe. As one commentator has remarked, this has been induced not merely by fear of “foreigners” in the community, but also by the kind of arrogance that depicts the outsider as “inferior rubbish”—and that has led people like Jean-Marie Le Pen, in France, and neo-Nazis, in Germany, “to press for the expulsion of the Other for the purpose of creating a homogeneous ‘cleansed’ territorial nation.”40 Commitment to the quest for recovery and purification of the promised land can retain its intensity even when its devotees have moved thousands of miles away to settle in another country—a country that, theoretically, affords a more conducive environment for relinquishing at least some aspects of the particularistic identity that drives ethnonationalist passions. Ben Anderson has called this phenomenon “long-distance nationalism”—a kind of ersatz politics through which is reproduced the “aura of drama, sacrifice, violence, speed, heroism and conspiracy” of the struggle back “home.”41 By way of illustration, Anderson highlights the commitment to fanaticism that is sometimes maintained by long-distance ethnonationalists and the effects that this can have back in the promised land: “We are aware of the role of German and Australian ‘Croats’ in speeding the violent collapse of Yugoslavia; of British and Canadian ‘Tamils’ in supporting the murderous Tigers of Jaffna; of Massachusetts ‘Irish’ in aid of the IRA; of segments of American Jewry behind right-wing extremism in Israel.”42 Of course, this does not apply to all or even most of those who retain a strong sense of ethnic identity after emigrating to a distant abode. Nor does this criticism suggest that all pride in cultural origins is simply a form of misplaced irrationalism and that vigorous assimilationist policies should be endorsed. In any case, one lesson to be learned from the

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attempted suppression of cultural or ethnic identity in the past is that it is more likely to encourage affirmation than denial, and to create martyrs for future generations to avenge.

BIOLOGICAL ELEMENTS OF ETHNONATIONALISM

It remains to emphasize one other aspect of ethnonationalist ideology: this concerns the biological basis of some of the ideology’s assumptions. As suggested above, the demarcation of the authentic ethnic community is normally associated with ideas about the history and traditions of the group that bind its members to a common future through a common past. This cluster of beliefs logically entails certain assumptions about bonds of common biological descent, making “blood” a key factor in group membership (in terms of both inclusion and exclusion). The notion of “descentism” implicit in this usually links biological inheritance to social and political inheritance, “as if the latter follows, or ought to follow, inevitably or necessarily from the former.”43 It should come as no surprise that the concept of ethnicity possesses a legacy similar to that of race, partly because the two words have often been used synonymously and both have their roots in physiological expressions.44 Although genetic differences between any two human beings are minute, and the differences between groups that perceive themselves as nations really are cultural rather than biological,45 a “rational” account of difference does not necessarily mitigate the intensity of feeling that the idea of blood ties generates—especially when that blood is thought to have been spilled in past eras on the very fields of one’s own territory and in defense of its integrity. It has been pointed out that racial prejudice has been around at least since the beginning of recorded human history, “but its biological justification [has] imposed the additional burden of intrinsic inferiority upon despised groups.”46 Early forms of biological nationalism in the nineteenth century drew on the growing prestige of the biological sciences. These were presented in a vulgarized version to fit in with such theories as Gobineau’s exposition of the natural inequalities of the races and the importance of maintaining pure bloodlines. Not only would this preserve the achievements of the great Teutonic civilization—it was also essential to “the fulfillment of their leadership mission.”47 Gobineau’s famous Essay begins with a statement claiming that the Aryan family has given rise to everything that is great and noble in the works of humankind.48 And one of the lessons of history is evidently to be found in the “irreconcilable antagonism between different races and different cultures.”49 It is hardly necessary to spell out here the practical consequences that followed from the development of these ideas in the next century. But there is a need to emphasize that the sentiments that underpinned the genocide of

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biologically defined “undesirables” in the course of World War II have clearly resurfaced in contemporary doctrines that preach the virtues of political exclusiveness based on notions of descentism—whether or not these are also described in terms of culture, religion, language, and so forth. Sentiments of this kind are flourishing with renewed vigor in locations ranging from Eastern Europe and South Central Asia to South Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and elsewhere. Furthermore, they are the basis on which some claims for self-determination in an exclusive political space are now being made by ethnonationalist forces.

CONCLUSION

If ever the idea of the modern centralized state acting as an automatic melting pot was a tenable one, the resurgence of ethnonationalist sentiments clearly reveals the flaws in its casting. In many cases, particularistic identities have not dissolved at all, and the bearers of such identities continue to seek recovery of a promised land and exclusive occupancy of it. A major justification for this quest is based on the idea of the ethnos as constituting a pure, natural community, bound by an all-encompassing chain of common descent and deriving its identity from the constitutive elements of a unique history and tradition. This is the basis on which ethnonationalism builds its vision of the authentic community that requires its very own political space in the form of a sovereign state. In this formulation, its nationalistic essence is clearly founded not only on cultural particularism but political particularism as well: Particularism, because nationalism identifies a “people,” distinct from others; political, because it requires that this particularism receive political expression in and through a state. For nationalism, the state is the political expression and guardian of a community that exists anterior to its state, but which best exists when it has its own state.50

Camilleri and Falk have written that the quest for identity and autonomy, while perhaps increasing in intensity, is “less likely to be statist in form and inspiration than in the past, and more likely to derive from local, ethnic, religious, linguistic, social or ecological perspectives and traditions which are in some sense critical of modernity.” 51 While the latter point concerning the challenge to modernity presented by ethnonationalist ideology is certainly apposite, there is little else in its ensemble of values and norms that threatens orthodox assumptions about the desirability of statist configurations as the basis for the ideal political community. Furthermore, while definitions of nationalism that equate it with loyalty to the state per se are to some extent misguided, 52 ethnonationalist ideology is certainly

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based on devotion to a particular species of political community that is defined uncompromisingly in terms of the ethnos. The ethnonationalist cause is to secure the political status of this particular “imagined community” through the establishment of an ethnocratic state—the existence of which is vindicated in terms of the unique history and traditions of the group. While a host of practical obstacles, from economic to security considerations, will no doubt modify the pursuit of ethnonationalist objectives on the ground, sovereign statehood in the terms described here is nonetheless promoted ideologically as the authentic expression of the right to full selfdetermination of the ethnos, and the most desirable model for the organization of political space. Indeed, it is advanced as a “final solution” to the problem of living with human difference,53 and therefore represents by far the most dangerous resolution of the ambiguities of state and nation in a world of nation-states characterized largely by ethnic heterogeneity.

NOTES The main argument in this chapter is based on that of a paper entitled “The Politics of Authenticity: Ethnonationalist Conflict and the State,” published as Working Paper no. 125, Peace Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, 1992, and also forthcoming in Kumar Rupesinghe, ed., Conflict Transformation (London: Macmillan, 1994). This chapter, however, focuses much more explicitly on the ideological dimensions of ethnonationalism and its implications for the statist paradigm. 1. However, I do not wish to overstate this point. Many modern states that contain culturally heterogeneous communities (and these form an overwhelming majority of states) are relatively peaceful places in which ethnic or cultural difference is accommodated without political turbulence, let alone violence. 2. Ralph Buultjens, “Behind Clio’s Mask: Philosophic History and Its Uses Today,” Ethics and International Affairs 7 (1992): 168. 3. See John A. Hall, “Introduction,” in John A. Hall, ed., States in History (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1986), p. 1. 4. See Alan Ward, “The Crisis of Our Times: Ethnic Resurgence and the Liberal Ideal,” Journal of Pacific History 27, no. 1 (June 1992): 85. 5. For a detailed discussion of the differences between state, regime, and government, see Lawson, “Conceptual Issues in the Comparative Study of Regime Change and Democratization,” Comparative Politics 25, no. 2 (January 1993): 183–205. 6. See Lawson, “Ethno-nationalist Dimensions of Internal Conflict—The Case of Bougainville Secessionism” in Kevin P. Clements, ed., Peace and Security in the Asia-Pacific Region (Palmerston North and Tokyo: Dunmore Press and United Nations University, 1992), pp. 59–60. 7. Harry Beran, cited in Allen Buchanan, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec (Boulder: Westview, 1991), p. 70. Buchanan argues, however, that consent is not necessary to political obligation and that, even if it was, many other factors would need to be present to support a right to secede (p. 71).

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8. See Michael Joseph Smith, “Liberalism and International Reform” in Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 212. 9. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 3d ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1966), pp. 27 and 29. 10. For a detailed discussion, ibid., Chapters 2 and 3. 11. Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, rev. ed. (Malabar: Robert E. Krieger, 1982), pp. 30–31. 12. Terry Nardin, “Moral Renewal: The Lessons of Eastern Europe,” Ethics and International Affairs 5 (1991): 7. 13. Kohn (note 11), 34. 14. A. D. Smith, “Neo-Classicist and Romantic Elements in the Emergence of Nationalist Conceptions,” in Smith, ed., Nationalist Movements (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 82. 15. Ernest Gellner, Reason and Culture: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1992), p. 120. 16. Richard Jay, “Nationalism,” in Robert Eccleshall, Vincent Geoghagan, Richard Jay, and Rick Wilford, Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 2d ed. (London: Unwin Hyman, 1984). 17. Peter J. Taylor, Political Geography: World Economy, Nation-State and Locality, 2d ed. (New York: Longman, 1989), p. 193. 18. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 268. 19. Edward Shils, Tradition (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 23. 20. Nardin (note 12), p. 7. 21. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1983), p. 125. The point has also been made that cultural identity is both fluid and manipulable; and so, it is argued, by itself it provides an unsatisfactory indicator for establishing the fixed boundaries around a particular political space. See VeitBrause, Chapter 4 in this book. 22. Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmented World (Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar, 1992), p. 27. 23. For elaboration of this point, see Lawson, “Institutionalizing Peaceful Conflict: Political Opposition and the Challenge of Democratization in Asia,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 47, no. 1 (1993): 27–28. 24. Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), p. 97. 25. George Balandier, Political Anthropology, A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 173. 26. Manning Nash, The Cauldron of Ethnicity in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 14. 27. Ibid, p. 15. 28. See also Shils (note 9), p. 59. 29. See Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 9. 30. Roger Just, “Triumph of the Ethnos,” in Elizabeth Tonkin, Maryon McDonald, and Malcolm Chapman, eds., History and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 75–76. 31. See Arline McCord and William McCord, “Ethnic Autonomy: A SocioHistoric Synthesis,” in Raymond L. Hall, ed., Ethnic Autonomy—Comparative

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Dynamics: The Americas, Europe and the Developing World (New York: Pergamon, 1979), p. 427. This point also forms the major focus of Just’s analysis: Just (note 30). 32. Anthony D. Smith, “The Supersession of Nationalism?” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 31, nos. 1–2 (1990): 14–15. 33. Benito Mussolini (1922) quoted in Jay, “Nationalism,” p. 185. 34. Dusko Doder, “Yugoslavia: New War, Old Hatreds,” Foreign Policy, no. 91 (summer 1993): 15. 35. See especially Lawson, “The Politics of Tradition: Problems for Legitimacy and Democracy in the South Pacific,” Pacific Studies 16, no. 2, 1993. 36. Nash (note 26), pp. 8–9. 37. “The Balkans,” Special Broadcasting Service, Canberra, April 6, 1993. 38. Aziz-Al Azmeh, “The Discourse of Cultural Authenticity: Islamist Revivalism and Enlightenment Universalism,” in Eliot Deutsch, ed., Culture and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991), pp. 478. 39. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 40. John Keane, “Democracy’s Poisonous Fruit,” Times Literary Supplement, August 21, 1992: 11. 41. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics: The Wertheim Lecture (Amsterdam: Centre for Asian Studies, 1992), p. 11. 42. Ibid., p. 12. 43. Steven Thiele, “Taking a Sociological Approach to Europeanness (Whiteness) and Aboriginality (Blackness),” in Steven Thiele, ed., Reconsidering Aboriginality, special issue of Australian Journal of Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1991): 180. 44. Lucius Outlaw, “Lifeworlds, Modernity, and Philosophical Praxis: Race, Ethnicity, and Critical Social Theory,” in Deutsch (note 38), p. 33. 45. See Antony Black, “Nation and Community in the International Order,” Review of International Studies 19 (1993): 87. 46. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (Harmondsworth, England: Pelican, 1984), p. 31. 47. Kohn (note 11), pp. 74–75. 48. Cited in Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. 42. 49. Ibid., p. 43. 50. Sanjay Seth, “Political Theory in the Age of Nationalism,” Ethics and International Affairs 7 (1993): 83. 51. Camilleri and Falk (note 22), p. 255. 52. Walker Connor, “A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a . . .” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1, no. 4 (1978): 386. 53. See Richard Bernstein, “Incommensurability and Otherness Revisited,” in Deutsch (note 38), p. 100.

6 The Stars on China’s Flag: Appropriating the Universe for the Nation John Fitzgerald

A number of different flags have been raised in China this century, to the rhythm of the rise and fall of successive regimes. The history of these flags illustrates not only the transition from one state formation to the next, nor just the intensity of conflict among competing regimes, but also the ethical reasoning that has underlain these transitions and conflicts at every stage. In their appeals to the heavens, China’s national flags recount a long story of the ethical negotiation between the self and the universe, and between the nation and the world, that has gone into the manufacture of the nation-state in history. The nation was conceived in a marriage of ethics and history: it inherited the universal principles of the one and the contingent particulars of the other, and these together stamped its features in a successive array of stars, stripes, and suns. This negotiation between ethics and history is still under way. Today, the single-party flags that fly over the two Chinas signal a growing disjuncture between the ethical foundations of the modern state, on the one hand, and new demands within China for greater regional autonomy and political freedoms, as well as experiments beyond China in limited forms of sovereignty, in regional economic alliances, in the assertion of human values over national ones, and in attempts to deal with global issues through new networks of substate institutions. Together, these domestic and global developments offer a fundamental challenge to the ideals of state unity, independence, and sovereignty that molded China as a nation and as a state.1 Yet these new challenges offer nothing new to the tradition of ethical reflection itself from which the nation and the state emerged in China this century. If anything, it was the idea of the nation-state that presented the greatest challenge to the universalist framework of traditional philosophy. Suns and stars were never simply partisan insignia in the iconography of Chinese nationalism. The sun, the stars, and the entire firmament offered a source of inspiration for ethical and political philosophers seeking 91

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to discover their own place in the universe, and who then deduced the place of their “nation” in a new international order of sovereign nationstates into which the Chinese Empire was forcibly abducted in the nineteenth century. The star of China was located in a much larger constellation of forces that were held to determine not only the future of the nation but the destiny of the world. The idea of the nation-state is in every case grounded in a vision of world community far greater than any nation, as Sanjay Seth argues in an earlier chapter of this volume, and nationalist ethics are generally conceived within a framework of universal human values. What do these global and universal contexts mean for the transformation of a nation-state such as China? And to what extent do differences among nations and states arise from differing conceptions of the universal (or international) systems within which they are thought to operate? The present chapter is concerned with the ways in which the idea of a world community and the appeal of universal values translate into particular kinds of states and nations, and impinge historically upon domestic politics and social movements. The history of twentieth-century China offers some insight into this general problem. At the same time, approaching the history of China from a more general ethical perspective helps us to restore to ethics and instrumental reasoning a place not far behind that of “gun barrels” in the history of the Chinese state itself.

ETHICS AND GUN BARRELS

It would be mistaken to assume that the Chinese state has been anything but a state in the process of transition this century. When the empire of China confronted the modern nation-states of Europe, under the pressure of war and the vagaries of the international treaty system, its days were numbered. By the close of the nineteenth century, the survival of the state was at issue and, many thought, the continuity of the civilization and the survival of the “race” were at stake as well. The process of ensuring the survival of “race,” civilization, and state entailed a transition in the twentieth century from one world order, in which China lay at the center of the universe, to another, in which China was no more than a sovereign power in a world of nation-states that were to be counted as equals to the degree that they could assert their authority as states. Chinese nationalism was conceived, above all, as a project for preserving the state by transforming it. Two aspects of the traditional Chinese world order reinforced this rational calculus. First, China was assumed to lie at the center of the world; secondly, the world was thought to be a universal moral community.2 Together, these twin assumptions meant that China’s national particularity

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was inevitably located within a rational ethical framework. The assumption of China’s centrality did not long survive the arrival of Western gunboats and militia, in the midnineteenth century, and by the closing decades of that century moral philosophers began coming to terms with the implications of China’s abrupt displacement. The second assumption, that China was located in a world order with universal ethical pretensions, proved to be far more robust. Ethics were not banished from the center of the world along with China, but instead reconfigured to accommodate the ethical community of the nation-state. Only a new kind of state would do; one that embraced the principles of the Enlightenment and modernity, the lessons of natural history and social science, and the ideals of democratic government and national sovereignty, and that, in the end, could marshal the resources of the nation in defense of the state. The political history of twentieth-century China may be seen as a series of experiments in reimagining the nation in varying configurations of race, region, and social class, with the single aim of ensuring the survival of the state under a variety of readings of the international state system. Chief among the problems confronting China’s nationalists was how to derive a formula for reconciling the particularity of the nation with the universal principles that underlay the new world order, and for reconciling the problem of unity-in-diversity within the nation itself in order to achieve the level of national unity that the world order appeared to require of its members. The two problems were closely related: the principles that appeared to explain unity and division in the world were applied systematically to the quest for unity-in-diversity within the nation. The intellectual transition between the philosopher Kang Youwei and his disciple Liang Qichao, around the turn of the century illustrates one of the ways in which the tension between a universal community and a national community could be resolved. In the 1890s, Kang Youwei rediscovered and refashioned the classical Chinese ideal of Global One World (Datong) into a universal ethical framework for the contemporary world order.3 His One World was a truly global community that acknowledged no distinction of race, class, or gender, that was united by common language, values, and culture, and that was limited in its extent only by the physical limits of the planet itself. The ideal community, for Kang, was not in fact the planet Earth but the universe. Kang was a keen stargazer. One World initially embraced the “living creatures on Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune,” as well as those on Earth, and in more sanguine moments he had even hoped to put an end to intergalactic warfare: “I have pondered deeply how to rid all the stars and all the heavens of war, but could not (resolve it).” But out of concern that his One World should be realized, historically, he chose to limit his community to the planet Earth and to the creatures inhabiting it: “I am only going to consider how to do away with the calamity of war in the world in which I was born.” In

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a significant gesture to practice, Kang settled for a minimum program embracing peace on earth.4 Part of that program was to convert the Chinese Empire into a nationstate that would approximate One World in its outline by eliminating differences of class, gender, language, and race among the people who made up the “nation.” Although he professed to discover One World, Kang indirectly discovered modern China. Kang’s student, Liang Qichao, selected the nation as the proper ethical community for the stargazing self. Liang hoped dearly for the emergence of a global community, but by the time he sat down to write The New Citizen (Xinminshuo) in 1902, it had become clear that the boundaries of his ethical community ran parallel to the borders of the Chinese nation-state.5 Liang’s reasoning was, after the fashion of his master, eminently rational. He simply reduced Kang’s minimum program a step further in the belief that present historical circumstances placed the ideal of a global state out of the question for the time being. One World resided, for the present, in the nation.6 When Liang tried to standardize Chinese identity in The New Citizen, he was only seeking for the nation-state what Kang had set out to achieve for the world: the elimination of all claims on the identity of the self prior to those of a central state. An indication of the importance of this ethical reworking of the term One World is the persistence of the term in modern political rhetoric. Sun Yatsen and Mao Zedong used the expression freely in their writings and speeches, and it is still to be found peppered over the essays of Communist functionaries and dissident democrats alike.7 Yet even among China’s nationalists there has persisted a lingering reluctance to embrace the ideas of the nation and the nation-state without reservation, precisely because they were insufficiently rational. Zhang Binglin is remembered as the “father of racial consciousness” among China’s nationalists, yet he, too, cried out against the boundaries that divided the world and trained his fury upon races and nations as among the worst offenders: they were too arbitrary and accidental. “Now, in this multitudinous universe, the earth is but a small grain of rice in a vast granary, yet today [we] who live on it have divided it up into territories, we protect what is ours and call it a ‘nation.’” 8 In fact, however, Zhang felt he had little choice but to settle on the “race” as his ethical community and the nation-state as the site of government. The present stage of history required it. In the end, Zhang became the founding father of modern Chinese “racism” because it was the only reasonable thing to do. Subsequently, in the Nationalist and Communist revolutions, the barrels of China’s big guns were trained in the direction of the boundaries of race, region, and class that had been first highlighted by the flares of these ethical philosophers. The idea of the nation-state embraced by revolutionary nationalists balanced the qualities of the particular and the universal, because the nation appeared poised, as it were, between the village and the universe. In

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the ethical, geographic, and demographic spectrum of the nationalist imagination, the landscape and the social communities of China appeared to possess one feature in common: the primordial “barriers” (jie) that divided them. Yet the nationalist assault on divisive barriers stopped at the water’s edge, where waves of “cosmopolitan” sentiment threatened to swamp all that was particular about the nation. Indeed, nationalism was on the defensive against particularism and cosmopolitanism in equal measure. So the sides taken in struggle and debate reflected different approaches to the two main tasks confronting nationalists. With one hand they needed to raise the myths and symbols of national consciousness to bridge divisions of “clan” and “native place”; with the other they had to sever connections with the universal community, whose time had yet to come.9 While different schools proposed different solutions, all were internally consistent in applying the same ethical principles to the national problem as they did to the international one. That is, the solutions for reconciling the particular and the universal within the nation matched those thought to be operating in the world at large.

THE PARTICULAR, THE UNIVERSAL, AND THE FLAG

These efforts are illustrated in the history of China’s flags. There have been four internationally recognized national flags this century, in addition to a number of other candidates that never quite made the grade. The first, in the shape of a pennant and bearing a coiled dragon, flew lazily over the imperial fleet at anchor in Tianjin as the empire crumbled in 1911. The dragon pennant of the imperial court was replaced by a flag in the European style, bearing five horizontal stripes, which was raised in January 1912 to mark the establishment of the Republic of China. Around the same time, a number of other flags flew alongside the republican flag, bearing varying configurations of the sun and of constellations of stars. But the flag that succeeded the republican flag was the Nationalists’, bearing a blue-sky and white-sun motif in the canon of a bright red rectangle. This flag moved with the Nationalist Party to Taiwan, in 1949, where it remains the “national” flag to this day. The national flag that has flown over Beijing since 1949 carries a distinctive canon of one large star ringed by four smaller stars, again on a bright-red background. Each of the flags that succeeded the dragon pennant has represented a different kind of revolutionary state—Republican, Nationalist, and Communist—and each flag has marked the repudiation of the one that preceded it. More pointedly, the arrival of each of these phases in the history of the modern nation-state has heralded a new set of criteria for distinguishing the limits of tolerable national diversity and has identified new principles for asserting national unity; each flag, in other words, has reconciled imagined

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differences around a distinctive symbol of unity in diversity. The widely felt imperative to unify and strengthen the state, to the point where China might take its part in the community of nations as an equal partner, ultimately determined both the criteria of tolerable diversity within the nationstate and the principles upon which unity should be asserted.10 What makes the history of China’s national flags unique is the particular sequence of icons and the logical progression that they reveal in the history of the state in its attempts to apply a variety of universal principles, drawn from the firmament of Enlightenment thought, to the general problem of attaining unity-in-diversity and establishing the place of the nation in the world. The most important of these have been racism (or, as it was thought, the natural division of the world into competing national “races”); local democracy (or more particularly the right of distinct communities to self-government in a world struggling for democratic representation against an older monarchical order) and classism (or the division of China and the world into competing social classes that were momentarily thought to render national differences redundant). Each of these principles has supplied a distinct set of criteria for distinguishing national citizens from national traitors within the orbit of the nation-state, and for distinguishing among friends and enemies in the international state system. The horizontal five-striped flag of the Republic (1912–1927) represented national unity as an equal union of ethnic groups: the red represented the Han community of China, yellow the Manchurian, blue the Mongolian, white the Tibetan, and black the Moslem. This conformed with the views of one party of nationalists, which distinguished clearly between the boundaries of ethnic groups and states in their reading of world history. Liang Qichao observed that a single state might house many ethnic-nations and a single race might well be scattered over numerous states; hence, there was no general law governing the relationship between ethnicity and statehood. A racial definition of the nation could prove a barrier to state-building in a multiethnic community such as China, he argued, where nationalism needed to sever all connection between ethnic identity and patriotism in order to maintain the territorial integrity of the empire and the centrality of the state.11 Racial nationalists contested this reading of history. While it was true that Han Chinese had long distinguished “barbarians” (yi) from themselves by outward signs of skin color, odor, body hair, gait, and manners, such gratuitous insults did not make for racial solidarity of the kind the revolutionaries had in mind for the nation.12 Earlier references to barbarians as degenerate animals had been framed within an ethical hierarchy, rather than a “scientific” racial one, and had usually counseled that the Han might well degenerate to the level of beasts and barbarians if they were not careful. The moral order also held out promise of barbarian redemption by offering to incorporate border peoples into Greater Han civilization if they

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adopted appropriate standards of belief and behavior. Indeed, to racial revolutionaries, it seemed that the incapacity of their countrymen to think of themselves in terms of race was one of their most debilitating features as a race. Even in the early revolutionary period, Sun Yatsen observed, “the majority of the Chinese people still did not realize that they were conquered by the alien Manchus, so they lived in a stupor and died dreaming.”13 In order to conceive of relations among peoples as a struggle between races and nations for a place in history, the Chinese people had to be aroused from their “stupor” to something approaching modern racism. The five-bar flag of the 1912 Republic was inconsistent with a racial revolution against the “alien Manchus.” Although proclaiming the importance of ethnicity in distinguishing among peoples, at home and abroad, the separate bars of color announced that the nation was not a homogeneous ethnic community after all. This would not do for Sun Yatsen’s Nationalist movement. He imagined that the Chinese people made up a single “race,” competing in a struggle for survival with other races represented by their own national states. Chiang Kaishek presented a similar argument, in China’s Destiny (1943), the better to illustrate his point that the Chinese people “constitute not only one nation, but one race.”14 The five “stocks” that made up the people were not to be confused with ethnic or racial groupings; ethnic differences were said to be more apparent than real, grounded not in biology but in environmental conditioning and belief.15 The resort to cultural determinism in explaining ethnic diversity within China was not, however, matched by a comparable assessment of differences among nations. To the contrary, national boundaries were etched in blood. In fact the illusory ethnic barriers that set China’s people apart from one another were more readily revealed as illusions because real ties of blood distinguished them from all other “races” on earth. The Chinese nation could plausibly be conceived as a single community, bound by bloodties, when the international struggle was a competition among blood types. So Nationalists eagerly embraced the dubious idea of a “yellow race” because it signified both racial unity and distinctiveness. “Chinese belong to the yellow race,” announced Sun Yatsen, “because they come from the blood stock of the yellow race. The blood of ancestors is transmitted by heredity down through the race, making blood kinship a powerful force.”16 The Nationalist Party itself was a powerful force. In a symbolic gesture marking the identity of the Nationalist Party with the “race” and with the state, Sun placed his party colors on the canon of a red flag and declared the result the national flag of China. The linkage of a single race with a single-party state was not coincidental. Sun insisted that his party should rule in the name of the people because the people had failed to appreciate the racial significance of their “own” revolution. He meant business. The raising of the Nationalist flag in Guangzhou on 1 January, 1925, signalled the onset of a concerted pogrom against descendents of the

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original Manchu Banners who had been sent south to pacify Guangdong in the midseventeenth century.17 From 1928, the Nationalist government established an elaborate cultural regime to assist the people of Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria, Xinjiang, and the Han regions to overcome false consciousness of ethnic identity, and to achieve a thorough comprehension of their common racial identity—and, not incidentally, to recover their sentiment of “central loyalty” toward the Nationalist state.18 Such was the function of the sun on the flag: as there are no two suns in the sky, so there is no place for two suns on a flag. China was a monoethnic nation and a single-party state. In the iconography of China’s flags, it is stars and stripes that have represented difference. Three flags that rivalled the Nationalist one—two of which failed to make the transition to national flags—had recourse to the stars. One depicted nine stars surrounding a circle and enfolding the traditional symbols for yin and yang. This nine-star insignia was unfurled on October 10, 1911, by military units involved in the Wuchang Uprising. Another flag depicted eighteen stars arranged in two concentric circles. The stars on each of these two flags symbolized distinct military or regional political units, each gathered under a union flag. The eighteen-star flag, in particular, is notable for representing the eighteen provinces (into which the country was then divided) around a symbol of a national confederation. National confederation—like the alternative national models of ethnic coexistence and racial unity—was also conceived in relation to a distinctive international order, in this case founded on progressive humanist principles. A founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Dazhao, argued in January 1923 that regional, social, and ethnic differentiation within China matched comparable divisions within the world at large. Progress, he counseled, was propelling peoples and states in the direction of One World (shijie datong)—“a world through which the common spirit of humanity flows, like blood through a single vein”—and federalism was an ideal system for bringing different communities together because it was uniquely suited to resolving the paradox of the particular and the universal in the transition to One World: “Localities, countries, races and social units each have their own particularity, just as individual people do, and federalism enables them to preserve their particularities while preventing the encroachment of others.”19 In the case of China, Li concluded, internal divisions were best resolved by adopting a federal model of government consonant with the principles governing particularity and universality within the world at large. The federalist movement ultimately fell to a third flag that appealed to the stars. This was the flag of the Communist Party state, depicting four stars around the greater star of the Communist Party, which eventually displaced the multiethnic flag of the Republic, the confederation of

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self-governing provinces, and the union of the “race” under the Nationalist party-state. Despite Li Dazhao’s intervention in favor of federalism, Communist theorists more generally tended to brand federalism a form of decentralized “feudalism” that was, in turn, conceived as a system of government inconsistent with the level of national unity required to make the transition to international proletarian dictatorship. Like the Nationalists, Communist theorists mounted their arguments against federalism and feudalism by establishing China’s historical pedigree as a single and unified nation. The Communists, however, resorted to an essentialist (and equally contrived) characterization of the nation in terms of class, rather than of race.20 The Communist argument also reconciled the particular and the universal within the nation on principles thought to be governing the course of world history. In this case, differences among national social classes were thought to reflect greater historical forces vying for supremacy in the evolving world order. In place of regional or ethnic differentiation, the Communists substituted the idea of uniformly national differences among social classes. China was one country housing a single “Chinese people” (Zhonghua minzu), argued Chen Duxiu, within a uniform socioeconomic system. As China’s economy was subject to the universal laws of history, so the nation’s newly emerging industrial proletariat would supply the historical fixative to bond their four hundred million compatriates into one.21 Others argued that regional differences dividing the nation were at base differences between nationally constituted social classes. Hence, “class warfare” would ultimately supply a force for unity sufficient to overcome differences of place and ethnicity, and so unite a state that was otherwise threatened with divisions measured even greater in their magnitude.22 Yet although the idea of class supplied an alternative principle of unity-indiversity to the racial model proposed by the Nationalists, it appeared to require a similar form of political representation: class struggle, like racial struggle, was conceived as a nation-building enterprise on a single-party model of the state. There was no room for self-government or for federalism in either case. The main game, all along, was achieving the sovereignty and independence of the state, and any attempt to classify the nation or transform the state that failed to achieve this end was inadequate by its own admission. Yet, paradoxically, even the state itself did not appear to be a given political unit, but rather an artful creation, akin to the creation of the universe in which the principles of nationalism were rooted. Creation of the state made gods of men. “It is men who create the state,” announced Li Dazhao in 1915. “We are the ones who dominate the immensity of the universe; the universe allows us to exist, we people of the same species, and admits that we may be capable of creating a state.”23 Those with sufficient genius to create the state were also entitled to nominate who it was that the

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state would act to represent; that is, who exactly comprised the nation. The four social classes starred for inclusion in the Communist nation were selected by the demands of state-creation itself. It happened by default: when certain classes appeared to resist the aims of a revolution for state unification, their presumed class enemies were actively recruited into the struggle against them. The new state then imagined by the Communists came to be identified explicitly with representation of the worker, peasant, petty bourgeois and “national” bourgeois classes that, by virtue of state goals, came to occupy a privileged position in the galaxy of state. State and national identity were reconciled in the vision of a class nation, under a Communist Party flag.24

A POLITICAL OR AN ETHICAL CRISIS?

The national flags of the People’s Republic of China and of the Republic of China on Taiwan no longer signify the states they represent. On Taiwan, the national flag and national anthem of the Republic still make explicit reference to the Nationalist Party at a time when the state is moving toward a multiparty system: the flag with its Nationalist Party insignia on the canon, and the anthem by referring to the nation as “our party” (wu dang). When a party lends its name and its insignia to the state, the state is hostage to the fortunes of the party. On the mainland, the flag of the People’s Republic betrays its origins in the state-orchestrated class struggles of the Communist revolution. With four small stars representing the “revolutionary” social classes of the nation, the flag of the People’s Republic signifies not only the victory of the classes that comprise the nation but also, by their omission, the defeat of the counterrevolutionary classes that did not make it onto the flag in the first place. The flag has proven an embarrassment on both counts. First, its celebration of the union of revolutionary classes has not always been consistent with a continuing commitment to class struggle even after Liberation. In the Cultural Revolution, the four social classes on the flag engaged in star-wars among themselves. So a generation of schoolchildren was taught to honor the flag without ever learning what it was they were saluting.25 More recently, the commitment to class struggle that guided the selection of stars for the flag is at odds with the more liberal economic program introduced by Deng Xiaoping. The flag’s selective assemblage of social classes heightens the asymmetry between state and nation by reminding those who salute the flag (and know what they are saluting) that the party’s ideological foundations are at odds with its practices. To be sure, domestic and foreign policies have shifted continuously throughout the history of the People’s Republic, and not always in the same direction. There have been three major shifts in foreign policy

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orientation since the 1950s, each associated with a different reading of China’s place in the global balance of power and each entailing different degrees of correspondence between domestic and foreign policy.26 But none has been as sharp as the present disjuncture. In the day-to-day conduct of domestic and foreign policy, as Samuel Kim has recently observed, “two Chinas—the domestic one and the external one—are moving on separate tracks.”27 It is not at all certain that this disjuncture is dysfunctional. To the contrary, continuity of policy in one field can offer a stable institutional framework for quite revolutionary changes in other fields. Nor is it at all certain that changing conceptions of China’s place in the world need have significant domestic implications, or that domestic policy developments inevitably prompt comparable developments in thinking about world order. The question at issue is not whether domestic and foreign policy should go hand in hand merely for the sake of consistency; indeed, it is not really a question of policy at all. The question is an ethical one: Have discrepancies between the ideological foundations of the state, the demands of a changing world order, changes in national policy, and reforms in institutional relationships within the state itself reached such critical mass that they threaten the legitimacy of the regime, and hence prompt reconsideration of the ethical foundations of the nation-state as a whole? It appears that they have, although still within the limits prescribed by the negotiation between ethics and history that has characterized the state all along. Certainly, the commitment of successive Chinese states to the ideal of state sovereignty on the Westphalian model (and to cultivating an appearance of unity and dignity in the face of the world) presents formidable obstacles to any radical reconsideration of the nature of the Chinese state, just as they limit the likelihood of Beijing making significant concessions on questions of sovereignty on international and global issues. The ethical transvaluation from a universal empire to a particular nation was bought at such high cost that it would appear foolhardy to reverse the procedure now. At any rate, memories of the hard-fought struggle against “imperialism” are not easily forgotten, and concessions on the issue of the unity and sovereignty of the state still invite accusations of treachery against the state. Yet the Communist party-state no longer has the stage to itself, as the reforms of the 1980s have intensified substate linkages across China’s provincial and national borders to a level unprecedented in the history of the People’s Republic. Dealings among entrepreneurs over lunch at a local restaurant are likely to have as great an influence on China’s future as the deliberations of the Politburo and the State Council at their ponderous formal sessions. Nor does Beijing even direct the action taking place on stage. China’s leaders have made a deliberate policy choice to expand the country’s dependence on foreign markets for trade, capital, and technology,

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recognizing full well the implications of this dependence for their continuing commitment to the “inviolable” principle of state sovereignty. They can no longer do just as they please without bringing their own identity and legitimacy into question. The legitimacy crisis has been heightened by the action of the People’s Liberation Army in opening fire on demonstrators in June, 1989. In consequence, even accusations of state treachery no longer carry the force they once did. Indeed, some of those presently accused of state treachery have begun to ask, “Treachery against which state?”28 A state is in serious trouble when it is no longer identified with the country it governs. For a single-party state, the problem can be terminal. Two further sources of tension are worth noting. A critical question now facing the Chinese state, in the view of central political actors, is how to promote economic development at the local level without sacrificing the political authority of the center. At the local level, the question is reversed: How is local autonomy to be preserved without upsetting the whole applecart, and perhaps sacrificing the economic gains that only centrally sanctioned political stability can ensure? To this is added a second problem: How is ethnic nationalism to be contained in China’s border regions? Both have been conceived, to date, as problems of local-central relations, amenable to correction by judicious adjustment of the center’s levers of control. To the extent that Beijing has continued to insist on exercising absolute control over localities, it has prompted demands at the provincial and local level for a higher degree of autonomy from the center. For the moment, the demand for regional autonomy has been sublimated in strategies of resistance, or confined to policy-briefing papers of the kind prepared for local political leaders by their teams of private advisers. For good reason. Beijing has been quick to react to any overt sign of regional autonomy that might issue from its liberal economic policies, and has resorted to a familiar and very powerful nationalist vocabulary to make its point. The nexus between local economic and political authority has been disparaged as marking the reemergence of “economic warlords,” or “feudal remnants,” thought to be still lingering in the unreconstructed national soul from the prerevolutionary era. In fact, however, present demands for a greater degree of local autonomy resonate more closely with calls issued earlier this century for a multiethnic union or a federal system of representative government than they do with premodern arguments for feudal rule in China. In the event, the federalist movement came to nothing. But the arguments for and against a multiethnic republic or a federation are worth resurrecting in order to discover why they were rejected as appropriate forms of government in the past, and hence to test whether the same arguments can still be mounted with any plausibility today. If we are to take the ethics and the rhetoric of politics seriously, then we might still find cause for alarm in the center’s persistence in branding

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moves toward greater provincial and local autonomy as “feudal.” These accusations echo a particular reading of One World philosophy that has aided and abetted the repression of difference within the nation for over a century, and that was predicated on a model of the nation and of the state that has long since outgrown its usefulness. One World was not initially conceived as a framework for the nation-state, nor even as a framework for the world, but as a formula embracing the “galactic clusters.” It may still be premature to expect to put an end to intergalactic warfare; but not, perhaps, for the world, for China, or for its constituent communities and regions. This calls for a little more than tinkering: it calls for rational consideration of the new forms of local and international community emerging in the world today, and for a reasoned response to new limitations on the provenance of the state that these developments must inevitably entail. There is plenty of precedent for such ethical reasoning in China’s own past. Indeed, if One World were to correspond with the contours of the planet, as Kang Youwei so earnestly hoped, then the burden of keeping this ideal alive might be lifted, at last, from China itself.

NOTES 1. For a general survey of these developments, see Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (London: Edward Elgar, 1992). 2. Hao Chang, Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 157–158. 3. Jung-pang Lo, ed., K’ang Yu-wei: A Biography and a Symposium (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1967), pp. 32–42. 4. Laurence G. Thompson, Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958), pp. 66, 80. 5. Hao Chang (note 2), pp. 6, 109–111, 155–156. Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), p. 53. 6. Hao Chang (note 2), p. 157. 7. Martin Bernal, Chinese Socialism to 1917 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), Ch. 1, passim; Sun Yatsen, San Min Chu I: The Three Principles of the People, Frank W. Price, trans. (Chunking: Ministry of Information, 1943); Mao Zedong, “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship” [1949], in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, in 4 vols. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1969), vol. 4, p. 414. 8. Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 51–52. 9. Hao Chang (note 2), p. 155; Sun Yatsen (note 7), pp. 5, 67–68, 99–100, 113–114. 10. This is not peculiar to the history of the Chinese flag. See Scott M. Guenter, The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1990). 11. Sun Yatsen (note 7), pp. 260–261.

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12. Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (London: Hurst, 1992), pp. 4, 122; Zarrow (note 8), p. 297. 13. Sun Yatsen, cited in Ssu-yü Teng and John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, 1839–1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 260–264. 14. Chiang Kaishek, China’s Destiny [1943], Wang Chung-hui, trans. (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 13. 15. Ibid. 16. Sun Yatsen (note 7), p. 9. 17. North-China Herald, February 28 and March 21, 1925. 18. Chiang Kaishek (note 14), p. 10; John De Francis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 83. 19. Li Dazhao, “Pingmin zhuyi” (Common-people-ism), January, 1923, in Li Dazhao xuanji (selected works of Li Dazhao) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1978), pp. 416–417. 20. Compare Mao Zedong, “The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party” [December 1939], in Mao Zedong (note 7), vol. 2, pp. 305–334, with Chiang Kaishek (note 14), pp. 3–15. 21. Chen Duxiu, “Liansheng zizhi yu zhongguo zhengxiang” (Federal selfgovernment and China’s political situation), Xiangdao zhoubao (the guide weekly) 1 (Sept. 13, 1922): 2. 22. [Cai] Hesen, “Wuli tongyi yu liansheng zizhi: junfa zhuanzheng yu junfa geju” (military reunification and federal self-government: warlord dictatorship and warlord separatism), Xiangdao 2 (September 20, 1922): 14. 23. Li Dazhao, “Pessimism and Consciousness of Self” (August 10, 1915), excerpted and translated in Hélène Carrère d’Encausse and Stuart R. Schram, Marxism and Asia, An Introduction with Readings (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1969), pp. 204–208. Emphasis added. 24. This argument is developed in Fitzgerald, “The misconceived revolution: state and society in China’s Nationalist Revolution, 1923–1926,” Journal of Asian Studies 49:2 (May 1990): 323–343. 25. W. J. F. Jenner, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1992), p. 66. 26. Michael Yahuda, Towards the End of Isolationism: China’s Foreign Policy After Mao (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983); Joseph Camilleri, Chinese Foreign Policy (Oxford, England: Martin Robertson, 1980). 27. Samuel S. Kim, “Mainland China and a New World Order,” Issues and Studies, 27:1 (November 1991): 1–43, esp. 40. 28. Fang Lizhi, “On patriotism and global citizenship,” G. K. Sun, transcriber, James H. Williams, translator, in George Hicks, ed., The Broken Mirror: China after Tiananmen (Harlow, England: Longman, 1990), pp. xxi–xxv.

7 State, Civil Society, and the Political Subject in a Divided Society: Reimagining Political Relations in Northern Ireland John D. Cash Since the 1950s in Northern Ireland, both the state and various political and social movements have imagined, and then re-imagined, a “modernity” in which the rules that organize subjectivity and intersubjectivity are “inclusivist” in form. From this perspective, the subsequent history of Northern Ireland can be analyzed as so many (failed) attempts by segments of the state, and by various civil groupings, to institutionalize this reimagined society as a new form of social and political relations entailing a new set of identities; one in that ethnic or religious identity plays a subsidiary role. These attempts have given rise to various forms of “exclusivist” resistance that have thrown both state and civil society into a profound legitimation crisis. An adequate understanding of the ideological rules and processes involved in this legitimation crisis is required before any analysis can be developed of what is entailed in breaking the rules of exclusivism and institutionalizing a novel, inclusivist form of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Northern Ireland (and other “divided societies”). Such an inquiry throws into question the whole matter of the relations between state, civil society, and political subjectivity and, thereby, offers an instructive setting in which to pursue questions regarding the reimagining and institutionalization of new forms of political subjectivity and political relations. In particular, it is the unconscious distortions and resistances that inevitably accompany attempts to institutionalize these reimagined subjectivities and relations that are pursued in this chapter. Such a perspective intends to provide a powerful and novel approach to studying the ongoing conflictual processes through which state and civil society struggle over the institutionalization of ideological rules and political subjectivities; whether these be the established, more or less sanctioned rules and subjectivities that constitute rationality, common sense, and taken-for-granted identities or whether they be newly imagined forms that challenge and threaten the established reality principles. This approach, 105

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then, offers one means of examining in some detail the processes that R. B. J. Walker has characterized as attempts “to resolve the relation between unity and diversity.”1 It proceeds, more or less as Walker suggests, by recognizing that “the state is its own ideology” and that its crisis of legitimacy is played out on a field where players other than the state appear as phantoms and where the rules of the game are exactly about whether such phantoms can name themselves, declare their own constitutive characteristics, and name, also, their preferred mode of relating to others, including the reimagined state. This process is concerned with what Walker has termed, with specific reference to the crisis of the state, the state’s continuing to “mak[e] these claims stick or participat[e] effectively in other constructions of the relationship between universality and particularity.”2 The broad claim from which we begin is that, in developing an understanding of the ideological forms that organize both subjectivity and intersubjectivity (or political identities and political relations), it is necessary to incorporate unconscious processes. Unless such a critical and protean dimension of both ideology and identity is systematically addressed, any attempts adequately to analyze the institutionalization of reimagined political identities and political relations will founder. The critical issue becomes one of defining the most appropriate manner in which to execute such an incorporation of the unconscious; that is, the issue becomes how best to take the unconscious seriously when developing an analysis of the political processes involved in the reimagining and reworking of forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The approach advocated here is one that I have developed on the basis of a critical reading of, among others, Althusser, Habermas, and Giddens. This approach attempts to develop a theory and method for the analysis of the structuration of the unconscious in ideology. I will sketch some general aspects of this approach and its possible uses for commenting upon attempts, within Northern Ireland, to institutionalize new forms of political identity and political relations; then discuss two examples of Unionist political discourse that, given limited space, must serve to illustrate some unconscious rules that have recurrently been drawn upon in the structuration of exclusivist Unionism. There is more than one way of reading psychoanalysis into social and political theory. In contemporary theory, still under the strong influence of structuralism and poststructuralism, there is a major tendency to accept the conceit that the unconscious is not only universal or transhistorical but also that it is always the same. Such a conceit has clear limitations and inevitably distorts any attempts to understand the unconscious processes at play in the structuration of ideologies and identities. However, even in those cases where the structuralist emphasis on synchrony has been rejected, the bad habit of placing the unconscious outside of history, too often has been retained. This is even the case in Anthony Giddens’s particular, and otherwise exemplary, version of structuration theory.

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Throughout his work, Giddens has consistently included the unconscious in his account of the structuration process. Nevertheless, he retains an asocial and ahistorical notion of the unconscious, though one that is marginalized to critical situations and stripped of its dynamic complexity. In this conception, the unconscious is a transhistorical species attribute upon which is grounded the basic capacities for trust, autonomy, and initiative; capacities that are understood as central to the ability of individuals to enter into social interaction. This unconscious is developmentally significant, but, for all but critical situations, socially irrelevant. It is part of nature but never part of culture; hence, it is always the same. In this last respect it retains the structuralist conceit, with one important and highly restrictive exception. For Giddens, the unconscious, being part of nature rather than culture, is solely an attribute of individuals.3 Habermas, and indeed Fromm before him, have made it clear that this ahistorical and asocial notion of the unconscious was never part of Freud’s understanding.4 For Freud, the unconscious was at once transhistorical and transformable; civilization is that complex cultural field in which the unconscious is ever present and ever dynamic. History, which Freud, like Hegel, Marx, and Habermas, understood as an evolutionary process, involves not only social and technological change but also change in the organization of the unconscious within the institutions of culture. Freud and Habermas are both concerned with the manner in which institutionalized ideologies (or illusions) can be understood as having an unconscious component that can, and does, change across institutional space and through time, due to the communicative actions of groups and generations of individual subjects.5 However, neither Freud nor Habermas have much to say about the specific forms that these unconscious processes and patterns of distorted communication take in particular social and political instances. Consequently, it is difficult to move from their theory of the unconscious to empirical research on particular ideological formations. Further, their evolutionary predilections, even in Habermas’s subtle hands, are clearly misguided. As Gramsci first helped us to see, the field of political conflict is a field on which ideologies play a central part. The battle for hegemony is principally, though not exclusively, a battle for intellectual and moral, as well as political, dominance.6 It is a battle within discourse over different forms of signification, communication, and subjection. Or, put another way, it is a conflict over processes of reimagining and institutionalizing new forms of political identity and political relations. At the same time, it is a battle in which all outcomes are contingent upon human action and in which no particular result is guaranteed. A structuration theory that concentrates on the unconscious rules drawn upon in this ideological battle for hegemony offers one way of beginning to specify a core set of rules drawn upon in the organization of such conflict. Such an emphasis on the unconscious rather than on practical consciousness is quite compatible with the

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principal emphases of structuration theory, despite Giddens’s own predilection for the elaboration of these emphases with an ethnomethodological inflection. The example of Roy Bhaskar’s work is telling in this respect. As he has put it: “It is important to stress that the reproduction and/or transformation of society, though for the most part unconsciously achieved, is nevertheless still an achievement, a skilled accomplishment of active subjects, not a mechanical consequent of antecedent conditions.”7 What are the central themes, beliefs, and values that characterize the Unionist ideological formation? There is no simple answer to such an apparently innocent question. Unionism is not monolithic and is not univocal. Rather it is a vital, dynamic, and diverse field of signification, communication, and subjection. Hence, no considered summary, however apparently basic, can capture its specificity, its complexity, and its variety.8 There is no essence to be discerned. Likewise, no moment of observation is sufficiently privileged to afford a “freezing” of its contents. Unionism is a dynamic set of constructions, evaluations, and beliefs regarding political experience in Northern Ireland. It is constantly being reconstituted, gaining new inflections, and losing old concerns in response to prevailing political exigencies. In these respects, Unionism is like all other ideologies. Along with these dynamic and contingent aspects of Unionist ideology, it is possible to discern a limited set of unconscious rules that are characteristically drawn upon for the production and organization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity.9 These rules carry no necessary implications as to the specific content of Unionist ideology, and there is nothing inevitable about their re-production.10 The extent to which any particular set of rules is re-produced through the structuration process, and the domain over which any set of rules has predominance, is always contingent upon the communicative actions of subjects and the intended and unintended consequences that follow from such actions. Subjects always act with an already-organized subjectivity, at least for that moment, and with a set of cognitive understandings and emotional investments concerning the horizon or context within which they are acting. At the same time, in so acting, subjects inevitably draw upon some set of unconscious rules of structuration that are more or less deeply embedded in social institutions and social structure.11 Through drawing upon specific rules of structuration, subjects may re-produce, modify, or, very occasionally, transform these rules and/or the range and depth of their embeddedness. Northern Ireland is a fascinating case study, in part, because it so clearly exemplifies these processes of structuration through which apparently primordial identities and patterns of relationship have been consistently re-produced. A revised structuration theory that specifies a variety of unconscious rules of structuration that are themselves the “site and stake” of political conflict, is able to open out this very issue of re-production

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through understanding it as a recursive, but contingent, process in which no particular outcome is inevitable and within which the rules for organizing subjectivity and intersubjectivity are constantly being fought over by political actors and movements, including the state. If, in Northern Ireland, the politics of exclusivist identity and difference are re-produced as the dominant form for the organization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, this does not happen automatically. Rather, this process is always contingent and usually conflictual. At any moment in this history, reimagined, inclusivist forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity have contested, with limited success, to institutionalize themselves. Such attempts have perennially, but not inevitably, given rise to a perverse spiral in which exclusivist ideologies for the organization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity have reasserted their hegemony, remaking, rather than merely reproducing, Northern Ireland as “a place apart.” In what follows, this will become apparent when we look at some critical moments in the history of Northern Ireland. This approach to the conflict between entrenched and reimagined forms of ideology and identity in Northern Ireland focuses upon the various unconscious rules of structuration through which, and in terms of which, political conflicts and accommodations are played out. It does so because the political conflict itself is best understood as exactly a conflict over which set of unconscious rules, be these inclusivist or exclusivist, are able to predominate, and over which fields of state and civil society. These rules are so central because they establish the cognitive and affective codes through which constructions of self-identity, group-identity, otheridentities, the proper forms of authority, and the proper exercise of power are organized.12

BREAKING THE RULES

As Bob Purdie has noted, the civil rights movement may be regarded as a catalyst that activated the dormant and deep-seated ethnic divisions within Northern Ireland. For a brief period, it placed a liberal ideology in a position of some centrality within the public discourse of Northern Ireland. As Purdie puts this, the civil rights movement was one of several “new departures and new experiments” attempted in the 1960s. He describes this movement, in its beginnings, as “a new way of conceptualising an old problem,” adding that, for the Roman Catholic community, “until the 1960s nationalism supplied the grammar with which to discuss possible solutions.”13 While endorsing Purdie’s understanding, two additional claims may be made. First, during the period from 1962 until 1975, Northern Ireland can be said to have experienced an attempt at modernization that eventually “failed.” That is to say, it failed in the sense that the expected consequences

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of a variety of attempts at economic, political, and “civil and constitutional rights” reform failed to have the expected transformative effects upon the character of social and political relations and social and political identities. Three major groupings can be identified as the carriers of this modernization project: the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), the O’Neill faction within the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), and the civil rights movement. What each of these groupings managed to do was to raise the serious possibility of a different ordering of relations and identities in Northern Ireland. They imagined a different form of society and, usually in a halting and compromised way, initiated political actions that were intended to institute these imagined identities and relations. Second, it is important to note that the claim is not that these three groupings invented, de novo, this new, imagined society. Such inclusivist and liberal rules had been a part of the ideological discourse of Northern Ireland since at least the late eighteenth century. What we see, from the mid-1950s on, is a renewed attempt to institutionalize this imagined society as a new form of social and political relations entailing a new set of identities; one in which ethnic or religious identity plays a subsidiary role. Apart from the three political or social movements identified above, the principal actor in this modernizing impulse was the state itself. From the 1930s, but with renewed vigor after World War II, the government in London had introduced a vast array of social welfare legislation, offering entitlement to state support or assistance on the basis of nonascriptive criteria. This state-sanctioned set of rules was administered and implemented within Northern Ireland by the Stormont regime and by the various local councils in ways that often, but not always, attempted to rewrite these rules in ascriptive terms. The classic example in this regard is the allocation of public housing according to sectarian criteria rather than universal needs-based criteria. This conflict between the universal, liberal rules of the welfare state legislation and the, frequently, exclusivist, sectarian rules of the local governments and agencies charged with the implementation of such legislation introduced a profound tension into the daily administration of the state—one that the three political and social movements mentioned above attempted to resolve, or at least to explore or exploit, through their attempts to institutionalize nonascriptive rules in the domains of economic, political, civil, and constitutional life. No doubt the most ambivalent and, perhaps, compromised of these three groupings was the O’Neill faction of the UUP. At the same time, this was clearly the most powerful of the three groupings. If successful it could, through its pivotal role as the principal governmental faction, make a profound difference. Of course, whether broader ideological and social forces would facilitate such a transformation of the dominant rules is the issue of major concern. Throughout the 1960s, the old certainties upon which the sectarian basis of Ulster politics was based came under challenge. First, the Irish

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Republican Army (IRA) campaign that had been mounted throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s came to a desultory, but official, conclusion in 1962. This cessation of paramilitary violence created a new political possibility for Northern Ireland. The very fact that the Republican paramilitary campaign had ended with a whimper highlighted the limited extent of support among Nationalists for such a campaign. It removed the most potent source of the Unionist “siege mentality”—the fear of being shot and bombed into a united Ireland. It also signaled a broader change: a willingness among a significant proportion of the Catholic/Nationalist community to work toward “new solutions to old problems.” Beyond this, it indicated the possibility of new political identities—ones not so firmly attached to the sectarian verities. The social movement that gave public and institutional form to this new possibility was the civil rights movement, with its insistence upon the equal rights of all citizens—perhaps best exemplified in its “one man [sic], one vote” campaign slogan. This movement, which initially drew its support from both Nationalist and Unionist communities, took the novel step of insisting that British standards and norms should be fully extended to Northern Ireland. Rather than looking to Nationalist and Republican ideology for its identity and program, the civil rights movement looked to similar movements elsewhere in the world—in particular, to the U.S. civil rights movement. Within Unionism, a parallel transformation was under way. The prime minister of the Unionist Party, Capt. Terence O’Neill, proposed to “transform the face of Ulster.”14 This claim has met with a very mixed reception among commentators on Northern Ireland; a reception that mirrors the manner in which O’Neill’s initiatives were received within Northern Ireland at the time. One group of commentators regards O’Neill as a positive force for change. For instance, F. S. L. Lyons wrote, in Ireland Since the Famine, that “Captain O’Neill set himself not only to divert domestic energies away from internecine quarrels and towards constructive policies but also to cultivate more amicable relations with the south.”15 In Northern Ireland Since 1968, Paul Arthur and Keith Jeffery describe O’Neill as “a man with a mission, an innovator who wanted to prepare Northern Ireland for the late twentieth century and its place in the affluent sun.” 16 Barry White, a distinguished journalist with the Belfast Telegraph, has claimed that “O’Neill genuinely wanted to make Northern Ireland a model, modern province.”17 Other commentators have either completely dismissed O’Neill as a hypocritical meddler and a traitor to Unionism or they have treated his purported liberalism with great scepticism.18 Generally, this last group base their dismissal of the significance of O’Neill’s reforms on the fact that these reforms were largely symbolic in character.19 However, to make such a claim is to miss the point. O’Neill’s personal virtues or failings are hardly the issue; yet, typically, most discussion is reduced to this. Rather, what is at issue is the political meanings that attached to

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O’Neill’s various initiatives, modest as these initiatives were from some perspectives. We can only begin adequately to comprehend the character of such initiatives and the responses they produced if we take seriously the unconscious dimensions of the ideological process within Northern Ireland.

THE DRIFT TO EXCLUSIVISM: A PERVERSE MULTIPLIER EFFECT

From late in 1968, the divided society of Northern Ireland became, as well, increasingly violent. Fierce repression of the civil rights marches by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC); the disintegration and destruction of “mixed” areas of housing (i.e., areas in which Unionists and Nationalists lived contiguously) in Belfast and elsewhere; the continual presence (from August 1969) of armed British troops on the streets; the intensification of various “policing” activities such as house searching and internment; the murderous activities of the various paramilitary groupings; the everyday spectacle of rowdy demonstrations, with petrol bombs and rubber bullets as symbol and substance of violent confrontation—all these signs marked a society in crisis. Both the Nationalist/Catholic and the Unionist/Protestant communities were confronted with a complex and confusing situation that they had to make sense of as best they could. So long as both communities held to exclusivist rules for the construction of these complex and disturbing phenomena, they could be certain of both their own identity and the source of the mayhem surrounding them. Each was a corporate group confronted by an implacable enemy. For Unionists, this enemy was trying to destroy their very identity and way of life; for Nationalists the enemy was trying to continue with its regime of oppression and discrimination while denying to them their national identity. At the same time, for so long as both communities continued to rely on exclusivist rules, they remained locked into a perverse spiral. In drawing upon such exclusivist rules for the structuration of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity, both communities assured the reproduction of these rules. Actions and interpretations that were exclusivist in form returned, in the next moment, as the rules for the organization of both subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Given the deep-rootedness of such exclusivist rules, and given the extent to which such rules organized both the field of intersubjectivity and the character of subjectivity, it should come as no surprise that attempts to institutionalize a reimagined social and political order should give rise to vehement opposition. However, it is crucial to notice that there were groupings associated with both communities that were attempting to make a difference by institutionalizing inclusivist rules; thereby beginning to change the forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity routinely available

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in Northern Ireland. These liberal groupings, principally the O’Neillites and the civil rights movement, were in no sense pure cultures; in part they continued to carry within them the very exclusivist forms they hoped to eradicate. Apart from their actual features, it was always open to one community, or sections of it, to read the other community through exclusivist forms. For one, given the mixed, rather than pure, culture of the liberalizing movements, these movements always contained features that could be construed as “evidence” of their implacable and hostile difference. Second, even in the absence of actual evidence, the exclusivist forms of both Unionism and Nationalism could successfully read events and the actions of others so that they conformed to the already established preunderstandings. Further, within the nominal groupings of Nationalism or Unionism, it was always open to read the actions of the liberal sections of one’s own nominal grouping by drawing on exclusivist rules; thereby seeing them as traitorous, deceitful, or naive. In a society in which, for fifty years and more, the dominant rules of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in both communities were exclusivist and in which threats to the identity of both communities were apparently perennial (itself a product of the dominance of exclusivist rules), the breaking of the traditional rules was inevitably fraught with conflict and the possibility of systematically distorted readings. The arrival of British troops in Northern Ireland in August 1969 created a new situation for all groupings, including the UK government. These new arrangements were ripe with ambiguity, as they involved both the maintenance of the Stormont regime and the transfer of principal, though not total, responsibility for security to the UK government. Within the Nationalist/Catholic community, we can trace two major effects of the heightened UK involvement: the formation of both the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (the “Provisionals”).20 While both were committed to the achievement of a united Ireland, these two organizations drew on quite distinct rules in constructing their identities, their role within Northern Ireland, their relationship to Unionism and Unionists, their relationship to Britain, and their judgment regarding the appropriate means by which the cause of a united Ireland should be pursued. The Provisionals drew on exclusivist rules to construe all of the above; hence, their opposition to both Unionism and the union with Britain was organized in terms of such exclusivist criteria. The SDLP, a party that formed in August 1970, while not inoculated from the occasional reliance on exclusivist rules, attempted to develop and institutionalize within the Nationalist community a conception of the above roles, relationships, and appropriate means that was organized by inclusivist rules. As a party of reform with a nationalist constituency, the SDLP was committed to both the institutionalization of inclusivist rules within Northern Ireland and the promotion of a united Ireland through political means that themselves were organized in an inclusivist form. The effect of

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this was to accord the Unionist community a legitimate role in any negotiations regarding a united Ireland and to respect their status as a majority within Northern Ireland. However, unfolding events made this inclusivist vision a difficult one to sustain. For Unionists, also, British intervention was problematic and led to an accentuation of internal differences. The disbandment of the B-Specials, which accompanied the arrival of British troops, was taken by many Unionists, drawing on exclusivist rules, as a sure sign that they had been betrayed and left defenseless. They read the disbanding of the B-Specials as a punishment and betrayal for past loyalty; that is, as an unwarranted taking from them of their, assumed, “proper” right to differential protection by representatives of their own group. They felt they had been stripped of their last bulwark against “terror” and left subject to an ineffective (i.e., more impartial) form of policing. Westminster was no longer trustworthy and, with the reemergence of the IRA in its Provisional form, the civil rights movement was, purportedly, exposed for what it had always been: a front for Republicanism. Unionism was split and found itself engaged in an internal conflict regarding the proper rules for ordering subjectivity and intersubjectivity. For both communities in Northern Ireland, events, subsequent to the introduction of British troops, entered a perverse spiral in which exclusivist rules again became the predominant ideological currency. In the above discussion, the argument is made about the need to take the unconscious seriously; and a revised theory regarding the structuration of the unconscious is suggested as an appropriate means of so doing. There is, in addition, in very broad strokes, an account of political conflict in Northern Ireland that attends to some unconscious rules of structuration. These rules have been broadly characterized as either inclusivist or exclusivist, but, due to restrictions of space, little more has been said of them.21 In what follows there is an attempt to flesh out some principal characteristics of the exclusivist rules that have succeeded in recolonizing the political space in Northern Ireland recursively over the past thirty-odd years and that have done so despite the fact that they have been recurrently challenged by reimagined forms of ideology and identity. This fuller description of the unconscious rules of exclusivist Unionism will be developed with reference to two particular discursive examples.

THE LOYALIST NEWS: ULTRA-LOYALISM SPEAKS

This section briefly examines what Sarah Nelson has termed “ultraloyalism.” It does so by looking at the rules drawn on in one publication that supported the resurgence of what it regarded as traditional Unionism. This publication, the Loyalist News, was close to the two principal Loyalist

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paramilitary groups, especially the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).22 Its editor, John McKeague, a staunch Loyalist and a “committed Free Presbyterian and supporter of Ian Paisley,” had been associated with the Ulster Protestant Volunteers’ bombing campaign in 1969 and subsequently became the first chairman of the Shankill Defence Association.23 Consider the following (Loyalist News, Dec. 4, 1971) as just one example—one that avoids florid dehumanization—of the extent to which exclusivist constructions were carried within “ultra-loyalism.” JUST

A THOUGHT

Many people of reasonably moderate views are asking themselves, after all these years of toleration and living and working with Roman Catholics, what has gone wrong? Many people are puzzled by the lack of cooperation between the R.C. clergy and our own. Many are puzzled by the thinking and the logic of the average R.C. Perhaps the man you’ve worked beside for many years, suddenly trots out all the old shibboleths, what do you think or what can you say? The old lady with the pioneer badge, shuffling around the city centre store, could she be planting incendiary devices? or maybe she’s scouting the layout of the building. The priest walking unconcernedly through the city, is he really a priest, or some terrorist in disguise? Darkness falls and the streets become deserted, only those with any necessity are out and about, old people sit in their homes and long for the cold light of morning, yet dreading what the news media may bring. In many streets and roads working men cluster around the barricaded entrances and discuss the situation. Remedies and solutions are worked out, talk, talk, talk. Impotency swells in each man’s breast, anger fills each head as the night wind brings the crunch of the bombs and the whine of the bullet. Every man remembers the proud record of Ulster and silently rededicates himself to those high ideals for which fathers and grandfathers were willing to and in many cases did, lay down their lives. The morning brings work for most, unemployment for some, but depression for almost all. Grim morning headlines herald yet another night of unmolested I.R.A. activity. Somehow one must struggle on. The R.C.s one meets in the course of a day’s work, in the course of a day’s employment make no comment, on the night before, who knows what they are thinking, perhaps they are gloating, counting the dead. Feeling sad and martyred for their own, bitter and satisfied towards their enemies. Perhaps a look at the local Nationalist newspaper puts everything in perspective for the average Protestant. Here he learns that there are two kinds of truth, the pure unsullied Roman Catholic truth and ordinary dubious Protestant truth. Here the Loyalist realises that what is happening in Ulster is a reawakening of the ancient enmity and hatred felt by the adherents of the “one true church” towards those who happened to say and prove logically, “you are in error.” One has to be blind to be unable to see that there will never be peace with Rome, until Rome makes peace with God. Even the priests of the Romish Church are invariably bound up with the terrorists and the whole fabric of the church is extended towards

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them. People are misled by the Communist threat, but the Vatican will ally itself with anything or anyone to gain its own ends. No matter what the year brings Rome never changes and the sooner these moderate clergy and laymen get this into their heads the nearer the solution will be. The average Protestant can also learn that mentally and theologically he has nothing in common with the alien controlled Roman Catholic. (Signed) Defender

Here, in apparently moderate tones, we find a profoundly insidious example of an imagined Ulster construed by drawing on exclusivist rules. This modest proposal, as it were, is offered as “just a thought”; as if reason (or “ordinary dubious Protestant truth”), which has suffered so much through the onslaught of a hostile world, can only voice itself in a whisper. Yet insist this reason does! It begins with an assumed, apparently benign, worldweariness. A puzzle exists: despite all its goodwill and tolerance, Unionism is failing to achieve its liberal ambitions. How could this be so? The answer is provided by what some traditional Unionists have always known: there is something rotten in the state of Ulster and it can be characterized as the “thinking and the logic of the average R.C.” But who are these people and where are they encountered? They are not, as some Unionists may care to believe, a remote and alien caste formally committed to a paramilitary group such as the IRA. Rather, they are all about; the alien is in our midst, so the thought continues. They include “the man you have worked beside for many years”; “the old lady [at] the . . . store”; and the priest “walking unconcernedly” about. They are, indeed, the “average R.C.” The third paragraph informs us that “every man remembers the proud record of Ulster.” The interpellation of “every man” is extended only to Unionists; as if those others cannot be included in the universal term of address.24 After all, they are silent and fail to disown the events of the night: “the crunch of the bombs and the whine of the bullet.” Clearly, no Unionist or Loyalist could be accused of initiating such terrors; they must have their origin in the alien netherworld. But what of those silent ones, “the R.C.s one meets in the course of a day’s work”? Could their silence be just a disguise; could they be “gloating, counting the dead”? After all, they have failed to see the errors of their way, even after such errors have been “prove[d] logically.” Instead, they adhere to what they claim as “‘the one true church’.” And here is the answer to the puzzle with which the worldweary observer began: “the Loyalist realises that what is happening in Ulster is a reawakening of the ancient enmity and hatred felt by” Roman Catholics toward Unionists and Protestants. Behind all this lies a vast network in which the pope pulls all the strings. The priest and the terrorist are as if one. And now the “solution” to all Ulster’s ills is clear: “moderate clergy and laymen” must see the Vatican for what it is. And the “average

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Protestant,” the subject to whom this message is addressed, he [sic] must learn that, “mentally and theologically he has nothing in common with the alien controlled Roman Catholic.” Here there is no doubt as to where the boundary is drawn between “good” and “bad,” “self” and “other.” All Catholics and Nationalists are untrustworthy and to compromise with them is to treat with the dupes and agents of an “alien” power. The persecutory constructions and affects stand out and do not require further comment. The denial of equal entitlement to Nationalists/Catholics is also self-evident.

PAISLEY AND THE DUP: EXCLUSIVISM IN AN EVANGELICAL IDIOM

Ian Paisley became a significant political actor during Terence O’Neill’s premiership. Prior to establishing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in 1971, Paisley had been associated with the establishment of the Free Presbyterian Church in the 1950s and the Protestant Unionist Party in the 1960s. Through these organizations he laid claim to an independent and evangelical, Protestant and Unionist tradition that can be readily traced back to such nineteenth-century figures as William Johnston of Balykilbeg, the leader of a revived Belfast Orangeism in the late 1860s, and Henry Cooke, Thomas Drew, and the Rev. Hugh “Roaring” Hanna, the last of these an influential street-preacher of the same “enthusiastic” period around the 1860s.25 In the latter part of the twentieth century, in response to various attempts to reimagine forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley drew on the unconscious rules of exclusivist Unionism in a largely successful attempt to reinstitutionalize such rules as a predominant reality principle of the contemporary period. Paisley’s “call to the Protestants of Ulster,” excerpted below,26 is an exemplary and characteristic statement in which we can observe the rules of structuration he drew upon in the 1970s. A CALL

TO THE

PROTESTANTS

OF

ULSTER

Fellow Protestants, I am so deeply concerned with the present grave situation which is developing in our Province that I am urged to address to you this call. . . . Our case is desperate. For the past five years through the treachery and weakness of those in authority, our land has become a prey to our traditional enemies. The hundreds of new made graves, the scars of thousands of mutilated bodies and the tragedies of innumerable sorrows all bear silent but eloquent testimony to Ulster’s dark agony. Let us also remember that as our case is desperate so is the case of our enemies. They must succeed or perish; they must conquer us or be destroyed themselves. They know that they are most certainly doomed if

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they are defeated. Hence their madness. They are devotees of that godless monster which has drenched Ireland with blood for many generations— the godless monster of a United Ireland. In their frenzied devotion they spare neither man, woman nor child, Roman Catholic or Protestant. They are prepared to wade to victory, nay even swim to victory, in the blood of their fellow countrymen. Decency, honour, truth or morality are totally irrelevant as far as they are concerned. They trample them under their feet as of no account as they stampede forward in their base lust for power. Rev. William Arlow stands indicted of the basest of falsehoods, when he comes to their defence with the testimony that they are SINCERE MEN SEEKING PEACE. Well might we ask what sort of sincerity is this? Yes and what sort of peace is this? Mr. Arlow has drunk the heady wine of ecumenism so deeply that his mind is in a stupor and his eyes are blind to the plain unadulterated facts. In the delusion which follows such inebriation the victim BELIEVES THE LIE. If our enemies win then we and our children will have our future fortunes determined by a tyranny which has no parallel in Ireland’s history. Make no mistake about it we are struggling for CONSTITUTIONAL FREEDOM. . . . It is a noble cause in which we are engaged. There is everything in it to stir the fire in the soul of every free man and patriot. Though it may at this dread moment be under the darkest of skies yet it is too big with the destiny of our Province to be allowed to fail. IT MUST NOT FAIL. IT CANNOT FAIL. We must not suffer the infamy of betraying the sublimest of trusts. This beautiful land cannot be allowed to be subjected to our enemies. Our fields, our homes, our firesides and the graves of our fathers, our cities and our churches, our wives and our families we must protect and defend from every hazard. The glorious heritage which our fathers left us we must never betray. The hopes with which they died and which buoyed their spirits in the last conflict we can never permit to be extinguished. We must grasp the torch which they so nobly bore aloft and transmit it with increasing brightness to generations yet to come. The words “defeat” or “surrender” must not be named amongst us. They are not to be dreamed of. We must settle it now that we MUST SUCCEED . We cannot parley with an enemy who sees such parley as but another path in its strategy to destroy us. Peace with such a foe can only come when he has surrendered. Any other peace would have within it the seed of our destruction. We must not, we cannot, we dare not sit down and discuss chances. There is too much at stake to think of discussing probabilities. We must make success a certainty and that by the help of Almighty God we can do. If we are prepared to do our duty, our whole duty we have nothing to fear. What is our duty as Protestants at the present time? This is the question with which we must gravely concern ourselves.

This statement (of which but a small section is quoted), published by Paisley, was widely distributed in January 1975. It appeared, also, as a onepage advertisement in a popular provincial newspaper, the News Letter.

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Such was its effect, that some of Paisley’s followers in the Ballymena area believed it was the prelude to Paisley’s taking up arms against the British government.27 The immediate context in which the statement was made was the introduction of a temporary cease-fire, which followed a meeting between members of the Provisional IRA and some leading Protestant clergy from the four main Protestant denominations. As a follow-up to the calling of this cease-fire, UK civil servants, under the direction of the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, began talks with Provisional Sinn Fein (generally regarded as the political wing of Provisional IRA). These talks led to an agreement to allow Sinn Fein to establish and run incident centers, the task of which was to monitor the cease-fire and take appropriate action to preserve the cease-fire if incidents threatened its continuation. Involving, as they did, discussions with the dread Republican enemy by both Protestant clergy and representatives of the British government, these events surrounding the calling of the cease-fire were ripe for appropriation by Paisley, as they could so readily be construed in terms of what I have elsewhere described as the persecutory position and the affiliative-corporate mode of Unionist ideology.28 Further, both the meeting between the Protestant clergy and the Provisional IRA, and the discussions with Sinn Fein leading to the establishment of incident centers, had been facilitated by the Rev. William Arlow, associate secretary of the Irish Council of Churches. As go-between, he seemed to draw particular hostility. Paisley’s “call” names Unionists explicitly as “Protestants of Ulster” and it identifies Ulster as “the last bastion of Bible Protestantism in Europe.” Enemies are seen to confront this Ulster Protestant subject from all sides. Having dominated Europe and penetrated Britain via the ecumenical movement, only Ulster and her traditions of liberty stand in the way of total domination from Rome. Hence, the IRA terrorist campaign is supported by Rome: the IRA is construed as Rome’s agent. In speaking of “our enemies,” Paisley, near the beginning of his “call,” makes implicit reference to the Provisional IRA and its supporters: “devotees of that godless monster which has drenched Ireland with blood for many generations—the godless monster of a United Ireland.” Such enemies are diabolical in character; they spare no one, “neither man, woman nor child, Roman Catholic or Protestant”; they are ruthless, “prepared to wade to victory, nay even swim to victory, in the blood of their fellow countrymen” and they are without decency, honor, or morality in their “base lust for power.” Two aspects of this construction of the “enemy” warrant comment. First, there can be no doubt that the Unionist community felt itself besieged by “terrorists.” Most Unionists reading Paisley’s “call” could readily bring to mind a relation, friend, or acquaintance who had been killed or, more usually, injured through a Provisional IRA action. Second—and it is the particular form that Paisley’s repudiation of “terrorism” takes to

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which I want to draw attention—the Republican enemy is construed as barbaric and as lacking the basic human dignities. Indeed, their “lust for power” is the only quality ascribed to them. We should note the consequence of this dehumanizing construction of the enemy. Any attempt to discuss differences, any attempt to introduce and maintain a cease-fire through consultation and accommodation, is ruled out of court. No chances may be taken, no openings for peace explored, if they involve a “parley with an enemy.” No peace is acceptable except the peace that follows the abject surrender of the enemy. At this stage of the “call,” care is taken to specify that both Roman Catholic and Protestant are the victims of the enemy’s lust for power. And later (not quoted above), in discussing the third duty of reaffirming “our principles” to “our Roman Catholic fellow countrymen,” the virtues of “the heritage of Protestantism” (“civil and religious liberty”) are extended to “both Protestant and Roman Catholic.” However, only Republican “terror” is mentioned in this “call”: Protestant paramilitaries and the British army are omitted. Moreover, in recounting Ulster’s history as a history of betrayal, the representation of the minority community in the power-sharing executive is referred to disparagingly: “Republicans with 22 per cent of the vote must have 40 per cent of the seats in the new Executive.” The effect of this was that “the violence escalated.” In this late reference to the Nationalist/Catholic community, the prior careful distinction between the implacable Republican enemy and the iconic Roman Catholic good neighbor is lost, as the minority community becomes an undifferentiated group of “Republicans.” In this construction of the Nationalist/Catholic other, the rules of what has elsewhere been termed the dehumanizing and persecutory positions are drawn upon.29 At first, a split is made between those seeking the “godless monster of a United Ireland” and those characterized as “Roman Catholic fellow countrymen.” The former are construed via the dehumanizing position, but what are we to make of the latter? Paisley creates a formal category of equality into which certain Roman Catholics may step. Perhaps he intends all such Catholics other than IRA members or committed supporters of political violence? It soon becomes clear that this is not the case, as SDLP members and supporters—that is, those associated with the most inclusivist of the major Nationalist/Catholic groupings—are reduced to the category “Republican” and linked to the two themes of increased violence and unfair, undemocratic representation in the processes of government and administration. This construction of the “good neighbor” Roman Catholic is iconic in form. Such iconic constructions of the “good” Catholic are curiously devoid of content. At the point that content is introduced, the full implications of this reliance upon the persecutory position (for this aspect of the “call”) becomes apparent: the iconic positive construction turns to a persecutory negative construction embracing the Nationalist/Catholic community. No longer is the persecutory construction

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restricted to the Provisional IRA and its supporters; rather, it is extended to include the most liberal or inclusivist members of the Nationalist/ Catholic community. As soon as members of this community enter the sequence of political action, as soon as they act in ways that locate them in an actual position (thereby taking on further dimensions or content), viewed from the persecutory position they become a dangerous, untrustworthy other. Construed from within this position, no interactions between Nationalists/Catholics and Unionists/Protestants could lead to peace; only unilateral surrender by the enemy, or divine Providence, can offer this. In this manner, the fragility of Paisley’s opening toward his “fellow Protestants” is revealed. Above, we have already seen how such constructions can feed back into a perverse cycle, driving both communities toward exclusivist positions and policies. If the construction of the Nationalist/Catholic other is persecutory in form, with a certain reliance upon the dehumanizing position as well, what of the construction of Protestant subjectivity? Again we find a split, this time between the true Protestant and those, like William Arlow and his ilk, who have drunk the “the heady wine of ecumenism.” The true Protestants of Ulster are understood as being under attack from all sides. Their duty is to resist, so as to preserve the traditions of their forefathers and thereby protect their freedom and their loved ones. This construction of the “good” Protestant is clearly organized by the rules of the persecutory position, as is the construction of the “bad” Protestant. Personified in the Rev. William Arlow, the “bad” Protestant is construed as such because he treats with the enemy. Indeed, Arlow is akin to a latter-day Lundy in clerical garb. He is guilty of falsehood; he is an “inebriated victim” of ecumenical and Republican propaganda; and because he has worked toward an inclusivist identity, he must be repudiated. Arlow and others supporting negotiations are accused of “vile treachery” and branded as “traitors.” In his call of January 1975, Paisley drew upon exclusivist forms of Unionism to construct the subjectivities of Protestant and Catholic and to prescribe the proper form of relationship between the two communities. He constructed a split world in which the dominant effect is persecutory anxiety allied with feelings of righteousness; and he interpreted attempts at some form of cease-fire and negotiation as treachery. The extent to which such a construction was dominant within Unionism, especially within both the DUP and its more secular counterpart, the Vanguard movement under the leadership of William Craig, the possibility of changing the forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Northern Ireland were severely limited.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has explored the structuration of Unionist ideology over a critical period, observing the process through which exclusivist identities

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and patterns of relationship have been re-produced, contingently, but, apparently inevitably, in Northern Ireland. Having identified some unconscious rules of Unionist ideology, rules that are drawn upon in the making of subjectivity and history, the chapter has explored some ways in which different rules for the construction of subjectivity and intersubjectivity constitute the forms through which, and about which, intra-Unionist ideological conflict is fought out. The political conflict within Unionism in Northern Ireland is, first and last, an ideological conflict. This does not mean that class processes, material interests, religious beliefs, or political advantage are not part of this conflict. What it does mean is that these and other interests are organized through ideology and fought over within ideology; which is to say, within the field of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The failure adequately to comprehend this ideological process carries significant implications for any attempts to make a difference in Northern Ireland through the institutionalization of reimagined subjectivities and reimagined rules for the organization of intersubjectivity. Such attempts to move Northern Ireland toward a social and political structure in which inclusivist rules for the organization of subjectivity and intersubjectivity are dominant require a soundly based understanding of what changing the rules entails and of the perverse multiplier effects that such attempts may unintentionally produce. Whether these attempts are at the international level and involve the establishment of intergovernmental bureaucracies and systems of rights and regulation, as with the current workings of the Anglo-Irish Accord, or whether they are at the level of local institutions, such as the current movement toward more integrated schools in Northern Ireland, the processes involved in changing the rules need to be understood as inevitably engaging with the structuration of the unconscious rules of ideology. Both in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, we live in a world in which it is essential to take these unconscious rules seriously.

NOTES 1. See R. B. J. Walker, p. 35 in this book. 2. Ibid., p. 36. 3. See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1984), Ch. 2, for a detailed account of the place of the unconscious, as understood by Giddens, in the structuration process. 4. See Erich Fromm, “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology,” in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); and Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971; J. Shapiro, trans. Chs. 10–12. 5. See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 21, J. Strachey, trans. (London: Hogarth Press, 1962). 6. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).

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7. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism (Sussex: Harvester, 1979), p. 46. 8. For a magisterial historical account consistent with this claim, see A. T. Q. Stewart, The Narrow Ground: Aspects of Ulster, 1609–1969 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977). 9. In other work I have specified, in some detail, some principal unconscious rules of Unionist ideology. First, drawing upon psychoanalytic theory, I have paid particular attention to the structuration of emotions within what I have termed the various ideological “positions.” Second, drawing upon cognitive-developmental theory, I have paid particular attention to some principal cognitive features of some distinct modes of ideological reasoning. However, in this chapter, apart from the final section where the context allows me to be more specific, I have restricted myself to the very broad distinction between exclusivist rules and inclusivist rules. I refer the reader to the following: John D. Cash, “Ideology and Affect: The Case of Northern Ireland,” Political Psychology 10, no. 4 (1989): 703–724; John D. Cash, “Ideology as Process: The Rules of the Game,” Melbourne Journal of Politics 17 (1985–1986): 1–23; and John D. Cash, “Taking Ideology Seriously: The Case of Northern Ireland,” diss., Yale University, 1993 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1993: 9331536). 10. I use this hyphenated form of writing re-production so as to emphasize a major theoretical point about the ways in which the making of history from one moment to the next is always a contingent process in which outcomes are not inevitable, even in those circumstances in which they may be predictable to a very high degree of accuracy. This is a primary claim of structuration theory, as developed by Giddens, Bourdieu, and others. 11. I follow Thompson’s definition of social structure as “the relatively stable asymmetries and differentials which characterise social institutions and fields of interaction.” Further, I agree with Thompson’s claim that to analyze social structure “involves the attempt to ascertain the criteria, categories and principles which underlie these differences and account for their systematic and durable character.” See John B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1990), Ch. 6. The quotes are from pp. 282, 283. 12. For more on this see Cash, “Ideology as Process” (note 9) and Cash, diss. (note 9). 13. Bob Purdie, Politics in the Streets (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1990), pp. 1 and 2. 14. Belfast Telegraph, November 24, 1965. 15. F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 78. 16. P. Arthur and K. Jeffery, Northern Ireland Since 1968 (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1988), p. 6. 17. B. White, John Hume—Statesman of the Troubles (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1984), p. 37. 18. An interesting and idiosyncratic example of the genre that dismisses O’Neill as a traitor is D. Gordon’s, The O’Neill Years (Belfast: Athol Books, 1989). 19. See Purdie (note 13) for the most intelligent version of this assessment of O’Neill. On page 14, Purdie summarizes his position as follows: “The most innovative aspect of O’Neill’s premiership was his ‘style’, which consisted of making liberal and modernist statements and gestures, while using extreme caution in nudging his party towards changes in its traditional outlook.” 20. I am not claiming that the involvement of British troops was the sole determinant of the formation of these two groupings; only that it was a principal and

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precipitating one. Another proximate effect of significance was the splitting of the civil rights movement in 1970. See Purdie (note 13) for more on this. For more on the formation of the SDLP, see Ian McAllister, The Northern Ireland Social Democratic and Labour Party (London: MacMillan, 1977), passim. 21. In note 9, the reader is referred to publications where a more detailed and variegated account of such rules is provided. 22. See Sarah Nelson, Ulster’s Uncertain Defenders (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1984), p. 61. Nelson provides a detailed account of the histories and internal divisions within the two principal Loyalist paramilitary organizations, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). 23. Steve Bruce, The Red Hand: Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 32–39. See also Nelson (note 22), p. 61. 24. No doubt, every person or everyone is the nonsexist form of this interpellation, but clearly this example relies in part on the gendering of the self as male to support its attribution of treachery and inferior logic to “Roman Catholics.” 25. See Frank Wright’s excellent study, “Protestant Ideology and Politics in Ulster,” European Journal of Sociology 14, no. 2 (1972): 223ff. 26. Published by Paisley in January 1975. 27. Clifford Smyth, Ian Paisley: Voice of Protestant Ulster (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1987), p. 95. Smyth was a member of the DUP from 1972 to 1976 and a public representative in both the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Constitutional Convention, where he served as secretary to the United Ulster Unionist Council. His knowledge of this reaction to Paisley’s address is authoritative. 28. Cash, “Ideology and Affect” (note 9), Cash, “Ideology as Process” (note 9), and Cash, diss. (also note 9). 29. Cash, “Ideology and Affect” (note 9).

8 Inadequate Providers? A Gendered Analysis of States and Security J. Ann Tickner

Historically, the identity of states has been closely tied to their role as national security providers. Given the assumption that threats are in the external realm, a sound national security policy demands that states try to increase their capabilities and enhance their power, the most important component of which is military power. According to the neorealist school of international relations, the scholarly approach most committed to a statist definition of security, “self-help” is imperative: in an anarchical international system, devoid of institutional structures that could prevent the outbreak of violence, states must protect themselves, for they cannot count on others to do so. Security depends, therefore, on striving for autonomy and self-sufficiency and on not being dependent.1 There is a growing sense among policymakers and international relations scholars, from various parts of the world, that the state’s ability to provide genuine security, as well as the desirability of a self-help system, is eroding. It is necessary to first examine some of the literature that is questioning this state-centric model of security and advocating more comprehensive forms of security, less centered on the military defense of territorially defined boundaries. The next step is to examine the neorealist depiction of states’ security-seeking practices through a gendered lens. While neorealists portray states as abstract unitary actors whose behavior can be explained in terms of some higher rationality independent of human agency, the position developed here is that the portrayal of this security-seeking behavior is built on characteristics such as self-help, autonomy, and power-seeking that we, in the West, associate with masculinity. In conclusion, by drawing on feminist writings, a less gendered, more inclusive model of security is outlined. Such a model could provide greater security for individuals as well as the potential for international cooperation sought by proponents of comprehensive security. 125

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IS THE STATE AN ADEQUATE SECURITY PROVIDER?

The construction of the Western alliance system under the U.S. nuclear umbrella in the post-1945 years marked a significant change in the security dilemma of states and the means for resolving it. While questions were raised throughout the Cold War about the consequences of a failure of nuclear deterrence, the real debate about national security did not begin until the early 1980s. The intensification of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union fueled fears of nuclear war with the likely outcome of the destruction of winners and losers alike. The Report of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues made this nuclear paradox explicit.2 The fact that the security of states depended on the insecurity of their citizens had stretched the traditional concept of security to its limit. U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative highlighted the fact that national boundaries were indefensible against nuclear weapons. Now, with the Cold War over and the consequences of the heavy burdens it placed on the defense budgets of both the superpowers evident, even some Realists are questioning the ability of any one state to act on its own in matters of security provision. Acknowledging that the United States is no longer powerful enough to act alone, Henry Kissinger has urged the recreation of a concert of powers in the North to prevent local conflicts from escalating, most of which he sees as likely to originate in the South.3 While they would be critical of Kissinger’s ethnocentric views, voices from the South are also questioning the state’s ability to provide security. Amid what he terms a “growing culture of violence,” Rajni Kothari sees the decline and erosion of the state in the face of “multiple assaults on its capacity to manage human affairs.”4 In parts of the South, domestic disorder along with the relative stability of international borders have turned the traditional assumption about boundaries between anarchy and order on its head. With the exception of the Middle East, most military conflicts in the South since 1945 have not been across borders but the result of domestic challenges to the legitimacy of political regimes frequently supported by outside intervention. Successful deterrence against external attack is not an adequate measure of national security when the greatest threat is internal insecurity. This is even more problematic when, as Nicole Ball points out, even the term internal security is a misnomer, since its purpose is rarely to make all citizens equally secure, but rather to enable ruling elites to remain in power, often by military means used against the majority of the population.5 Questions about the adequacy of the state as a security provider have also been raised by those who are beginning to define security in multidimensional terms that extend beyond its political/military dimensions. For proponents of “comprehensive” security, security is defined as the attempt to protect against events that threaten to degrade the quality of life for the

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inhabitants of the state, whether they be lack of basic material needs, resource degradation, or environmental pollution.6 Comprehensive security underscores the forces of global capitalism that threaten the state’s ability to secure the economic well-being of its citizens, as well as the dangers of environmental degradation that defy the concept of boundary protection. Proponents of comprehensive security are sceptical about states’ ability to solve these multiple security threats unilaterally. They also emphasize the disutility of force for solving these types of problems.7 This recent debate over the meaning of security and prescriptions for its achievement in a variety of regional settings has prompted certain international relations scholars to undertake a more fundamental reassessment of the boundaries and identities within which our traditional understanding of security has been framed. As a response to the erosion of the state’s ability to provide security in what they describe as a rapidly changing world, Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk suggest the need to reconceptualize boundaries in a variety of spatial forms—global, local, regional, and functional, as well as national.8 Richard Ashley claims that in a world where military security issues no longer reign supreme, the Realist image of a unitary state is being displaced by multiple actors and communication channels that are disrupting our understanding of boundaries between inside and outside.9 These authors believe that the exclusionary boundaries, fostered by identities associated with popular sovereignty and nationalism, are no longer functional for the enhancement of security, and may actually be counterproductive. Critical of a statecentric view of security, they point to the dangers of a political identity constructed out of exclusionary practices. R. B. J. Walker criticizes the language of division associated with this type of thinking: he claims that assumptions that security can be provided only within states works in the interest of elites and reinforces boundary distinctions between self and other, friend and foe, citizen and foreigner, that set up barriers inhibiting the achievement of world security.10 David Campbell claims that the state requires this discourse of danger in the external realm to secure its identity and legitimation that depend on the promise of internal security for its citizens. Citizenship then becomes synonomous with loyalty and the elimination of all that is foreign.11 Walker laments that, faced with demands for some sort of world security, we have learned to think and act only in terms of the security of states. These authors, while extremely critical of national security discourse and calling for new ways of conceptualizing security, concede that it is hard to break out of traditional ways of thinking. In spite of their reservations about the state’s ability to manage world politics, they acknowledge that it remains the most important political unit in the international system and one that has monopolized our understanding of political life in the modern world. 12 Many would still agree with Hans Morgenthau’s claim that the state remains the recipient of man’s highest secular

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loyalties and the largest community for which men are willing to sacrifice and die.13 The nineteenth-century ideology of nationalism, which asserts that the nation-state is the ideal and only legitimate form of political organization, and which has provided the rationale for twentieth-century wars of national liberation in the South, has recently undergone a period of resurgence in the North also, in both East and West Europe as well as in the former Soviet Union.14 Less identified with the politics of national security and the ideology of nationalism, certain women have been thinking about security and protection in very different terms, at least since the beginning of this century, when Jane Addams and her colleagues called for a reconceptualization of security rather similar to that proposed by proponents of comprehensive security today.15 It is my belief that feminist analysis offers important new ways of thinking about security: ways less identified with the contemporary concept of state sovereignty. Feminists from a variety of intellectual traditions have, repeatedly, questioned the boundaries within which our traditional understanding of political life is framed. Less involved with the state’s security practices, women’s lives are also a useful entry point for rethinking the politics of identity. Looking at the state and its security practices through a gendered lens can provide important new insights about the inadequacies of traditional national security policies with which contemporary critics of national security are concerned. As V. Spike Peterson claims, the concept of national security is profoundly contradictory for women.16 Since, in most societies, women hardly ever occupy positions of importance in foreign policy making or in the military; they are rarely responsible for formulating national security policy. When women write or speak about national security issues, their voices are rarely heard, quickly forgotten, or dismissed as “unrealistic.” Assigned to the category of “protected,” women have generally been denied agency in matters of security and have had little control over the conditions of their protection, which has been assigned to (usually) male protectors. Feminists are beginning to explore these boundaries between “protectors” and “protected” that are upheld and legitimized through socially constructed unequal gender relationships and personified in the security practices of the state itself. 17 It is important now to explore these gendered boundaries and identities and the extent to which, beneath the claim of protection, they may actually contribute to the validation of policies that are not, as seen above, providing real security, either for individuals or the international system of states.

A GENDERED PERSPECTIVE ON NATIONAL SECURITY

The identity of states as security providers has depended on the construction of boundaries between outside dangers and a protected territorial

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space over which the state is sovereign. In terms of its security function, the state is ambiguously gendered: as female, it is “protected” by male warriors; as male, it becomes the “protector” personified. In its protector role, the state depends upon the willingness of its male citizens to take up arms whenever it deems that its security is sufficiently threatened. Contributing to the security of the state through military service is a mark of first-class citizenship in most societies. This militarized model of citizenship can be traced back to the ancient Greek city-states: for the Greeks, the most honored way to achieve recognition as a citizen was through heroic performance and sacrifice in war.18 Women and slaves involved in the realm of “necessity” in the household or the economy were not included as citizens: it was considered that they would pollute the higher realm of politics. In many contemporary societies, citizenship still remains bound up with the Greeks’ depiction of the citizen-warrior. Just as the Greeks gave special respect to citizens who had proved themselves in war, it is still a mark of respect to be a war veteran, an honor that is denied to all women as well as to certain men. In many states, prior military service is of value for gaining votes even in political offices not exclusively concerned with foreign policy. This conception of cititizenship leads to a militarized definition of patriotism that brands those who are unwilling or unable to serve in the military or who are critical of their state’s foreign policies as less than patriotic. When, in the United States, the National Organization for Women in the United States decided to support the drafting of women into the U.S. military, it did so on the grounds that women would remain second-class citizens as long as they were denied military participation on an equal footing with men. To be a first-class citizen, therefore, one must be a warrior whose ultimate duty is to be willing to die for one’s country: it is less clear, however, that this sacrifice is one that most men look upon with enthusiasm. Most militaries have to work hard at training men to kill: usually it is accomplished by appealing to their masculinity. Military recruits learn in boot camp that, to be a soldier, one must first be a man. Becoming a successful soldier means learning to control fears that are explicitly labeled “feminine”; and to fail is to remain “womanly.” 19 Judith Stiehm claims that getting men to fight through the manipulation of their anxiety about their sexual identity and by socializing them into believing that they are protecting distant women and children may actually lead them to commit immoral acts that they would not otherwise be willing to do.20 “Protector” is a relational concept that depends on the presence of those in need of protection: it requires the existence of those who are believed to be incapable of protecting themselves—a category to which all women and some men have been assigned with respect to national security. The myth that women are in need of protection is sustained by contradictory messages that simultaneously suggest that women are too valuable to fight and that they would be ineffective and unreliable if called

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upon to do so. Judith Stiehm claims that this dependent, asymmetric relationship leads to feelings of low self-esteem and little sense of responsibility on the part of women. She asserts that, for men, the presence of ablebodied competent adults who are seen as dependent and incapable contributes to misogyny.21 By deconstructing the protector/protected relationship, which is legitimated by the myth that women are being protected, feminists are suggesting that this unequal relationship of domination and subordination, sustained by unflattering gender stereotyping of both women and men, may actually contribute to violence against women in both the public and private realms. Calling into question the notion of protected, the National Organization for Women in their “Resolution on Women in Combat” of September 16, 1990, estimated that between 80 percent and 90 percent of casualties due to conflict since World War II have been civilians, the majority of whom have been women and children. As weapons become more lethal and the security apparatuses of states are frequently directed against their own populations, civilian casualties are rising: women, however, suffer particular vulnerabilities from the effects of war that are seldom documented. The raping of large numbers of women in the war in BosniaHerzegovina in the early 1990s alerted the world to an atrocity that is as old as war itself and one that is aggravated by the misogynist training of soldiers discussed above. Often the same woman may be the victim of violence by soldiers on both sides of a conflict. In Somalia in 1993, women and children were being used as human shields for Somali gunmen to protect them against fire from UN forces, an ironic reversal of the protector/protected relationship.22 Women and children constitute 80 percent of the global refugee population—a phenomenon usually attributable to military conflict. Life in refugee camps is particularly disruptive of and detrimental to women’s lives: increased danger and poor living conditions make caring for children and families extremely difficult.23 In all societies, women are the most frequent victims of domestic violence, a crime that is always underreported, but one that ranges across regions, cultures, and classes. There is evidence to suggest that violence against women is higher in militarized societies and in military families— another ironic twist to the protector/protected relationship. As Sara Ruddick points out, all of the work in the private realm that is traditionally assigned to women, such as childrearing, caring for the elderly, and tending to the needs of families, is threatened by violence.24 When military spending is high and social welfare programs are cut back, women, who are disproportionately clustered at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, are usually the first to suffer. Women also assume most of the unremunerated caregiving activities that states relinquish when budgets are tight. Evidence such as this suggests that women are particularly vulnerable to both the physical violence and economic dislocations that result from

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militarism and war: it also leads us to question the boundaries within which our traditional understanding of security has been framed. The boundary between a public, domestic space, protected, at least theoretically, by the rule of law, and the private space of the family, where, in many cases, no such legal protection exists, problematizes the anarchy/ order distinction of national security discourse. This gendered analysis suggests that the physical violence that exists across levels from the battlefield to the family is interrelated and can be exacerbated by unequal social relationships. A gendered analysis of the state’s security practices can also tell us something new about the way in which international conflict is legitimated. Since the beginning of the state system, the national security functions of states have been deeded to us through gendered images that privilege a stereotypical masculinity. In times of war, the state itself becomes a citizen-warrior. When international relations theorists describe the international behavior of states, they present us with masculine images of stag hunts or “games nations play.”25 Hans Morgenthau described the Soviet– United States rivalry of the early Cold War period as “the primitive spectacle of two giants eying each other with watchful suspicion. . . . Both prepare to strike the first decisive blow, for if one does not strike it the other might.”26 Throughout the period of state-building, nationalist movements have used gendered images that exhort masculine heroes to fight for the establishment and defense of the “mother” country, images that parallel the protector/protected relationship discussed above. In the words of Jawaharlal Nehru, “It is curious how one cannot resist the tendency to give an anthropomorphic form to a country. . . . India becomes Bharat Mata, Mother India, a beautiful lady, very old, cruelly treated by aliens and outsiders, and calling upon her children to protect her.”27 The collective identities of citizens in most states rely heavily on telling stories about, and celebration of, wars of independence or national liberation and other great victories in battle. National anthems are frequently war songs, just as holidays are celebrated with military parades and uniforms that recall great feats in past conflicts. These collective historical memories are very important for the way in which states command support for their foreign policies. Rarely, however, do they include experiences of women or female heroes. Women’s relationships to nationalist movements have been ambiguous: early revolutions in eighteenth-century America and France, with their promise of individual liberty, political rights, and popular sovereignty, did not include the granting of these same rights to women. More recently, women who fight beside men in wars of national liberation usually find that their issues are forgotten once the struggle is over and patriarchal values are reestablished. Rejection of male protection by women who have participated in

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nationalist or other political liberation movements may actually induce violent reactions from men whose wives begin to question traditional family relationships.28 The ideology of nationalism has too often depended on the devaluing and even demonizing of those on the outside. If national identity has been secured through the use of masculine images and the valorizing of characteristics and roles traditionally assigned to men, the less favorable images of those on the outside have often been constructed through associating them with a devalued “femininity.” As David Campbell notes, the discourse that is used to secure the identity of those on the inside, through the association of danger with those on the outside, is frequently framed in gendered terms. For example, representations by U.S. authors of the nineteenth century of Japanese people and people of Latin America as treacherous, childlike, emotionally disturbed, and effeminate are gendered, vestiges of which are still part of U.S. foreign policy discourse today. During the early Cold War, the labeling of communist or socialist thought as “pink” stands in contrast to the imperatives of national security that depended on the ability of strong men to stand up to the threats of communism.29 The language of colonialism has also been framed in similarly gendered terms. Cynthia Enloe describes pictures of native women on postcards, sent home from African and Asian colonies in the early nineteenth century, suggesting images that were appealing but which also made clear that these alien societies needed the civilizing government that only whites could bestow.30 Such images, although somewhat muted, remain today. They are particularly prevalent in the thinking of Western states when they are dealing with the South. In the postindependence era, former colonial states and their leaders have frequently been portrayed as emotional and unpredictable, which are characteristics also associated with women. During the Cold War buildup of nuclear weapons by the United States and the Soviet Union beyond any rational level, Western policymakers cautioned that even a few of these same weapons in the hands of people in the South would pose a greater threat to world security. Neorealist theorists of international relations have described the “outside” in more abstract terms, as an anarchy devoid of rules that could ensure civilized behavior. This “state of nature” is not only a metaphor for the way in which men or states can be expected to behave in the absence of goverment; it also depicts an untamed natural environment, whose wild and chaotic spaces are often described as female. As Hannah Pitkin notes, Machiavelli’s depiction of “fortuna” as a woman who must be tamed and bent to men’s will is regularly associated with nature—something outside the political world that must be subdued and controlled.31 Translated into international politics, this gendered depiction of fortuna is similar to the disorder or anarchy of the international system portrayed by realists and neorealists.

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It has been shown here that national security policies are frequently described in gendered terms in which men, or masculine gendered states, are stereotypically portrayed as protectors called upon to protect helpless women, or female gendered states, who lack the ability to protect themselves. These gendered images can contribute to an overly militaristic definition of security. Realist and Neorealist theories that explain and prescribe for the security-seeking behavior of states, do so on the assumption of clearly demarcated boundaries between inside and outside. In the discourse of national security, these boundaries are frequently characterized in gendered terms: the outside is deemed dangerous and its inhabitants emotional or irrational—characteristics also used to describe women. Such distinctions between inside and outside are detrimental to the achievement of the type of global security that proponents of comprehensive security suggest our contemporary world demands.

RECONCEPTUALIZING THE STATE’S SECURITY FUNCTION

Given this definition of security—one that depends on the myth of orderly domestic spaces in need of protection from outside danger through military means (a definition that proponents of comprehensive security believe is actually counterproductive to the achievement of genuine security)—can the state continue to be an adequate security provider? Historically, those who have answered this question in the negative have proposed the creation of international institutions that could mitigate the exclusionary identities of states and the zero-sum definition of their national security interests. Contemporary proponents of comprehensive security also support a larger role for international organizations, although they tend to favor a variety of institutional structures and levels appropriate for different security-enhancing tasks. As many would admit, there is a danger in relying too heavily on institutions that are even further removed from democratic processes than is national security, an area of policymaking that is most likely to be formulated in nondemocratic ways. International organizations as they are presently constituted represent the security interests of states, rather than people. Feminists have also been quite critical of international governmental organizations that are even more devoid of women policymakers than national governments. Mona Harrington argues that feminists should be alarmed by structures of international economic power that rarely include women or the interests of underprivileged groups and that operate without governmental oversight. Harrington claims that these structures are forming new linkages with supportive international political networks far above the scrutiny of democratic oversight. She also notes that those who support the internationalization of business and finance have also been among the

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strongest supporters of military spending and appeals to a militarized version of patriotism.32 Obviously there are security issues that demand action at the global level; however, I would argue that, wherever possible, structures for security provision should be built from the bottom up, rather than the top down. While it is true that many states are perpetrators of large-scale physical and economic violence, often against segments of their own populations whose only recourse may be the international community, I believe that we should try to work toward the construction of states whose security needs are not defined in zero-sum terms and legitimated through appeals to an exclusionary, militaristic, gendered form of patriotism. We need be thinking about states in which all citizens, both women and men, could be both providers and recipients of the type of security that diminishes both physical and structural violence. Such states would need to be built on genuinely democratic structures that emanate from below.33 I shall conclude with some thoughts on what this democratic model of security might look like.

A NONGENDERED MODEL OF NATIONAL SECURITY

While these concluding thoughts draw on the ideas of feminist writers, they are not intended to be a feminine model of security to replace the masculine model outlined above: rather, my purpose is to present some ideas that can help to get beyond gendered images of national security that are detrimental to a democratic vision of security. Mona Harrington develops a model that she calls the “inward-turned feminist liberal state.” She suggests that such a state would be contentious rather than harmonious, since it would recognize disparate and conflicting interests based on sex, race, and class. In light of these conflicting interests, the concept of national interest would have no legitimacy; therefore, the pretense that the joint fortunes of a nation’s people could be advanced by war would be politically impossible. This would not be a liberal state in the classical sense, with an emphasis on individual autonomy and individual rights, but a social democracy committed to protecting the needs of its most vulnerable citizens.34 While Harrington’s social-democratic model is inward-looking, it in no way supports exclusionary boundaries or the concept of national interest defined through self-aggrandizement and hostility toward others. Although it puts the vulnerable within one’s own state first, it does not do so at the expense of those on the outside. Also acknowledging that the state is a phenomenon that cannot be legislated out of existence, Jean Elshtain argues that we must try to tame and limit the demands of sovereignty and move toward what she terms a postsovereign politics—one that shifts the focus of political identity from

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sacrifice to responsibility. This would involve the forging of civic identities in such a way that sacrifice of the self or the enemy, associated with the military definition of citizenship that I have described, is not so pervasive a demand.35 A focus on responsibility shifts the emphasis of security provision away from its outwardly focused military dimension toward the type of multidimensional security favored in Harrington’s social democratic model. Such reformulated models of the state require the reconstruction of the meaning of citizenship. Judith Stiehm’s concept of the citizen-defender provides a new model for the military dimension of citizenship. Arguing for women’s participation in the military on an equal footing with men, Stiehm suggests that a society composed of citizens equally likely to experience violence and be responsible for its exercise would be stronger and more desirable. In a nation of defenders, the roles of the protector and the protected cease to exist. Women could shed the disabilities that come with dependence and men would be free from the coercion derived from the manipulation of their manhood.36 The concept of citizen-defender diffuses the aggressive connotations of warrior-patriot. With less emphasis on the manliness of war, new questions about its morality could be raised: citizen-defenders, more compatible with defensive strategies or nonoffensive defense, could also change our image of war. In order to move from sacrifice to responsibility as Elshtain suggests, we need to think not only of moving away from the sacrificial concept of the warrior-patriot, but also about revaluing activities associated with caring. The ethic of caring and responsibility for the planet and its inhabitants has been devalued by linking it to the private realm associated with activities typically performed by women. A more secure future demands that what we value in the public realm, including the realm of international politics, not be so rigidly separated from the values we espouse in the home. Boundaries between public and private sphere activities, which have served not only to validate aggressive policies in the international arena but also to perpetuate the vulnerability and dependence of women, will not be broken down until men and women participate equally in both these realms. While we are still far away from the gender equality necessary for the achievement of this model of security, states do vary across time and space, both with respect to their national security policies and their social policies toward women and underprivileged people generally. A simultaneous examination of domestic and international policies that relate to security provision broadly defined suggests that they are not unrelated. For example, although the Scandinavian states are not widely perceived as significant actors in the international system, their policymakers have often taken leading roles in working for peace and the natural environment, and their foreign-aid programs rank amongst the highest in terms of per capita

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contributions. These states are also committed to social-welfare policies that serve the interests of women and other underprivileged groups. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also have some of the highest numbers of women in national and international policy making positions. Scandinavian states are used, not as ideal models, but rather to suggest that states’ policies may coincide over a cluster of issues that are related to security broadly defined. There is a possibility that the presence of equal numbers of women and men in policymaking positions and a commitment to a different definition of security may not be coincidental. Greater equality between men and women, which would contribute to the eradication of harmful gender stereotyping, could move the definition of security away from the exclusionary militaristic focus that I have described. A nongendered future—one that valorizes characteristics associated with both women and men and that requires the rejection of the rigid separation of public and private values and unequal social distinctions—would be a more secure future for us all.

NOTES 1. For an elaboration of this neorealist view of security, see Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1979). 2. Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 3. Graham Allison and Gregory Treverton, eds., Rethinking America’s Security: Beyond Cold War to New World Order (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 238–248. 4. Rajni Kothari, “The Yawning Vacuum: A World Without Alternatives,” Alternatives 18 (1993): 119–139. 5. Nicole Ball, Security and Economy in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 40. 6. For examples of this literature that discuss the economic and environmental dimensions of security, see Richard Ullman, “Redefining Security,” International Security 8:1; and Jessica Mathews, “The Environment and International Security,” in Michael Klare and Daniel Thomas, eds., World Security: Trends and Challenges at Century’s End (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991). 7. I accept this multidimensional definition of security. See J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). In this chapter, however, I am focusing on the political/military dimensions of security. 8. Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmented World (Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar, 1992). 9. Richard Ashley, “Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17 (1988): 227–262. For an analysis that also problematizes the concept of territoriality and suggests possible transformations, see John Gerard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47, no. 1 (winter 1993): 139–174. 10. R. B. J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988).

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11. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 12. See R. B. J. Walker, “Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics,” Alternatives 15 (1990): 3–27. 13. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed., revised (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1978), pp. 501–502. 14. For a comprehensive discussion of the historical origins of nationalism, see Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (Princeton: Van Norstrand, 1955). 15. Jane Addams, Emily Balch, and Alice Hamilton, Women at The Hague: The International Congress of Women and its Results (New York: Macmillan, 1916). 16. V. Spike Peterson, ed., Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992), p. 32. 17. I am defining gender as a social construction. The meaning of masculine and feminine has varied across time and cultures. In the West, certain attributes, such as power, autonomy, and rationality are perceived as masculine; while their opposites, weakness, interdependence, and emotion are perceived as feminine. While these dichotomous characteristics do not necessarily describe all men and women, those associated with masculinity are generally considered more desirable by men and women alike. 18. Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988). 19. Sara Ruddick, “Mothers and Men’s Wars,” in Adrienne Harris and Ynestra Kings, eds., Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics (Boulder: Westview, 1989). 20. Judith Stiehm, “The Protected, The Protector, The Defender,” Women’s Studies International Forum 5: nos. 3/4 (1982): 367–376. 21. Ibid. 22. New York Times, June 21, 1993: A6. 23. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 57. 24. Ruddick, in Harris and King (note 19), p. 81. 25. Games Nations Play is the title of a popular international relations textbook: John Spanier, Games Nations Play, 6th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1987). 26. Morgenthau (note 13), p. 363. 27. Kohn (note 14), p. 183. 28. Enloe (note 23), p. 55. 29. Campbell (note 11), pp. 176–177. 30. Enloe (note 23), p. 42. 31. Hanna Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p.127. 32. Mona Harrington, “What Exactly Is Wrong with the Liberal State as an Agent of Change?” Ch. 2, in Peterson (note 16), p. 66. 33. I have outlined such a model in J. Ann Tickner, Self-Reliance Versus Power Politics: American and Indian Experiences in Building Nation States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). As this analysis makes clear, I am aware that the achievement of this type of development from below tends to lose out to imperatives of building national security and national power. 34. Harrington, in Peterson (note 16), p. 77. 35. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice,” Ch. 6, in Peterson (note 16), pp. 150–151. 36. Judith Stiehm, Women and Men’s Wars (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983).

PART 3 GLOBALIZATION AND POLITICAL SPACE

9 Problematic Paradigm: Liberalism and the Global Order James L. Richardson

The ending of the Cold War has brought about a fundamental change in the ideological climate of world politics. After two centuries during which ideological conflict was ever present and at times the dominant theme in international relations, there is now a perception, extending across the whole of the political spectrum, that all effective challenges to liberal democracy have disappeared. The triumph of liberalism, of course, is greeted in a variety of ways—celebrated by Francis Fukuyama, perceived with foreboding by Rajni Kothari (as “a world without alternatives”), and dissected by Chris Brown (under the ominous heading, “really existing liberalism”).1 Even in the international relations discipline, so long dominated by realism, liberalism may well be on the way to becoming the dominant paradigm. This chapter examines some of the implications of this resurgence of liberalism, especially as it manifests itself in public discourse but also in the work of some contemporary liberal theorists. The discussion revolves around two questions: In what ways is this dominant liberalism contributing to the construction of a certain kind of global order? and, What role does this liberalism ascribe to the state? Liberalism, it is evident, is a concept that stands in great need of clarification, but it can be said that it provides a complex set of values and assumptions underlying public discourse that not only characterize and legitimize certain arrangements, but also, through reinforcing some tendencies and marginalizing others, contribute to constructing whatever order may be emerging. Globalization, it is assumed, is not merely an aggregation of certain impersonal structural forces—concerning production, finance, the media, communications, and transnational networks—but the form it takes is promoted by the prevailing ideology. The question is, in what ways and to what ends, and how is this affecting the capacities and the authority of states? Liberalism in international relations theory has not in the past been central to liberal political thought, which has been concerned above all 141

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with the internal ordering of political communities and with the rights of individuals within such communities. “Globalization,” however, calls in question the sharp separation between the internal and the external, and also the sharp separation between the economic and the political. This separation characterizes much liberal thought, and raises the question of which strands in the liberal tradition are most salient in this new phase of world politics, in which traditional dichotomies have lost much of their relevance. Prima facie, the “international” strand takes the state for granted; whereas the “internal” strand, in both its political and its economic dimensions, accords it a lesser role than rival traditions such as conservatism or socialism, not to mention earlier doctrines such as absolutism. Does the ascendancy of liberalism foreshadow the diminution of the role of the state to the point that it is no longer the central actor in world politics, and does it offer an alternative conceptualization? The chapter will draw attention to some familiar critiques of liberalism; but it will also inquire whether the novel features of the present international system point to new concerns. Does the liberal paradigm provide means of addressing these concerns, and does it open up fruitful avenues for addressing emerging global/international issues, or does it close off such avenues? Does it, in itself, constitute a large part of the problem? To the extent that the latter is the case, it becomes important to identify the forces sustaining the paradigm or offering ways of moving beyond it. It also becomes important to examine internal tensions within the paradigm, which is far from a unified body of thought; could these be of greater significance than Kothari, for example, allows?

THE LIBERAL MOMENT

But first, however, it is necessary to consider the realist objection that the hypothesis of the liberal ascendancy is premature, and that the apparent triumph of liberalism is likely to prove as transient as in 1919 or in 1945. As Owen Harries expresses it, “one should view with extreme scepticism the current outpouring of claims that what has been true about relationships between states from the time of Thucydides until yesterday no longer holds.”2 In other words, traditional security imperatives can be expected, as before, to limit the extent to which states permit the forces of interdependence to erode their basic functions; the core of international politics will remain the relations among among independent, sovereign states; “new great powers will rise,” the essentials of the great game will remain as before, and realism will continue to provide the key to understanding its basic rules. The Realist critique cannot be dismissed out of hand, and it retains a strong hold among national security policymakers. On the other hand, it

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has lost ground within the international relations discipline. Realism’s failure to anticipate the end of the Cold War seriously damaged its credentials, and there is a widely shared perception that it is inadequate as a framework for characterizing the essential features of the system that is emerging after the Cold War, even if some familiar realist features remain present. A plausible case is being made for replacing it by a liberal paradigm, albeit under a variety of labels.3 The essential argument for this view is that the international system has entered an entirely new phase, in which the relations of the major powers are now qualitatively different from those of the past few centuries. The structure of the system no longer renders war the ultimate means of securing their survival against other great powers, and power-balancing (i.e., military power balancing) the proximate means. The major powers no longer adopt a Hobbesian posture of war in relation to one another. Rather, they form a security community, a “zone of peace.” The reasons for taking this view are varied: some authors place the emphasis on the Kantian argument, revived by Michael Doyle, that stable democracies do not fight one another;4 others are more impressed by the character of the new interdependence. That is to say, this is no longer just the interdependence of trade between relatively separate states, but the increasing global integration of industrial production, finance, the media, and so forth. Others, again, are impressed by the disproportion between cost and benefit: the sheer irrationality of war among nuclear powers. Whether Russia and China will be drawn into the security community constituted by the United States, Japan, and Western Europe remains the major uncertain factor, but the hypothesis that the foregoing political and economic changes could signify a structural shift in world politics of the kind envisaged by the liberal paradigm is sufficiently persuasive that its implications are worthy of further exploration.5

THE NATURE OF LIBERALISM

But what is the character of that liberal ideology that faces no effective challenge in the contemporary world? The familiar Wilsonian tradition of liberal internationalism offers only limited indications. Its goals have been largely achieved: liberal democracy is in the ascendant, barriers to economic intercourse are diminishing, and the world is thickly populated with international organizations. However, its principle of the selfdetermination of peoples, although widely endorsed, is now seen as a source of problems, not solutions. And it does not offer a sense of direction in today’s international setting, when states are widely perceived to be losing to the market much of their effective power, when globalization is calling in question the familiar meaning of state boundaries, and when a

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range of issues are seen to require new forms of global “governance.” In a world where the intertwining of the internal and the external is increasingly evident, the meaning of liberalism for the emerging order cannot be derived from the rather contingent set of principles associated with Wilsonian internationalism. It becomes necessary to look more deeply into the liberal tradition: what are the fundamental values that underlie these familiar principles—bearing in mind that they were originally advanced as a philosophy of government, and that they evolved over time? Students of political thought offer different answers. John Dunn complains of liberalism’s “extreme imprecision of reference . . . being a liberal is often a matter of broad cultural allegiance and not of politics at all.” But historians E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish find “both liberalism and liberalisms”; they find both “national variety” and “universal aspects” of the ideology.6 Anthony Arblaster identifies some central values, but also unresolved tensions. “The metaphysical and ontological core of liberalism is individualism,” but this term has “several meanings, albeit related and overlapping . . . it is from this premise that the familiar liberal commitments to freedom, tolerance and individual rights are derived.”7 Arblaster’s enumeration of liberal values is equally familiar: freedom, tolerance, privacy, constitutionalism, and the rule of law, reason, science, and progress. He makes it clear that the formulation of all of these gave rise to problems and choices, and that in two areas—liberalism’s relationship to democracy and to capitalism—the problems were so far-reaching that the liberal tradition became subdivided into different strands. Some of his headings highlight aspects of these tensions: “Property Versus Democracy” (the eighteenth-century view that political rights did not extend to “the mob—the instrument and accomplice of turbulent demagogues who wish to disturb society”;8 and “The Fear of Democracy” in the midnineteenth century when such an extension of political rights came onto the agenda. Does this foreshadow today’s readiness, despite the tendency to equate liberalism with democracy, to subordinate democracy to other concerns (e.g., “stability,” or the containment of feared ideologies)? Of even greater relevance to present concerns are the problems inherent in the liberalism-capitalism nexus. Allowing that laissez-faire was never absolutely unqualified, the liberal tradition prior to the late nineteenth century favored the minimal state, thanks to its commitment to what came to be termed the negative concept of freedom—that it “consisted essentially in the absence of all but a minimum of law, regulation and compulsion.” In the face of the rise of socialism and an incremental increase in state intervention in the economy, T. H. Green and the “new liberals” advanced a positive concept of freedom, as not merely “freedom, from restraint or compulsion” but “a positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or enjoying,” and, moreover, introduced a new egalitarian strand into liberalism: “the ideal of true freedom is the

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maximum of power for all members of human society alike to make the best of themselves.”9 Equality, however, has never been a core liberal value. The traditional liberal value in this context is universalism—those inalienable rights of man enshrined in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”) and in the French revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. This strand of liberalism, however, with its call for an expanded role for the state in the name of an enlarged reading of liberal values that emphasized the realization of human potential, always remained subordinated, within the liberal constituency, to the traditional preference for limiting state control over individuals, especially in the economic sphere. Although the kind of middle ground between laissez-faire and socialism championed by Green, and later by Keynes, foreshadowed the policies eventually followed in Western Europe and, with greater ambivalence, in the United States, political support in Europe became divided between a social-democratic left and a conservative right, the political heirs of the liberal tradition being reduced to relatively small minorities. In the United States, where both parties were liberal, the Democrats by the 1930s came to stand for the welfare-liberal approach, but only up to a point, and there was no attempt to formulate a coherent doctrine. The resurgence of free-market liberalism in the 1980s, the assault on the doctrine, and the partial curtailment of the practices, of welfare-liberalism, while apparently an aberration in relation to the postwar decades, was more a reassertion of the core liberal values and ideology. The compromises that constituted Ruggie’s “embedded liberalism,”10 whereby Western governments limited the application of market principles in the interest of goals such as full employment and social balance, were largely set aside in the 1980s, first in the United States and Britain, but increasingly elsewhere. The liberal paradigm, then, legitimizes two competing views of the role of government in the economic sphere, but one of them is closer to the paradigm’s core values and assumptions. The second may be seen as an attempt to broaden the paradigm to incorporate certain core values from a rival, socialist paradigm, and has never become securely established within liberalism. A further telling indication of the abiding priorities of liberalism is provided by the Western view of human rights. The initiative in according it a high place on the international agenda was taken by the Carter administration, in an expression of that administration’s commitment to the Wilsonian “idealist” strand in liberalism. Although the ensuing policies have been tempered by pragmatism, that characterization remains valid. The rights that the United States has supported, however, have been exclusively the political and civil rights of the core liberal tradition. The extension of this traditional concept to cover economic rights, and, in particular, rights of subsistence, was resolutely resisted from the 1970s until

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the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993, and whether the partial concessions at that conference to Third World insistence on the acknowledgment of economic rights will be incorporated into Western doctrine and practice remains to be seen, but appears unlikely.11 On another of the central issues for liberalism in international politics, however—the question of intervention—there does appear to have been a fundamental change over the long term. The characteristic liberal stance in the nineteenth century was to affirm the principle of nonintervention. 12 Those who, like Mazzini, urged intervention on behalf of movements seeking freedom from oppression, or John Stuart Mill, who endorsed intervention under carefully delimited circumstances as an exception to the general principle, foreshadowed today’s interventionist liberalism. At the present time, when arguments for humanitarian intervention abound and precedents for United Nations interventions of increasing scope are accumulating, voices calling for a return to principled noninterventionism have a distinctly archaic ring.13 These three developments—concerning the market, human rights, and intervention—offer only partial indications of a global order; but they share an important common feature in that they tend to diminish the authority of the state. The empowering of the market weakens the state’s capacity to control activity within its territorial space; international representations on behalf of human rights give precedence to the rights of individuals over state sovereignty; and the legitimizing of intervention, under whatever conditions, amounts to an even more radical claim to override sovereignty. Before coming to a more general conclusion, however, it is necessary to consider countervailing features of contemporary liberalism; above all, the growth of international organizations and the associated theory, which Robert Keohane terms “regulatory liberalism” (in juxtaposition to “commercial liberalism”).14 While there are instances of a transfer of power to international organizations, as Joseph Camilleri (Chapter 13) notes, the major institutions remain intergovernmental, and their “coordinating” role remains rhetorical unless their decisions are actually implemented—by member states. In certain areas such as environmental issues, while it is true that meaningful policies often require international agreement, their effective implementation is likely to require a strengthening of state capacities.

CRITIQUES

The critiques of liberalism most familiar to students of international relations remain relevant, but need to be updated and more closely related to the themes of broader critiques of liberal thought. For Morgenthau, the cardinal sin was liberalism’s denial of the central importance of power in

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international politics.15 It might appear that this is a lesson that has been adequately learned: throughout the Cold War liberals accepted the priority of “national security” goals, and the shared assumption of those engaged in the debates over whether U.S. power is declining is that power remains of fundamental importance. At another level, however, liberal thinking still neglects power: the structural power of the North in relation to that of the South remains a notable “blind spot.” Liberal opinion acquiesces readily in the marginalizing of North-South issues and in the comfortable image of a Southern “zone of conflict” contrasted with the beneficent Northern “zone of peace.” The blind spot extends to unconcern for the impact of the powerful international financial institutions on the development prospects of the poor, even though the evidence suggests that, while their policies may have assisted some countries, they have exacerbated the problems of many others. Morgenthau’s realist critique converges with the traditional radical critique of liberalism, that in its preoccupation with individualist values, it neglects the extent to which an individual’s chances of realizing those values are conditioned by social circumstances. For example, the doctrine of the universal benefits of free market exchanges presupposes relatively homogeneous parties to the exchanges, but liberals show little concern for the effects of inequalities or relationships of dependence. In a context of extreme inequalities of wealth and power, according to this line of reasoning, liberalism becomes essentially an ideology that serves the interests of the strong, legitimizing an ordering of society that continually reinforces those same structures of inequality. If liberal support for globalization is viewed from this angle, the question of the role of the state appears in a new light. The focus now shifts from the state in general to the differentiation of roles among distinct categories of states. One particular category, the newly industrialized country (NIC) state, has proved capable of exercising a very effective role as gatekeeper vis-à-vis global influences as well as purposeful steering of internal social and economic development. At another extreme, there are those states that have been termed “wards of the international financial institutions,” or even “quasi-states,” whose basic policies depend, not on impersonal global forces, but on the decisions of international officials.16 At the apex of the system, among states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), there is also differentiation: a few states enjoy a degree of autonomy and influence not approached by the rest. But is it the G7 (governments of the seven leading industrialized states), or more plausibly the G3 (the United States, Japan, and Germany)? Or does the unrivaled structural power of the United States place it—the U.S. state—in a position of substantial dominance, as Susan Strange has argued?17 For E. H. Carr, voicing a different line of criticism, liberalism’s central flaw was the doctrine of the harmony of interests, which traditionally

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found expression in the belief that the real interests of peoples were congruent, but that conflicts were artificially created by undemocratic leaders, or were caused by irrationality, the lack of an informed public opinion, and the like. 18 Assumptions along these lines remain part of the liberal approach to international issues. For example, opposition to measures supported by liberal opinion and sanctioned by the UN Security Council is readily perceived as illegitimate: the possibility that it might reflect genuine local interests or cultural concerns is not entertained. More generally, and here Louis Hartz’s view of U.S. liberalism is relevant,19 a liberal political culture tends to diminish awareness of alternative values and ideologies, and is conducive to the ready condemnation of others for not conforming to one’s own perception of the norms appropriate for them. The case of Somalia suggests how insensitivity to the ethical and political dilemmas of liberal interventionism could open the way to a new variant of imperialism. From one perspective, agreed norms are being enforced by the legitimate international authority; from another, strong states are overriding the autonomy of a weak state. In the contemporary context, a new critique of liberalism might be formulated along the following lines. When the global agenda is no longer determined by security concerns, a much wider range of policy options is opened up, at least in principle, but the dominant free-market version of the liberal paradigm drastically narrows the agenda once again by imposing its own parsimonious imperatives. Globally, these require free trade and the removal of all other barriers to economic intercourse: the main purpose of cooperation among governments is to reduce distortions in the free working of markets. At the national level, throughout the OECD world, the overriding goal is to promote competitiveness, mainly by removing obstacles to the free working of markets, but also through selected state initiatives. At a time when global technological and financial developments are weakening the capacity of states to manage national economies, and thus to pursue equity and welfare goals, free-market liberalism downgrades those goals themselves. Some of the costs of this radical departure from the post-1945 “embedded liberalism” compromise in the West—structural unemployment and a tendency toward social polarization—are becoming increasingly evident. Elsewhere, as we have seen, the focus is on the traditional Western conception of human rights and the promotion of democratic political forms, but there is much less concern over promoting the social, economic, and institutional developments without which such forms are unlikely to win effective support. This renewed narrowing of the agenda implies the continued subordination of at least two momentous issues (that were subordinated for other reasons during the Cold War): the issues of equity and subsistence, and global ecological concerns. While North-South issues declined in salience during the 1980s, the underlying problems became more, not less, acute.

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Many countries in Africa and Latin America experienced not just a relative decline in growth, but an absolute decline in per capita income; and there was an increase in malnutrition and acute deprivation.20 Projections based on present trends offer no prospect of a reversal: much of Africa, for example, is expected to remain outside the dynamic global economy and to experience even further decline and misery.21 Whereas a cosmopolitan ethic would insist that this issue is of the utmost urgency, liberalism legitimizes acquiescence in the working of market forces. The second issue comprises the set of concerns raised by demographic pressures, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, the disposal of waste materials, ecological damage, and the prospect of radical changes such as global warming. To address these will require political imagination and initiative of the highest order, calling for the setting of goals internationally and their effective implementation, and radical rethinking of a kind that the liberal paradigm resists, if indeed it does not preclude. The idea of sustainable development appears to be at the boundary of the paradigm, yet the question is likely to be whether this is a viable concept, or whether even more radical rethinking of economic assumptions and practices will be needed. These developments—the social and economic dislocation being experienced in the OECD world, extreme deprivation in Africa and in sections of many Third World societies, and the halfhearted response to longterm ecological challenges—are not an automatic consequence of the economic and social trends that constitute globalization. Here, as Joseph Camilleri indicates, there are social developments (such as the emergence of a multiplicity of transnational networks) that offer the potential for addressing concerns of this kind, most of them transcending national boundaries. The marginalizing of this kind of agenda is to be ascribed, in the first instance, to the prevailing ideology—the one-sided market liberalism that has been highly influential among Western elites for some time, was embraced wholeheartedly by the United States in the 1980s, and is imposed on the large section of the world that is financially dependent on the OECD countries. Any attempt to take up the challenge would require the setting of concrete goals at the global level, as well as at that of states and perhaps other incipient political communities, and a determined will to implement such goals. Whether this would require the restoration of greater effectiveness to states, the actors best capable of implementing such policies, or whether this is precluded by the encroachment of transnational economic and social forces, pointing to a need to construct new global institutions or to strengthen old ones, is a central question at the present time. But the onus of argument rests on those who maintain that alternative institutions stand a better chance than states of adequately addressing urgent global issues. The experience of the European Union, the only genuinely “supranational”

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institution, underlines the reluctance of governments and electorates to transfer political authority to such institutions, and suggests that the time frame for the construction of fully effective transnational political institutions is likely to prove very long—comparable to that for the development of the “modern” state itself. On the other hand, the example of the NIC state illustrates the potential for purposive state initiative within the present global environment.

FORCES SUSTAINING THE PARADIGM

These issues raise the question of the nature of the forces sustaining the paradigm, and in particular the move away from the “embedded liberalism” compromise of the early postwar period. Robert Cox discusses the weakening of the broad coalition of political forces that supported that compromise, in which organized labor had the central place, joined by other groupings that favored the expansion of the public sector and the welfare state.22 This political coalition was undermined by developments that have become evident since the 1970s: the decline of the political power of labor due to the disappearance of many of the traditional industries in the Western economies; the effects of technological change and the mobility of capital; and the effects of increased competition in the industrialized world, the pressure to reduce costs, inflation, and government expenditure. In response to these pressures and the changing balance of political forces, the ideology of the New Right, formulated in a multitude of wellfunded “think-tanks,” provided a rationale for the familiar policies of the 1980s, pursued most strongly in the United States and the United Kingdom but more widely influential: deregulation, privatization, the reduction of government expenditure, tax concessions to those on higher incomes, and the like. The goals of social equity and full employment were set aside in the name of competitiveness and efficiency. Also under threat was the maintenance of publicly funded infrastructure. This was not the only possible response to the international pressures, but whereas the “welfare liberal” political forces were thrown on to the defensive and bereft of new ideas, the New Right offered a way forward that benefited the more dynamic elites and offered a mirage of a general sharing of the benefits of the new growth in the future. It is perhaps only when this can be clearly seen to have been a mirage that the basis for a regrouping of political forces may begin to emerge. The role of the economics discipline, highly influential in public policymaking and in the public discourse, is also relevant. While it may be the case that many economists did not share the New Right’s political agenda, in particular its promotion of inequality and its rejection of the

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welfare state, their general preference for markets over governments, their preoccupation with competitiveness, and their neglect of the larger social and political underpinnings and consequences of policies meant that there was little effective opposition from the economics profession to the New Right agenda, nor a reassertion of neglected social and political goals. Typically, in a situation characterized by multidimensional technological and social changes, the response of economists is to overstate the benefits of free-market solutions, declining to enter into the discussion of broader concerns through the recourse to dichotomies, as if all such concerns could be banished by reiterating the superiority of free trade over protection, or of markets over “intervention.”23 The failure of the Keynesian solutions to contemporary economic problems led, not to any return to the values and goals of Keynes’s generation, but to a narrowing of focus and a tacit return to a confidence in the capacity of markets to achieve social goals that that generation had known to be misplaced—or to a tacit abandonment of those goals. Liberal-democratic governments, always subject to short-term pressures, find their preoccupation with the short term enhanced by the influence of economics, whose timeless models and focus on the allocation of resources provides no corrective. The goals of other key actors in the system, such as transnational corporations and financial institutions—whether they are to be understood primarily in terms of profit maximizing or as empire-building—are also relatively short-term, and the new prominence of international currency speculation further accentuates the influence of short-term thinking on governments. The effect of these tendencies is to erode the authority of the state, weakening its capacity to take constructive initiatives in response to the multiple challenges of globalization. Notably lacking is any sense of a long-term vision, in striking contrast with the early postwar period. At that time, in societies shaken up by the effects of the 1930s depression and the World War II, there was a determination to put to good use socially the enhanced powers that industry and technology made available, potentially, to states. In the last decades of the century, the goals do not extend beyond abstractions such as efficiency, competitiveness, and flexibility. Admittedly, the challenge to the OECD states is doubly demanding, since it involves addressing their own social problems and the taking on of novel responsibilities on a range of global issues of which the postwar policymakers were scarcely aware.

PROSPECTS

There is no early prospect of an effective challenge to the liberal paradigm. Although there are competing ideologies, most notably Islam, there

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is none that has a potential universal appeal, and in that sense is capable of promoting a global alternative to liberalism. Critical social movements may undermine its pretensions and may influence the ideological climate in particular societies, but their diversity and decentralization suggest that they are not well placed to mount a general challenge.24 The dominant liberalism, however, is unlikely to become hegemonial, in Cox’s sense; that is to say, an ideology that enjoys broad legitimacy through providing diffuse benefits throughout the system, as well as particular rewards for the hegemon. The aggressive promotion of democracy provokes resistance that whatever particular interests may be involved, can often claim support on cultural grounds or as opposition to external intervention. Moreover, if democracies fail to deliver the goods economically, and if they become associated with corruption and profiteering rather than with social equity, cynicism and alienation are likely to replace the present acceptance of democratic institutions in many parts of the world. Too many are excluded from the benefits of liberalism, even within Western societies—but above all in the Third World. In the long run, the further polarization projected by present trends cannot be viable: the paradigm offers too little to those excluded from its benefits, and little prospect of reversing these trends. If there is no effective challenge to the liberal paradigm from without, a challenge to its dominant strand could still come from within—from revival of the “welfare” strand that gained the intellectual ascendancy in liberalism from Green to Keynes, even though it never gained the full support of the wider liberal constituency. Potential successors to these thinkers are not difficult to identify. John Rawls places the question of justice at the center of contemporary liberal political thought, and the writings of Amartya Sen propound an ethic of development based on a concept of positive freedom remarkably close to that of Green.25 The relevance of Sen’s normative views is not limited to the “developing” world, but is universal, and these views find a measure of institutional expression in the work of the UN Development Programme.26 Liberal thinkers such as these do not address the question of the role of the state in a world undergoing globalization. Nonetheless, they look to political action to advance social goals and to counteract negative effects of market forces. The individual remains the focus of their moral concerns; political communities of some kind are taken for granted rather than theorized about, and the question whether liberal values can be adequately advanced through cooperation among states or whether this requires new political structures is not addressed in those terms. An answer may be implicit in the writintgs of international regime theorists and “regulatory liberals,” who study the workings of particular sectors of transnational activity, examining nonstate actors and transnational networks alongside state actors. Their answer would seem to be that while initiatives frequently

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come from nonstate actors, the heart of any effective international regime is cooperation among states (or even, according to the “hegemonic stability” school, the hegemonic leadership of the most powerful state). It is a conservative answer: just as new issues complicate governmental agendas, so do new transnational societal actors complicate the task of balancing the claims of internal societal actors, but they do not change the essential character of that task nor diminish the state’s responsibility for its choices. This is, however, a conservatism with regard to institutional means, not political ends; and if the liberal paradigm has little to say on the question of political and social ends, and provides little impetus to ideas for radical political or institutional change, it does not entirely preclude such change. It is to the fissures within liberalism and to the work of heterodox liberal thinkers that one may look for relief from Kothari’s nightmare of a world without alternatives.

NOTES I wish to thank Hayward R. Alker, Jr., for his valuable comments on an earlier draft. 1. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18; Rajni Kothari, “The Yawning Vacuum: A World Without Alternatives,” Alternatives 18, no. 2 (1993): 119–139; Chris Brown, “‘Really Existing Liberalism’ and the International Order,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21, no. 3 (1992): 313–328. 2. Owen Harries, “Fourteen Points for Realists,” The National Interest 30 (1992–1993): 109. 3. See, for example, James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, “A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post–Cold War Era,” International Organization 46, no.2 (1992): 467–491; Charles W. Kegley Jr., “The Neoidealist Moment in International Studies? Realist Myths and the New International Realities,” International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 2 (1993): 131–146; Torbjörn L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 240–242. 4. Michael Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1151–1169. 5. For a more extended discussion, see James L. Richardson, “The End of Geopolitics?” in Richard Leaver and James L. Richardson, eds., Charting the Post–Cold War Order (Boulder: Westview, 1993). 6. John Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 30; E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish, Western Liberalism: A History in Documents from Locke to Croce (London and New York: Longman, 1978), pp. xviii, xx. 7. Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 14. 8. Ibid., p. 190. 9. Ibid., pp. 285–286. For the text of Green’s essay, “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract,” see Bramsted and Melhuish, Western Liberalism, pp. 652–656.

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10. John G. Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982): 379–415. 11. In his speech at the world conference, Secretary of State Warren Christopher undertook to seek U.S. ratification of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, but the speech was entirely devoted to the theme of democratization. (Warren Christopher, “Democracy and Human Rights: Where America Stands,” speech to the World Conference on Human Rights, Vienna, 1993). Australian policy has, in contrast to that of the United States, included a commitment to economic and social rights since the mid-1980s, even though civil and political rights retain the greater prominence. (Ian Russell, “Australia’s Human Rights Policy: From Evatt to Evans,” in Ian Russell, Peter Van Ness, and Beng-Huat Chua, Australia’s Human Rights Diplomacy (Canberra: Australian Foreign Policy Publications Programme, Department of International Relations, Australian National University). 12. Bramsted and Melhuish (note 6), pp. 278–287, 352–383. 13. See, for example, David C. Hendrickson, “The Renovation of American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 71, no. 2 (1992): 48–63. 14. Robert O. Keohane, “International Liberalism Reconsidered,” in John Dunn, ed., The Economic Limits to Modern Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 15. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 4th ed., (New York: Knopf, 1967). 16. Eliot Abrams, “The New Poor-house,” The National Interest 32 (1993): 72; Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 17. Susan Strange, States and Markets: An Introduction to International Political Economy (London: Pinter, 1988). 18. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1946). 19. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955). 20. For an overview, see United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1990, pp. 33–36. 21. Jacques Attali, Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order (New York: Times Books, 1991), pp. 71–74; Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 211–218. 22. Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 279–285. 23. For an example of this kind of reasoning, see Ross Garnaut, “Comments: Expanded Thoughts on Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy,” in J. L. Richardson, ed., Northeast Asian Challenge: Debating the Garnaut Report (Canberra: Canberra Studies in World Affairs 27, Department of International Relations, Australian National University, 1991). The debate over Michael Pusey’s critique, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation-Building State Changes Its Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) was similarly frustrating due to his economist critics’ preference for making debating points over addressing the concerns that he articulated. 24. For a more positive assessment of the potential of critical social movements, see R. B. J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988).

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25. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). For a valuable survey of Sen’s approach, and the associated views of Martha Nussbaum, see David A. Crocker, “Functioning and Capability: The Foundations of Sen’s and Nussbaum’s Development Ethic,” Political Theory 20, no. 4 (1992): 584–612. For a brief statement of his view of freedom, see Amartya Sen, “Individual Freedom as a Social Commitment,” New York Review of Books 37 (June 14, 1990): 49–54; for his development ethic, see, for example, Amartya Sen, Resources, Values and Development (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 26. Crocker notes Sen’s influence on the drafting of Human Development Report 1990; see Crocker (note 25), p. 587.

10 Symptoms of Globalization: Or, Mapping Reflexivity in the Postmodern Age Anthony M. Elliott

Modernity, the social and political order of the late twentieth century, is characterized by widespread cynicism about rationality and knowledge; coupled with the recognition that technoeconomic modernization is directly connected to the production of risks, hazards, and insecurities on an unprecedented global scale. Questions of risk assessment and evaluation are not only on the political agenda today in advanced modernity, but are intrinsic to the nature of political and social management; that is, the administration of reflexive knowledge generated by the agencies, organizations, and institutions that form the interconnected world of states and societies. The issue of reflexivity in the context of risk assessment is what will be pursued in this chapter. The first section reviews the contributions of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens on risk and reflexivity as they concern the impact of changing patterns of global interconnections in relations between self and society. The second section critically examines the implications of the theory of reflexive modernity in terms of postmodern political conditions. The third section focuses on one contemporary manifestation of “instituted reflexivity” in the global system, the expert structures of bureaucracy and technoscience of political management, and submits them to a critical examination. Drawing on the psychoanalytical work of Castoriadis, Klein, and others, this section analyzes some of the fantasy networks and representations that underpin bureaucratic technique in the international networks of states and societies. The thesis is that, in postmodern political conditions, the instituted reflexivity of expert systems is a double-edged phenomenon, at once a constitutive source of social reproduction, as well as a force locating human subjects within social and ideological relations of domination and power. In conclusion, I consider some of the general issues raised by the issue of reflexivity in relation to individual and collective autonomy in advanced modernity. 157

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MODERNITY AS REFLEXIVITY AND RISK

In his Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1992), Ulrich Beck argues that modern social life creates new parameters of risk and danger that we must face as individuals and collectivities. According to Beck, we are today witnessing, not the final breakdown of the Enlightenment, nor a transition to some postmodern social universe, but instead, modernity coming to terms with itself—its radicalization. Beck argues that the technoscientific development of modern societies in the West has now reached the point where humankind is released from traditional constraints of the social and natural environments. This development, says Beck, opens the social world in the widest possible sense to a systematic questioning and critique of modernization itself. History, as it were, is today being rewritten backwards: problems resulting from technoeconomic development are increasingly subject to reflexively infused systems of action aimed at preventing, minimizing, or reordering the unintended, destructive effects of industrial modernization. What are the contours of risk in late modernity? Beck acknowledges that the concept of risk can be applied to all forms of social organization. Yet risk in the late modern age, he says, becomes fundamental to the reflexive ordering of social life itself. Of central importance in this respect is the impact of globalization. The globalization of social institutions systematically intensifies the overall parameters of risk. As Beck puts this, the risks of modernization possess an inherent tendency towards globalization. A universalization of hazards accompanies industrial production, independent of the place where they are produced: food chains connect practically everyone on earth to everyone else. They dip under borders. The acid content of the air is not only nibbling at sculptures and artistic treasures, it also long ago brought about the disintegration of modern customs barriers. Even in Canada the lakes have become acidified, and forests are dying even in the northern reaches of Scandinavia.1

Globalization thus creates risks that transcend boundaries of time and space. The distribution of risks, as witnessed in nuclear calamities like Chernobyl or global warming, have no spatial, national, or temporal boundaries. Significantly, Beck has also taught us to see that the “openness” of risk today is connected in an essential way to the restructuring of politics, above all as concerns the managment of political consequences. In modernity’s earlier development, risk calculation and assessment operated through the logic of the “insurance principle.” The insurance principle, Beck says, was an effective means of legitimizing the immensely productive, yet nevertheless very destructive, forces of modernization. Company

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insurance and the welfare state were prime instances of risk institutions aimed at reducing, in some sense, the catastrophic consequences of industrialization. In conditions of advanced modernity, however, we see the collapse of the insurance principle. In the intensified global and totalized space of the new world system, existing legal norms of responsibility and damage atrophy. “Along with the growing capacity of technical options,” writes Beck, “grows the incalculability of their consequences.”2 Similarly, in a series of recent publications, Anthony Giddens3 underscores the reflexive ordering of the social institutions of modernity, and the vital role that risk assessment plays in the contemporary era. Giddens seeks to move beyond the modernity/postmodernity debate by rethinking the notions of, and the relations between, risk and trust, security and danger. Modern social life, for Giddens, is a realm of mixed possibilities. It is an institutional order of ambivalence, in which individuals and collectivities continually face new opportunities and new dangers. In this connection, the overall riskiness of life in the late modern world is far greater than it was in traditional societies, because of the globalized nature of its social systems and institutions. Nuclear war, global warming, world economic recession, totalitarian superstates: these are, says Giddens, the potential “high-consequence risks” of modernity. Against this backdrop of anticipated apocalyptic risks, social institutions become subject to reflexively organized domains of action, whereby thinking in terms of security and risk is fundamental to the reproduction of society. Reflexivity, according to Giddens, should be conceived as a continuous flow of individual and collective “self-monitoring,” a monitoring in which room is made for the contingency and openness of social life today. As Giddens puts this: To live in the “world” produced by high modernity has the feeling of riding a juggernaut. It is not just that more or less continuous and profound processes of change occur; rather, change does not consistently conform either to human expectation or to human control. The anticipation that the social and natural environments would increasingly be subject to rational ordering has not proved to be valid. The reflexivity of modernity is bound up in an immediate way with this phenomenon. The chronic entry of knowledge into the circumstances of action it analyses or describes creates a set of uncertainties to add to the circular and fallible character of post-traditional claims to knowledge.4

BECK AND GIDDENS IN THE POSTMODERN

The theory of reflexive modernity, outlined in different ways by Beck and Giddens, offers an alternate perspective on the relations between self and society in contemporary theoretical debates. It clearly breaks with the

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Enlightenment view of subjectivity, where a self-identical subject unproblematically confronts a stable object-world; yet it also rejects the poststructuralist critique of the “decentred subject,” thoroughly fragmented in and through language. Instead, self and society in this viewpoint are interrelated in a global context, where cultural forms press into a reflexive mobilization of meaning and identity. Such a case, however, is not to be mistaken with transcending the implicit assumptions of modernism itself. Beck and Giddens may offer a path toward thinking individual and collective reflexivity otherwise, but aspects of their work also remain caught within a modernist prism that grants metaphysical privilege to rationality, autonomous selfhood, and emancipation. In this respect, Scott Lash5 has convincingly argued that the theory of reflexive modernization, notwithstanding its grasp of the multidimensional nature of modernity, cannot adequately theorize the contingency and ambivalence of the contemporary era. In this section, I will explore some of the limits of the theory of reflexive modernity, suggesting that it is necessary to reframe the concept of reflexivity in a fashion more in keeping with the current postmodern age. First, consider the complex institutional processes that are reshaping social life today. The image of modernity presented by Beck and Giddens focuses, on the one hand, on the complex interplay between the extensional transformations of globalization, and, on the other, on the reconstruction of social action through reflexive risk assessment. Modernity is understood on an institutional level as vulnerability. For Beck and Giddens, the crisis-ridden system of global interconnectedness in which we now live is experienced by people ambivalently, as exciting adventure and terrifying risk. Global institutions interlace in a direct way with the dizzying kaleidoscope of local meanings and identities, that in turn provide individuals with opportunities for reflexive calculation of their deepest hopes and fears. This belief in the possible reflexive calculation of social uncertainties is, however, irredeemably subverted and destroyed in postcontemporary theoretical interventions, in postmodernism. This critique— as reflected in the work of Lyotard,6 Baudrillard,7 Jameson,8 and Vattimo9 —sees postmodernity as a world of such cataclysmic change, dynamism, and intensity that all existing principles and assumptions of conceptual thought are plunged into crisis. By a perverse kind of internal logic, postmodernity is said to break up social reality into chunks of experience, without reference, structure, or unity. Of key importance in this respect is the proliferation of images, messages, and codes disseminated through the phantasmagoria of the mass media. The proliferation of images in postmodern social space, or “simulation” in Baudrillard’s account, entails a radical breakdown in our sense of subjective reality. Postmodernity multiplies, dislocates, and disperses the psychological forms of everyday reality. It destroys modern structures of time, space, history, and truth, replacing

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them with a celebration and pluralization of brute immediacy. Indeed, it appears increasingly difficult to achieve any kind of critical distance for the illumination of social experience at all. Faced with the multiplication of the social, the trusted distinctions between meaning and nonmeaning, truth and fantasy, surface and depth can no longer be sustained. Second, connected to the cultural forms of postmodernism, it is necessary to raise the question of the status of human subjectivity. In the theory of reflexive modernity, the human subject is seen as self-interpreting, self-monitoring, and self-legislating. For Beck, identity risks are ordered and reordered through cognitive reflexivity (in typical sociological fashion, Beck is little interested in the psychic processes that fashion the links between the cognitive and the affective, rationality and desire). For Giddens, identity risks are calculated in social networks of trust and relatedness. Self-organization, says Giddens, is constituted through an “emotional inoculation” against unconscious anxiety. Yet the work of Beck and Giddens is, in my view, stunted by this deliberate restriction of reflexivity to integrated selfhood as such. What is of crucial importance here, as modern psychoanalysis affirms, are the (de)formations of repressed desire and the imaginary, intersubjective dimensions of the social network. That is, repressed desires force social relations into certain deceptions and distortions. There is an excess of unconscious enjoyment, passion, condensation, and displacement at the heart of human social relationships. This has, of course, far-reaching consequences for the very notions of subjectivity and self-reflection. In French psychoanalysis, Lacan10 denotes the failure of sexual identity by citing the subject with a crossed-out S, indicating that lack and the unconscious are inextricably intertwined. In other psychoanalytical currents—Castoriadis,11 Laplanche,12 Elliott13—selfhood emerges as a direct outcrop of the unconscious itself: a creative core of representational flux that continually condenses and displaces its own roots within the cultural, social network. These considerations are listed, not simply to “play” theoretical strategies against each other, but in order to raise the question of representation itself. For it is precisely the nature of representation—the limits of figuration and the capacity of the psyche to give fantasy registration to social processes—that is directly called into question by the fragmenting and dislocating global world of postmodernity. Transnational capitalist markets, new communication technologies, the industrialization of war, the multiplication of social identities and movements, the fracturing of knowledge and information: these institutional transformations suggest that international and transnational relations have eroded the powers of the modern nation-state to unproblematically control regional and national concerns. At the level of the individual subject, the capacity to grasp, think, and monitor social processes may well be distinctly different from that proposed in the theory of reflexive modernization offered by Beck and Giddens. If we

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treat seriously the concept of decentered subjectivity, and link this with the fragmented nature of postmodernity, we reach a different conception of the nature of reflexivity in institutional social life. In particular, I will suggest in this chapter that it is necessary to retrace the connections between the self-monitoring realized through reflexivity, on the one hand, and the realization of critical reflectiveness upon systems of action and interaction, on the other.

CONTEMPORARY REFLEXIVITY AS INSTITUTED: SOME ASPECTS

It is important now to attempt to locate in a more precise manner a central flaw in the work of Beck and Giddens on reflexive modernity. Certainly, the concept of reflexivity is useful for thinking about social, cultural, and political transformations in the context of modernity and postmodernity. The reflexivity of modern social life consists in a complex interplay between human action and system reproduction, such that self and society are continually refracted back upon one another. Late modernity—with its global commodified forms, its destruction of custom and history, its mass media, its separation of time and space—introduces into the very heart of social life the means by which human action is constantly monitored and reconstructed in the light of incoming knowledge and information. Beck and Giddens thus emphasize, rightly in my view, that reflexively applied knowledge is itself always open to revision. Such is the case even in those “private” domains, such as therapy and counseling of all kinds, where emotions count strongly. In this connection, therapy is a kind of internal expert system deployed for self-realization. Self-therapy is reflexively used to develop new forms and directions of personal change. However, the question that must now be raised—for both practical and theoretical reasons—is whether reflexivity can adequately be understood as “self-monitoring.” A range of difficulties inevitably arise here. In the first place, if reflexivity is constituted through cognitive monitoring, then how might human beings come to understand the internal, affective contradictions that generate their social activity? What, exactly, are the links between the cognitive ordering of reflexive knowledge and the frames of desire and passion that underpin contemporary social forms? What of the connections between reflexivity, knowledge, and autonomy? If it is recognized that repressed desire is, in some part, built into reflexive social practices, then how might this affect our understanding of individual and collective autonomy? When it is claimed that there has been a dramatic increase in the scope of reflexivity in social life, this implies that: first, social systems and domains of action come under the sway of human decisionmaking and

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agency; and second, sociohistorical change is produced in and through self-monitoring and self-interpretation. But it might be just as well to ask something about the kind of knowledge that is placed under the microscope of contemporary reflexivity. For example, who could make an analysis—even according to the logic of resource maximization and costbenefit thinking—between money spent on fashion-design in the West and the amount needed to reverse the dramatic climatic changes that threaten our survival? Who could devise a “reflexive” option between the money that anonymous bureaucracies spend on surveillance technologies and the amount that might be needed to reverse the proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons? At this point, the notion of reflexivity as institutional monitoring reaches its limit. Such considerations suggest that there are deep political ambiguities in the theory of reflexive modernization. The concept of reflexivity, as used by Beck and Giddens, is closed off from certain dimensions of the social-historical world, thus introducing an artificial gap between subject and object, the inside and outside, the individual and history. Yet surely it is important to distinguish the theoretical or abstract possibilities of reflexivity from its sociopolitical reality, from the various instituted modes that reflexivity assumes in the contemporary world. In this connection, it is possible to facilitate such consideration through an exposition and critique of some of the central social forms to be found in contemporary bureaucracy and the application of technoscience to political mangement. In the space of this chapter, no more than a sketch of a general direction of thought that seems fruitful is possible: this has been pursued in greater detail elsewhere.14 Moreover, I wish to underline the point that the critique I develop in what follows focuses upon only one mode of instituted reflexivity in the late modern age. Nevertheless, this attempt to unpack the social forms of instituted reflexivity in one domain of institutional life certainly carries important implications for the development of a more general social theory. For, according to the standpoint being proposed, modes of reflexivity—whether individually or globally—are embedded in imaginary networks of meaning of the contemporary instituted world. The lifeworld itself is saturated, indeed structured and reproduced, through core modes of imaginary fantasy and unconscious representation.15 Consider in this respect the fantasy networks that underpin bureaucracy, science, and technique as concerns state decisionmaking in international frameworks. First, the control that technoscience exerts upon contemporary society, the amount of money and faith that is invested in it, suggests that scientifically based “expert knowledge” has been granted a highly privileged site in the planning and mapping of rationality. Yet the very precision, technicality, and specialization of contemporary technoscience also suggests that the sort of reflexivity we are likely to find in such domains is likely to be impersonal and mostly purpose-orientated.

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The adminstration of technology, as Jacques Ellul says, is done because it is done. Expert skills and/or systems are considered expert when subjective or psychological variables are reduced to a minimum. The debilitating, rigid imaginary structures of contemporary technoscience have been analyzed with great lucidity by Cornelius Castoriadis. Technoscience, says Castoriadis, embodies a general illusion of omnipotence—the illusion of mastery.16 Yet this mastery, as illusion, is no more than pseudorational in character. The one-dimensional, goal-orientated purposes of modern expertise and technology is informed by “social imaginary significations” of power, control, and mastery. Significantly, it is precisely such fetishism for “rational mastery” that grants science, technology, and administration its own legitimation. Technoscience rarely enters into the crisis of politics or ethics, since it is continually pushed toward a brutal and ruthless celebration of autonomization as such. As Castoriadis puts this: Who among the proponents of technoscience today really knows where they want to go—not from the standpoint of “pure knowledge” but with regard both to the kind of society they would wish to live in and to the paths that will take them there? . . . This path—quite paradoxically, considering the amount of money and effort being expended—is less and less that of the desirable in any sense, and more and more that of simply the doable. We do not try to do what “would be necessary” or what we judge “desirable.” More and more, we do what we can, we work on what is deemed doable in the approximate short term.17

The “doable” thus becomes equated with the “rational,” and that means the goal-effective. Yet such a frame of reference contains the seeds of its opposite; that is, irrationality. As Bauman notes of this rationalizing tendency in risk assessments of global security: “More and more often we hear the opinion . . . that it is precisely the enhanced rationality of arms production and strategic planning inside the state units of international conflicts that must be held responsible for constantly growing irrationality governing the inter-state space. Thus rational logic is deployed in order to create a situation in which the credibility of a threat will be guaranteed by the sheer irrationality of putting it into practice.”18 The psychical contours that inform this development of expertise and technique in modern societies have been recently studied by Slavoj Zizek. Zizek tells us that the expert-produced and managed technique that forms the contemporary bureaucratic world is based upon an “obsessive libidinal economy.”19 As concerns the political imagination, as well as the political will of individuals, there is a kind of fantastic autonomization of expert knowledge and power itself. It is as if self-sufficiency and independence are projected into the bureaucratic, symbolic world of rules and regulations, such that the possibility of acting otherwise or differently effectively

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vanishes. This negation takes the form of denial, in the Freudian sense of the term: “I know very well that these issues are important and life-threatenting, but just the same they must be subjected to the applications of expert knowledge.” Zizek contends that such denial involves a radical limitation of symbolization, as well as the possibilities for genuine political and cultural innovation. As Zizek describes the atomization of the bureaucratic psyche: The obsessional participates in frenzied activity, he works feverishly all the time—why? To avoid some uncommon catastrophe that would take place if his activity were to stop; his frenetic activity is based on the ultimatum, “If I don’t do this (the compulsive ritual), some unspeakably horrible X will take place.”20

The orientation of late modernity toward bureaucratized control, ordering, and power, infused by social imaginary networks of omnipotence and fetishism, locates instituted reflexivity within destructive relations of domination. It extends reflexivity into the immense apparatus of institutional repression of the late modern world, and in turn limits the capacities of human subjects for creative, imaginative activities with regard to social organization. An exploration of the relation between reflexivity and its embedding in the more pathological dimensions of contemporary technoscience requires an analysis of the unconscious splits between inner and outer, public and private, self and other. The characteristic movement of pseudorational mastery, on the level of psychical experience, is a rupture in the unconscious organization of subjectivity: there is a monstrous splitting between what is self and what is other. Unconscious splitting, perhaps of the kind analyzed by Melanie Klein, is of key importance in grasping the direction in which much reflexive action is ordered in the contemporary era. Klein21 locates splitting and projective processes within unlimited anxiety, envy, and hatred. If not ameliorated by creative social relations, this splitting can become excessive, leading to the extreme idealization or denigration of objects. The paradox, however, is that splitting only further mobilizes unconscious anxiety. The projection of the self into external objects redirects negativity, but also leads to perception of such objects as being even more dangerous than they were perceived to be previously. Splitting thus leads to a vicious cycle: loss of self and loss of feelings/an accompanying increase in persecutory objects. There is a progressive “breakdown” into a world that is fragmented: everything is in bits and pieces. These processes occur not only on the psychical plane: processes of splitting spill into the entirety of the contemporary instituted world.22 That is to say, modern institutions have become thoroughly penetrated with deeply painful and disturbing psychotic pathologies. Levin expresses this as:

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The inner-outer split and the Self-Other split encourage paranoia; but since they also encourage intolerance, bigotry, hatred, conflict and aggression, paranoid fantasies of panoptical and acoustic surveillance, thought control and attacks of demonic possession they should not be immediately dismissed as symptoms of private madness: it could be argued that they manifest an awareness that may be in touch with a normally concealed sociopathy, the social genesis of a form of suffering represented only in its most extreme state by the classified schizophrenic.23

Splitting is in some ways even more pervasive in modern social life than this account indicates. Not only individuals and social formations, but the technical framework of modern instiutions may be caught up within the language and logic of splitting processes.24

POLITICAL REFLEXIVITY AS INSTITUTED: AN EXAMPLE

Having sketched the broad contours of my argument about the nature of instituted reflexivity in the international order of political technoscience and state bureaucracies, we can explore some possible connections by means of an example.25 Consider in this respect recent Western political responses to the war in former Yugoslavia. The complicated arguments over the question of military intervention in Bosnia have generally revolved around the issue of whether the conflict is ethnic, nationalistic, or economic in character.26 In this connection, expert systems monitoring the war, such as NATO and the United Nations, have created reflexively infused knowledge systems about the age-old ethnic hatreds in Bosnia, the restructuring of nationalism in light of the shifting relationships between Bosnia’s three ethnic groups, and the nature of these group’s economic and territorial ambitions. However, the internal form of these institutional mappings suggests something rather different about contemporary rationalism. In the United States, the Pentagon and the State Department ran full cost-benefit analyses of the potential costs of military intervention. In October 1992, in the face of the massive financial commitment dictated by intervention, expert systems in the United States concluded that the conflict was an “internal matter” and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of other nation-states. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere,27 the ideological effect of this cost-benefit analysis involved a radical displacement of the crisis—social, historical, and moral—as impersonal and inhuman. The very horizon of meaning raised by the war in Bosnia—social destruction and mass death, the questions of human rights and of minorities and nation-states—was denied and disowned. The moral horror of “ethnic cleansing” was neutralized in one stroke through a bureaucratic, fetishistic disavowal. The political crisis in former Yugoslavia, which has exploded with

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particular force in Bosnia, has been seen by Western institutional agencies, by and large, as an outbreak of primitive and savage barbarism.28 Broadly speaking, Western expert systems have been able to interpret the Bosnian conflict, through the lens of bureaucratic ideology, as something Other to the democratic principles of the developed capitalist order. In this instituted mode of reflexivity, it is vital to maintain the illusion that “the Other does not exist.”29 Hence, the tendency of expert systems to focus attention around humanitarian issues—supervising aid distribution, patrolling the convoy routes, and so forth. Against this backdrop of reflexively structured expert knowledge, the tragedy of former Yugoslavia has been recast as a kind of “natural disaster.” In particular, it is necessary to underline the forms of splitting undertaken by expert systems in relation to the Bosnian crisis. The ruthless division of global political space—us/them, insiders/outsiders, democracy/ barbarism—is the effective means through which instituted reflexivity is able to conceive the potential political outcome in Bosnia as neatly confined within the bounds of a “foreign” territory, and of imagining that this eruption of ethnic conflict is essentially domestic in character. Such splitting, I suggest, has the effect of recasting representations of the crisis in former Yugoslavia within the same imaginary networks of meaning of which the brutalities of Bosnia are actually a part. This statement may seem excessive; but it is perhaps less so when one considers the interconnections between general fantasies of omnipotence and the destruction of freedom as the denial of multiplicity, heterogeneity, and difference. Domination across global political space institutes manifold pathological symptoms, certainly. But it is surely not too fanciful to detect similarities in the fantasy scenarios of a fascist politics that believes it can destroy a whole population (i.e., the mind-shaking brutalities of the Serbian detention camps), and a modern bureaucracy that conceals its reflexive monitoring of international affairs under an illusion of omnipotence. For it is here, as Slavoj Zizek has argued, that we find “the hysterical split that characterizes the attitude of the West—the uncanny anatagonism between its ‘official’ politics (preventing ethnic cleansing) and its true desire (to allow the Serbs to finish their work and then, after the fait accompli, to impose peace).”30

REFLEXIVITY AND COLLECTIVE SELF-REFLECTION

In the preceding sections, a number of critical remarks on the theory of reflexive modernity, tracing specific manifestations of distortions or pathologies in contemporary rationalism, have been raised. The theory of reflexive modernity, as we have seen, posits a radicalized rationality in human action, interaction, and systems domains. Modern experience is reflexively highly mobilized; it is self-transgressive in that it is continually

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open to internal monitoring, revision, and restructuring. Yet it is at this point, in effect, that the theory of reflexive action and monitoring falters, discovering a grave split between the circular and fallible character of knowledge in the late modern age and the concrete question of critical reflectiveness and the imaginative capacities of human subjects for creative activity. Radical thought needs to retrace this split in contemporary rationalism, in the hope of pressing through the calculating reflexivity of selfmonitoring. From such an angle, reflectiveness will still be of capital importance, but at a “higher” level: reflectiveness as deliberate, critical activity. It is at this point that social and political theory must undertake a more systematic reflection upon the notions of reflexivity and social transformation, of rationality, self-reflection, and the imagination. The full form of reflexivity and the full institutional implications of reflexive modernization offers a more detailed specification of the development of an international nation-state system with incoherences, contradictions, and dissension. It is not my argument that the modern nationstate, and the system of authority structures it encodes, has been eclipsed by the postmodern global system. But it is a central part of my argument that the advent of postmodernity heralds transformations in reflexivity and rationality at the regional, national, and global levels. As David Held argues: While democratic theory can no longer be elaborated as a theory of the territorially delimited polity alone, nor can the nation-state be displaced as a central point of reference. Global processes should not be exaggerated to represent either a total eclipse of the states system or the simple emergence of an integrated world society. . . . It is clear that any general account of the impact of globalization has to be qualified in relation to different patterns of local and regional development. What is called for, in short, is not a theory of the state, or a theory of the international order, but a theory of the changing place of the democratic state within the international order.31

The changing place of the nation-state has to be rethought, I contend, in relation to the deformations, pathologies, and displacements of modes of instituted reflexivity within the international order. Significantly, such deformations are instantiated as practices of world politics, refracted through nation-states. “In a crucial sense,” as R. B. J. Walker writes, “the state is its own ideology. Its claim to sovereign identity is in part what it is and what makes its nominal existence seems real.” 32 Yet the claim that pathologies of instituted reflexivity must become the subject of critical self-reflection moves not only at a theoretical level; it touches directly on issues of pressing practical concern. The world in which we live today is clamorous with conflicts and divisions that are, in part, constituted and reproduced by the trajectories of instituted reflexivity. Indeed, there are

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plenty of decisive reasons for questioning the functioning and social good of the political context of instituted reflexivity: former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, the Middle East. . . . Yet how far is a social reconstruction of instituted reflexivity possible? How might it be possible to place modes of instituted reflexivity under collective review within the international networks of states and civil societies? For contemporary critical theorists like Jürgen Habermas, the utopian outlines of a social condition beyond the calculating self-reference of technological knowledge and expert systems is to be found in the intersubjective structures of communicative rationality.33 This particular communicative sociation of individuals is at the basis of our collective interest in the reflexive, discursive ordering of truth and knowledge. Communicative rationality thus bears an internal relation to the critique of ideological and social domination. Yet the question of the possibility of reflectiveness, I believe, goes much deeper than this. It is not a matter of undoing the internal dross of our communicative rationalities alone; or, as Habermas is fond of saying, of making the “unconscious conscious.” The fundamental condition for the possibility of critical self-reflection lies precisely in those points of impasse or indeterminancy, of desire, imagination, and unconscious representation. Reflectiveness, then, is not some realm of abstract, discursive calculation. On the contrary, reflectiveness presupposes the creative dimensions of imagination and desire. We need a different conception of the relation between reflectiveness, knowledge, and autonomy in order to trace critically the potential pathways of advanced modernity: a conception that enables us to break with theoretical discourses that themselves idealize technical, expert discourse. As John Dunn points out: The claim to know better is flourished menacingly at identities, personal, cultural, and political, from the outside as much as it has ever been before in human history. But today—more clearly than ever before—we know that it can be vindicated only within identities, that the only authority which it can possess is a human authority, an authority for human beings not an external domination over them.34

There are several points that follow from this. To begin with, reflectiveness is not something that can come about through mere institutional selfreference. It requires, instead, an openness to difference and otherness: the bringing in of the human element. To this extent, reflexivity as critical reflectiveness requires a shift beyond self-monitoring to the point where knowledge is turned back upon itself, thus allowing room to examine the contradictions of the social order. Significantly, it also requires consideration of the self-involvement and self-framing of ideological discourse by human subjects. This demands a full taking in, holding, and containing of

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what Theodor Adorno calls the “torn halves” of the social—individual and culture, theory and practice, universal and particular, self and other. In Kleinian terms, such taking in and holding of contradictions and antagonisms can be characterized as a shift from the paranoid-schizoid to depressive positions—an integrative, psychical process that is essential for the symbolization of things other than what is. For no creation occurs where imagination is inhibited or repressed. Thus, we are talking, radically, about modes of reflexivity that can engage with more than simply the reality of contradiction and conflict. Creative reflexivity means the capability to think, feel, or act innovatively in relation to representations imagined beyond the instituted system. This is the principle of critical self-reflection, which is connected in an essential way to individual and collective autonomy. Such reflexive achievements involve a radical engagement with the deep structures of unconscious representational activity, sexuality, otherness, difference, needs, and desires.35 As Cornelius Castoriadis writes: It is because the human being is imagination (non-functional imagination) that it can posit as an “entity” something that is not so: its own process of thought. It is because its imagination is unbridled that it can reflect; otherwise, it would be limited to calculating, to “reasoning.” Reflectiveness presupposes that it is possible for the imagination to posit as existing that which is not, to see Y in X and specifically, to see double, to see oneself double, to see oneself while seeing oneself as other.36

Instituted reflexivity, in postmodern political conditions, displaces and condenses the possibility for this type of reflectiveness. Advanced modernity—with its globalization, its commodified forms, its liquidation of intimate relationship, its separation of time and space—makes problematic the generative social conditions necessary for deliberate, creative reflection. No one knows if reflectiveness will become further disfigured at the global level of social institutions, marked by viciously regressive forms of nationalism and racism, or further colonized by the one-dimensional logic of bureaucratic systematization. For the resurgence of the project of critical, collective self-reflection, however, new prospects and objectives are urgently required. NOTES The research on which this chapter is based was funded by the Australian Research Council. I would also like to acknowledge the advice and comments offerred on an earlier draft by Albert Paolini, Nicola Geraghty, John Cash, Anthony Giddens, and John Thompson. Albert Paolini has been a constant guide through the voluminous literature of political theory and international relations, and his constructive criticism has been especially helpful. The themes and arguments of this chapter will be developed further in a forthcoming work, Subject to Ourselves:

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Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity). 1. U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), 36. 2. Ibid., 24. 3. A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1990). 4. A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 1991) 28. 5. S. Lash, “Reflexive Modernization: The Aesthetic Dimension,” Theory, Culture and Society 10, no. 1 (1993): 1–23. 6. J. F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986). 7. J. Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988) and J. Baudrillard, Seduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 8. F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1990). 9. G. Vattimo, The Transparent Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). 10. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, (London: Hogarth Press, 1977). 11. C. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). 12. Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 13. A. Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 14. Ibid., and A. Elliott, “The Self-Destructive Subject,” Free Associations, 3(4), 28: 503–544. 15. A. Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) and A. Elliott, Subject to Ourselves: Psychoanalysis and Postmodernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, forthcoming). 16. C. Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (Oxford: Odeon, 1991), 272. 17. Ibid., 249. 18. Z. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992). 19. S. Zizek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1991), 37. 20. Ibid., 35. 21. M. Klein, “Envy and Gratitude,” in M. Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works (London: Virago, 1957). 22. A. Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition (Oxford: Blackwell). 23. D. Levin, Pathologies of the Modern Self (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 526. 24. S. Frosh, Identity Crisis (London: MacMillan, 1991), and A. Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) and A. Elliott Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 25. A. Elliott, A “Death and Its Other in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Fantasy, Death, Democracy,” Free Associations (London: Free Association Books, 1994, 4 (32), (Part 4), 8–35. 26. M. Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin, 1992). 27. A. Elliott, A “Death and Its Other in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Fantasy, Death, Democracy,” Free Associations (London: Free Association Books, 1994, 4 (32), (Part 4). 28. S. Zizek, “Ethnic Dance Macabre,” The Guardian, 28 August 1992: 21.

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29. Lacan, (note 8). 30. S. Zizek, “Ethnic Dance Macabre,” The Guardian, 28 August 1992, 21. 31. D. Held, “Democracy, the Nation-State and the Global System,” Political Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 32. R. B. J. Walker, “From International Relations to World Politics,” in this volume. 33. J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1987). 34. J. Dunn, Rethinking Modern Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 153. 35. A. Elliott, Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 270–272. 36. Castoriadis, “The State of the Subject,” Thesis Eleven 24 (1989): 5–43.

11 Manipulating Space in a Postcolonial State: The Case of Malaysia Loong Wong & Beverley Blaskett

Research theorizing the nature of the state, particularly the Third World state, has often referred to the notion of “transition,” whether the transition consists of economic development or the state’s transition from incontestable sovereignty to a condition of weak and dependent variable in the global political contest. Of course, the former—economic development— itself often relates to transition involving regime change, from authoritarianism to democracy, or vice versa. Such theorizing embraces the notion that some progression is evident across a range of states and supranational groupings—a view that has attracted recent criticism.1 The case of Malaysia—discussed in more detail later in this chapter— calls into question the validity of models that assume such progression as the inevitable consequence of participation in the global economy. The postcolonial state in Malaysia, far from withering away or being subordinated, is an active agent in consolidating, augmenting, and increasing its power and space. This has involved a redrawing of the state-civil society relationship as well as a renegotiation of international relations and a contestation of international identities. Contemporary theoretical discussions have tended to ignore the dynamics surrounding the postcolonial state. Consequently, they are in danger of constituting yet another Eurocentric perspective, which will do little to advance discussion on the state. Early interpretations of the state in postcolonial societies centered on the state striving for modernity, development, and growth.2 These analyses sought to support the indigenous growth of states and to foster enlightened opinion and policy.3 The state was seen to embody progress; to provide the institutional fabric through which change could occur in these new societies.4 Increasingly, these views have been found wanting. The “new world order,” increasing globalization of economic and social forces, and the (re)discovery of indigenous, ethnic, and national agents have all challenged the traditional view of the hegemonic modern state. Reexamination of the state has focused primarily on the exercise of power within the state, 173

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the sovereignty of states and state legitimacy. To what extent can states act—even within the domestic sphere—independently of one another and of supranational concerns embodied by new global social movements and international agreements, on issues such as the use of force and the protection of human rights? To this end, Camilleri and Falk have argued that it is questionable whether the state remains the most important entity in current world politics.5 Such a stance suggests that all states are significantly, if not equally, constrained by external considerations in their internal affairs, and that accountability to the world community is needed for a state to gain international standing. While these “new” promptings raised by Camilleri and Falk and others are welcome, these analyses are primarily focused on discussions dealing with the state in the Western tradition. In its crudest form, this formulation assumes that states follow an almost invariable pattern of development, from the premodern to the modern, converging into a central system of authority.6 Although this theory fits the historical process of state formation in Europe, its usefulness in other settings is limited. A single formulation of the state and its associated development is problematic, and at its worst smacks of determinism or a Western cultural imperialist reading of other societies and states. In cases of postcolonial states, a neglected variable is the discontinuity in the state tradition caused by colonial rule, which in most cases led to the atrophy of preexisting political institutions, and reduced complex issues of consent to authority and political bonds between different groups to one-dimensional law-and-order thinking. The formation of non-European states is not necessarily the result of successful replication of the path traversed by Western states: it can result from the direct contravention of these norms; for example, by (re)discovering and (re)appropriating indigenous political traditions and reinventing “new” state traditions. Postcolonial states are “late developers”; that is, most were constructed politically and, unlike European states, were thrust directly into the processes of modernity: capitalism, internationalization, economic growth and “development.” Although taking over many of the attributes of the colonial state, the postcolonial state asserted its authority as legitimate by projecting its difference from the colonial power, often doing so via an intervention of community or tradition, with emphasis on shared histories and cultures. Rethinking the nature of the state involves, in part, an examination of the relationship between the state and civil society. It may be that a modern state in postcolonial society, far from “withering away,” exerts greater authority upon civil society and the economy. “Generally viewed as having a legitimate right to guarantee the system of social production” and enjoying “a monopoly of the means of coercion,” the state could use economic development to mobilize legitimacy and entrench its power. 7 The

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structure of the state is not, however, not the simple and direct outcome of its control by a particular group. Constituted historically through the complex interactions of economic and political forces, the state marks the site in which conflicts and contradictions in society—class, ethnic, religious, and social—are played out.8 Social and political conflict can well be more predominant in society than social harmony. The state’s legitimacy and also its function can be augmented by the way it constructs symbolic and economic programs. Symbolic actions pertain to wars of liberation and state formation, as with Indonesia’s Konfrontasi and its takeovers of East Timor and West Papua, and as with Malaysia’s promulgation of the Rukunegara. “Development” has often been used to legitimate state action. This has been the case in Singapore, as well as the basis for Indonesian military action in East Timor and West Papua. The notions of political community and political space are conjoined: states have attempted to shape, define, create, and/or suppress civil society, so that civil society is not so much a precondition for the existence of political action by the state, but another task for it. The Malaysian example indicates that, although the state must take account of supranational concerns, there is still considerable domestic political power available if it can display economic growth and political stability. Indeed, Malaysia asserts itself as a significant player in the world arena by promoting the argument that states are best equipped to determine the range of their own activities, despite the efforts of Western-oriented organizations to reduce the power of non-Western states. Building on its creditable economic record, the Malaysian government has used rhetoric to argue against external critics, notably global environmental groups. In the domestic arena, it has been able incrementally to increase its power, arguing for strong measures to ensure social and cultural stability. Far from kowtowing to foreign criticism of its policies, Malaysia has sought to champion Third World states’ rights to determine their own political futures. In this way, it has manipulated its political space by restricting the scope of civil society at home and simultaneously expanding its voice in the global arena.

THE MALAYSIAN STATE’S SEARCH FOR HEGEMONY

No fraction or sector of the dominant economic class in Malaysia is able to attain the hegemony to fully determine its own course of capital accumulation.9 Instead, three fragments of the dominant class coexist: (1) the Malay governing class, which controls power but lacks a strong economic base; (2) the non-Malay (predominantly Chinese) capitalist class—the most developed segment of the local bourgeoisie; and (3) the metropolitan or international bourgeoisie that retains substantial ownership and control of

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Malaysia’s economy, without directly controlling the state apparatus.10 Consequently, the state has attempted to fill this hegemonic void and gradually expand its reach by employing the following three strategies: articulating a more interventionist role in the economy, encouraging the growth of a supportive Malay bourgeoisie, and restricting the scope of internal dissent. The conditions for this situation have their origins in colonial Malaysia.11 British rule promoted a Malay aristocratic stratum while allowing the Chinese the role of “comprador business.”12 The colonial state itself came close to managing the affairs of the metropolitan bourgeoisie, limiting the expansion of local capital. Upon formal independence (gained from 1957 to 1963), the postcolonial state had to reflect the interests of a much wider power bloc and could no longer serve the interests of a single fraction of capital. Under the constitution, the predominantly non-Malay urban areas were subjected to a gerrymander favoring the mainly Malay rural voters; and within the context of Malay dominance, the postcolonial state sought to promote Malay capital. However, it was constrained by the underlying “Alliance formula”—a political coalition arrangement of three communal political parties, each representing one of the major ethnic groups. 13 The growth of Malay capital was acceptable in the context of that compromise, and it did not threaten the interests of the predominantly Chinese local and foreign bourgeois interests. Only limited gains were made in developing a Malay capitalist class and, in the late 1960s, living standards deteriorated. In 1967, real per capita income and consumption decreased substantially. The average income of the bottom 10 percent of all households decreased by 31 percent, from M$49 to M$33 per month between 1957 and 1970.14 Unemployment rose from 6.0 percent in 1962 to around 6.8 percent in 1967/68, with urban unemployment around 10 percent.15 The effects of both the overall decline in income and the increase in unemployment were felt most in the Malay community. Fanned by extremist elements within the ruling bloc, and aggravated by perceived political threat, disastrous racial riots took place in May 1969.16 Parliamentary rule was suspended for two years after the riots and the governing Alliance underwent profound change. The old-guard aristocrats were prized out of leadership of the leading Alliance party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), and replaced by Young Turks, members with closer allegiance to the aspiring sectors of the Malay petite bourgeoisie.17 Through partial reformulation of the modus operandi of the state-sponsored economic development plans in the early 1960s, the government ushered in its New Economic Policy (NEP), in conjunction with the Second Malaysia Plan (1971–1975). The NEP aimed at creating a more equitable economic balance between the races and at eradicating poverty irrespective of race. 18 In addition, it announced that the state would be more directive in the economy:

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The government will participate more directly in the establishment and operation of a wide range of productive enterprises. This will be done through wholly-owned enterprises and joint ventures with the private sector. Direct participation by the government in commercial and industrial undertakings represents a significant departure from past practices. The necessity for such efforts by the Government arises particularly from the aims of establishing new industrial activities in selected new growth areas and of creating a Malay commercial and industrial community.19

The roles of government and private capital were made explicit: Besides providing the leadership in the articulation and achievement of the basic objective of the NEP, the Government will assume an expanded and more positive role in the economy than in the past. The private sector is expected to continue its dynamic growth and complement the Government’s efforts in achieving the objectives.20

The NEP therefore marked the transition from unregulated competitive capitalism to “planned” capitalism.21 The NEP was the government’s response to the “tensions and contradictions of capital at the level of the social and political struggle.”22 Expressed in ethnic rather than class terms, the situation allowed state managers to achieve a degree of autonomy in solving those contradictions according to their individual perceptions of what they were.23 No doubt, self-interest helped shape these perceptions. The managers realized that to enable the continued valorization and accumulation of capital, the process of surplus generation (and exploitation of the masses) could not revert to its pre-1969 form. A new set of relations between capital and labor had to be negotiated to allow for labor’s continued domination by capital. The formation of a Malay fraction of capital was thought viable and, since there was no ready Malay capital that could expand within “one generation,”24 the state had to fill that role. Local non-Malay capital (mainly Chinese) could not hope to play the part, mainly due to racial politicking. At the same time, the government, needing investment funds and investment confidence, could not afford to curb the further development of non-Malay capital. As a compromise, non-Malay local capital was targeted to expand from a 22.5 percent share of equity ownership in 1969 to a 40 percent share by 1990.25 To embark on a new model of capital accumulation based on manufacturing for the export market, the state managers stressed the need for foreign capital to develop the sector. While foreign capital’s equity share was to decline from 62.1 percent in 1969 to 30 percent by 1990, its share of the manufacturing sector was to increase, with the decline occurring in its share of the plantation and mining sectors. 26 By 1990, foreign capital fell to 25.1 percent ownership in the corporate sector;27 by 1988, bumiputra (Malay) ownership was estimated at 24.6 percent.28

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The enlarged role of the state in economic planning did not run counter to the interests of the managers and bureaucrats. In carrying out this social function of reproducing the dominant relations of production, the state offered them increased opportunities (both legally and illegally) for realizing their material interests. To this end, the government embarked on a program of capital accumulation. Through public agencies, the state was able to acquire a major stake in all sectors of the Malaysian economy and by the end of 1980 had become the dominant investor in the private sector.29 Efforts to foster a Malay bourgeoisie extended beyond the creation of public enterprise. As Puthucheary notes, the state permeated “every conceivable economic activity” and in the process created enterprises duplicating and competing with each other.30 The proliferation of public enterprises did not, however, eliminate the private sector. At the First Bumiputera Economic Congress it was recognized that state capital accumulation was a means of transferring assets to a Malay bourgeoisie. When it appeared that the growth of state enterprises would conflict with Malay private capital, the transfer of share ownership of state enterprises to Malay individuals was mooted.31 A year later, the prime minister and the finance minister announced a scheme to divest the shares of state enterprises to Malay individuals.32 Thillainathan, anticipating the effects of this state-led development, remarked that: The number of persons who benefit from the public expenditure programmes are limited, the need for rationing the limited benefits among competing bidders is obvious. In this rationing exercise, there is evidence to suggest that the beneficiaries have been chosen by reference to some political criteria rather than on economic grounds. The scope for corruption and favouritism is also readily evident in such situations.33

The promotion of a client class—in this case an indigenous Malay bourgeoise—was clearly tied to efforts on the part of the state to increase its provenance.

GLOBALIZATION, ECONOMIC CRISIS, AND CONTRADICTIONS IN POLICYMAKING

By promoting national unity, the architects of the NEP intended, among other imperatives, to correct, by 1990, economic imbalances in income, employment, and ownership and control of wealth. Foreign control of the economy was to be reduced to 40 percent of all equity capital, and bumiputra control to rise to 30 percent of the country’s economic assests. However, the relationship negotiated between state capital vis-à-vis private (especially foreign) capital at best constituted ambivalent dependence.

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Malaysia remains dependent on foreign investment and loans for investment capital inflows to offset adverse current accounts and to counteract “capital flight.” In order to stimulate foreign investment, the government has, since 1986, introduced budget measures, relaxed provisions of the Industrial Coordination Act (ICA), and introduced the Promotion of Investment Act (1986). The globalization (and dependence) of the Malaysian economy has led to new ideas, new work practices, and new economic strategies. Rapid economic growth and structural change have occurred. Economically, Malaysia is now more integrated into the world economy. Hungtington argues that, with economic growth, increasing globalization and the growth of a middle class, democratic space correspondingly increases, allowing for more democracy.34 In Malaysia, the opposite has been the case. The middle class is fragmented along communal lines and the Malay middle class, owing its mobility to government policies, supports the government and its role. Similarly, the proposition put by Macintyre that, as an economy becomes more “modern” and globalized, and state-capital relations more established, democratic reform becomes more likely, does not hold.35 Further, Pye’s argument that governments are stressed by global modernization, that “the authoritarian regimes are the most vulnerable and are therefore being seriously undermined” parallels the limitations of Macintyre’s arguments.36 While global economic forces have not necessarily created greater democracy or totally undermined the hold of the state, they have introduced an increased element of vulnerability. Economic crisis, intensified by globalization, has prompted a negotiation, at times contradictory, in the state’s hegemonic position. Structural limitations and political expediency has shifted the stance of the Malaysian state from “aggression” to “accommodation.”37 This has allowed the state further to “legitimate” the capitalist mode of production and to act accordingly to protect and maintain its stake. This is evident in the level of coercion the state is prepared to enforce on workers and peasants, who have suffered the brunt of the government’s contradictory response to dependence and crisis.38 While the use of coercion and the threat of force increased after 1970,39 “welfare” measures remained generally modest, with a resulting marked increase in the inequality of wealth.40 In the 1980s, the economy increasingly felt the effects of global recession. Analysts began to sound the alarm when the external debt topped M$31 billion in 1984. By 1985, it had rocketed to M$43.6 billion.41 The 1985 GDP growth-rate shrank by 1 percent against a growth rate of 7.8 percent in 1984, and rose to 9.4 percent in 1990. Other statistics showed that the number of unemployed leapt by 25 percent to 449,000 in 1985, putting the unemployment rate at 7.6 percent.42 Government policies enabled the economic base to be transformed from agriculture to rapid industrialization.43 By 1993, over half the work force was employed in manufacturing. 44 The influx of foreign capital

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needed to achieve this was accomplished through extremely liberal tax laws and regulations.45 Because industrial growth was foreign propelled, global economic recession doubly compounded the economic ills of the country. The economic slowdown brought about a loss of 43,844 jobs in 1985, of which 63 percent were from the manufacturing sector. 46 Given the prospect of a low- to no-growth economy in the second half of the 1980s, the government increasingly depended upon foreign capital, to the extent that it relaxed NEP and ICA requirements for foreign participation in the economy. Moreover, no equity condition was to be imposed on companies with less than M$1.5 million, provided they did not have pioneer status. Opposition to this new set of policies aimed at wooing foreign capital, pleasing the World Bank, and supporting the state in a time of economic hardship, met with further tightening of social and political control. This interplay of economic and political interests has produced its own contradictions. Increasingly, “a whole new structure of interlocking political and business organisations directed by state capitalists and political party capitalists came to dominate the economy.”47 For their immediate beneficiaries, these policies were a windfall; for Malay small businesses, they have often been a bane. Government policies have favored larger and more capital-intensive firms.48 This progression has been somewhat blunted by ideological mobilization and manipulation: espousing ethnic populism (i.e., advocating the interests of all Malays) via its ideological apparatus (the media, the education system, cultural and religious institutions), coupled with its political machinery and capacities (including repression), the government has attempted to mitigate contradictions of its own making. By virtue of this control, the government has tended to stem challenges to its authority and legitimacy.49

RESTORATION, NORMALIZATION, AND POLITICAL EXCLUSION

O’Donnell, in his conceptualization of the bureaucratic-authoritarian state, draws attention to its contradictory tendencies. According to him, these involve the state in a search for economic stability, which leads to further denationalisation of civil society . . . first as a consequence of the urgent search for transnational capital which is requisite for the normalisation of the economy, and later due to the necessity of maintaining a “favourable investment climate” in order to sustain the inflow of such capital. At the same time, [it] entails a drastic contraction of the nation, the suppression of citizenship, and the prohibition of appeals to the pueblo and to social class as a basis for making demands for substantive justice.50

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He warned that, once implanted, this system would aim to impose “a particular social ‘order’ based on political and economic exclusion of the popular sector,” with the upper fractions of a highly oligopolized and transnationalized bourgeoisie dominating the class structure.51 These processes are evident in the Malaysian state and constitute more than temporary hardship measures to stabilize the polity during recession. Restoration or normalization of the political order was the very theme of the post-1969 government. In the name of a return to “normalcy,” various draconian measures, such as emergency powers under the constitution, were “temporarily” introduced, purportedly to curb political excesses. Measures to control dissent, such as the Internal Security Act (ISA), the Essential (Security Cases) Amendment Regulation (ESCAR), the Sedition Act, the Printing Presses and Publication Act, the Official Secrets Act, became a permanent part of the political landscape. Buttressed by new amendments, these measures enabled the state to augment its surveillance over the citizenry. Side by side with state surveillance has been a process of political exclusion, institutionalized systematically through legal-constitutional processes.52 The government has used laws such as the ISA and ESCAR, as well as the Societies Act and the Universities and the University Colleges Act, to curb opposition and dissident groups, including those associated with political parties of the left, and more recently Islamic opposition groups representing the grievances of the Malay peasantry.53 Political exclusion has become evident; for example, the 1986 elections were held in a drastically reduced electioneering period (of nine days).54 The media, controlled by the government and parties in the ruling coalition, virtually excluded opposition parties and the ruling coalition won 61.9 percent of the parliamentary votes, securing 84.2 percent of the seats. In 1987, the government was plagued by the continued effects of recession, scandals, and allegations of corruption, while significant court cases went against the government and the rift within UMNO continued.55 At the same time, ethnic tensions were intensifying. 56 The government sought to defuse the situation with a massive roundup in October under the ISA. In the process, critics, social activists, and political opponents were rounded up.57 The country’s first prime minister, Tengku Abu Rahman, commenting on the arrests, considered the action to be an affront to democracy, engineered to distract attention from economic issues by demonstrating Mahathir’s determination and hard-line approach.58 Other observers concurred.59 The government further extended its powers. The judiciary was subjected to new restrictions, enabling control by the executive. In 1988, the lord president of the supreme court, Tun Salleh Abas, and some six other supreme court judges (out of the total of ten) were suspended.60 The power of royalty was also circumscribed by the state. Following the crackdown, the coercive laws were tightened. Media laws and

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the constitution were amended and the Police Act was drastically altered.61 The tengku characterized the government as brushing “aside the constitution, the law, and . . . set[ting] up a police state.”62 However, the increase in state powers found much support. Commentators have often explained the lack of effective opposition to the ruling coalition by reference to the divisive nature of communal politics, which makes a concerted alliance of antigovernment sentiment difficult to achieve. Crouch contends that “the possibility of violent racial conflict . . . provides what to many is a legitimate reason for the government to impose authoritarian controls.”63 Malay dominance in the political system, general prosperity, and the increasing success of Malay business also help to explain continued support for the government despite the widespread opposition amongst the middle classes to the 1988 attack on the judiciary.

A NEW VOICE FOR THE THIRD WORLD

Parallel to the development of the Malaysian state’s internal power has been its quest for a greater role in the international arena and increased international recognition. Contributing to this process has been the need to defend internal policies against international criticism, but also the wish to assert a more independent and activist foreign policy role. Having been criticized for its authoritarian style of government and its record on the environment, the Malaysian state chose to counterattack by labeling its critics “imperialists,” “biased,” “arrogant,” and “naive.” Throughout the latter part of the 1980s, Mahathir made political use of Western media attacks on Malaysian policy to argue that Malaysia should not be judged by standards set by First World countries, claiming that the Western media, largely through slanted reporting, sought to undermine Malaysia and other Third World countries. In publicizing its views, the Malaysian government actively sought to curtail criticisms of Malaysia and to manage the adverse global public agenda against Malaysia. In promoting a cultural relativist position to support its domestic policies, the Malaysian government sought to legitimize its democratic and human rights record. Essentially, it contended that Malaysia was democratic, but that it could not be judged by “certain particular (i.e., Western) yardsticks”64 that defined democracy too narrowly. In calling for more balanced reporting, better understanding between “cultures,” the shedding of colonial blinkers, and a restructuring of global economic and political power, Malaysia’s anticolonial and anti-Western media pronouncements gained much support in the Third World and, in the West, on the left. However, the Malaysian government’s strident criticism hides another agenda. It restricts scope for public scrutiny while enlarging and extending its reach. Bright and Geyer, considering international relations and the state within the world system, argue that the crucial point is

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no longer the evolution and devolution of world systems, but the tense, ongoing interaction of forces promoting global integration and forces recreating local autonomy. . . . This struggle for autonomy—the assertion of local and particular claims over global and general ones—does not involve opting out of the world or resorting to autarky. It is rather an effort to establish the terms of self-determining and self-controlled participation in the processes of global integration and the struggle for planetary order.65

This involves an examination of the ideological operation of foreign policy as a process; in Shapiro’s terms, a process of “making foreign”; creating exotic Others and disciplining domestic “selves.”66 Geopolitical reasoning invokes this ideological process of constructing spatial, political, and cultural boundaries to demarcate the domestic space as separate from the threatening other; to exclude otherness and simultaneously to discipline and control the domestic political sphere. Malaysia’s anti-Western campaign needs to be viewed within this context.

CONCLUSION

Students of social change who subscribe to a unilinear notion of unfolding social development believe that the democratic form of government is a concomitant of economic development.67 Although Malaysia’s economic development has been impressive, events since independence have drastically proscribed popular participation in politics not favored by the ruling group. While trappings of democratic rule are largely maintained in postcolonial Malaysia, a wide range of fundamental rights and freedoms initially guaranteed in the constitution have been progressively diminished through legislation. This “limiting of a limited democracy” stems from the activities of the postcolonial state and the contradictions it engenders: economic concentration, yet with it internationalization; denationalization vis-à-vis restoration; normalization, yet political exclusion. Class compromises and shifting alliances have created instability in which the dominant class and, indeed, fractions of it, have less and less room to maneuver. As Pinwill observes, the price of these shifting involvements is high: political and economic hegemony.68 The dominant class, in its bid to consolidate itself and to justify the excesses of authoritarian control, seeks to blur the distinction between the state and civil society. Excesses are rationalized away by arguments that question the appropriateness of a Western democracy for Malaysia and by arguments that stress majority interests.69 Given this view of democracy, it is imperative to draw a clear distinction between state and civil society. Pierson has argued that any attempts to “realize aspirations for both liberty and equality must be based not only upon the overcoming of the division between state and civil society but rather upon their increasingly clear and

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formalised differentiation.”70 In the case of Malaysia, given its ethnic and cultural heterogeneity, there is much to be said for the creation and preservation of a civil society valuing and defending social pluralism. However, this is far from easy. As Hawthorn has argued, there is a discernible trend amongst First World countries to rethink the reach of politics and to reformulate the distinction between public and private. He tells us: It is clear that any answer to the question of how, now, to think about Third World politics which presupposes what the scope of all politics is—especially if it supposes that this scope is fairly minimal; which makes a sharp distinction between states and regimes and between both of these and civil society; and which stipulates what the “normal” functions of each and the “normal” relations between each are—will at best be outdated and at worst get things quite wrong . . . all these presumptions are now in practice and so in theory open; more open, indeed, than they have been for at least fifty years.71

In this context, there is no clear trajectory open to the state. However, in many countries the state is increasing its reach and power over civil society and reasserting its importance. Other commentators have noted the open-endedness of history, and historical irreducibility, as products of the diversity of politics. 72 In the case of Malaysia, although there has been some internal opposition to the most draconian measures enacted by the government to muffle its opponents, the government has been able to consolidate its power over civil society, and has, in the process, enhanced its standing in global terms. The Malaysian state has pursued a high profile within the global arena, cultivating a non-Western image while limiting its exposure to the public gaze. In so doing, it has sought to induce, consolidate, and extend its sphere of influence and power. It has constrained criticism of government policy and performance, enabling it to deterritorialize its critics while enhancing its sphere of activities and influence. Further, it has acted to insert and reterritorialize itself within the global network of power. In “looking East” (promoted by Mahathir since 1981), closer economic cooperation led to Japan becoming Malaysia’s major trading partner and a major source of foreign investment; in “looking South” and in castigating Australia as a proxy for the West, Malaysia reestablished its “postcolonial identity”73 and grasped Third World leadership to regain what it calls autonomy and subvert the process of domination. The Malaysian state, then, has been able to entrench its power via a reconstitution of state aims and functions, and by astute intervention in international arenas to champion and legitimize the actions of developing states that find themselves confronting modernity’s contradictions. Increasing

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globalization and the apparently worldwide impetus toward democracy do not necessarily penetrate civil society in peripheral states, at least not in the fashion presumed in recent literature.

NOTES 1. J. Manor, “Introduction,” in J. Manor, ed., Rethinking Third World Politics (Harlow, England: Longman, 1991). 2. C. Geertz, Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963). 3. E. Shils, “The Concept and Function of Ideology,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 4. S. P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968). 5. J. A. Camilleri and J. Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar, 1992). 6. Huntington (note 4). 7. G. O’Donnell, “Tensions in the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State,” in D. Collier, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 286. 8. E. A. Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); C. Leys, “The ‘Overdeveloped’ Post-Colonial State: A Reevaluation,” Review of African Political Economy 5 (1976): 39–48; C. Pierson, “New Theories of State and Civil Society,” Sociology 18, no. 4 (1984): 563–571; B. Beckman, “Imperialism and the ‘National Bourgeoisie’s,” Review of African Political Economy 22 (1981): 19. 9. Lim Mah Hui and W. Canak, “The Political Economy of State Policies in Malaysia” Journal of Contemporary Malaysia 11, no. 2 (1981): 208–224. 10. Ibid.; also K. S. Jomo, A Question of Class; The State, Capital and Uneven Development in Malaya (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 11. R. Emerson, Malaysia: A Study in Direct and Indirect Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 12. K. Johan, The Emergence of the Modern Malay Administrative Elite (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 13. R. S. Milne and D. K. Mauzy, Politics and Government in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Times, 1978); D. K. Mauzy, Barisan Nasional: Coalition Politics in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: Marican, 1983). 14. Malaysian Treasury, Economic Report, 1974–75 (Kuala Lumpur: Government Printer, 1974): p. 44. 15. D. Lim, Economic Growth and Development in West Malaysia 1947–70. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973): p. 138. 16. M. Stenson, “Class and Race in West Malaysia,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 8, no. 2 (1976): 44–54; Jomo (note 10), Lim and Canak (note 9). 17. Jomo, ibid.; K. Von Vorys, Democracy Without Consensus (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). 18. Milne and Mauzy (note 13), pp. 321–351; D. L. Horowitz, “Cause and Consequence in Public Policy Theory” (mimeo, 1987). 19. Government of Malaysia, Second Malaysia Plan, 1971–75 (Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, 1971), p. 7.

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20. Ibid. 21. K. S. Jomo, “Spontaneity and Planning in Class Formation: The Ascendancy of the Bureaucrat Bourgeoisie in Malaysia,” paper presented to the Eighth Malaysian Economic Convention (mimeo, 1978). 22. C. Fortin, “The Relative Autonomy of the State and Capitalist Accumulation in Latin America: Some Conceptual Issues,” in D. Tussie, ed., Latin America in the World Economy (London: Gower, 1983), p. 10. 23. Nordlinger (note 8). 24. Second Malaysia Plan (note 19), p. 6. 25. Government of Malaysia Mid-Term Review of the Second Malaysia Plan 1971–75 (Kuala Lumpur: Government Press, 1973), pp. 80–85. 26. Ibid., p. 85. 27. H. Crouch, “Malaysia: Neither Authoritarian nor Democratic,” in K. Hewison, R. Robison, and G. Rodan, eds., Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarianism, Democracy & Capitalism (St. Leonards NSW Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1993), pp. 133–157. 28. Jomo, “Whither Malaysia’s New Economic Policy?” Pacific Affairs 63, no. 4 (1990/91): 476. 29. L. Wong, “The State and Organised Labour in West Malaysia, 1967– 1980,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 23, no. 2 (1993): 214–237; Lim and Canak (note 9). 30. M. Puthucheary, “Public Enterprise and the Creation of a Bumiputra Entrepreneurial Community,” paper presented at the Fourth Malaysia Economic Convention (mimeo, 1977): 21–22. 31. K. Ariffin, “Matlamat Penyertaan Bumiputra Di-Dalam Perniagaan dan Perusahan Di-Bawah Dasar Ekonomi Baru—Satu Tafsiran Semula” (mimeo, 1978). 32. New Straits Times (Kuala Lampur), July 8, 1979; July 3 and 5, 1980. 33. R. Thillainathan, “An Analysis of the Effects of Policies for the Redistribution of Income and Wealth in West Malaysia, 1957–1975,” Ph. D. thesis, London School of Economics, 1976: 273. 34. Huntington (note 4); S. P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 2 (1984): 193–218; L. Pye, “Political Science and the Crisis of Authoritarianism,” American Political Science Review 84, no. 1 (1990): 3–19. 35. A. MacIntyre, Business and Politics in Indonesia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990); A. Macintyre, Business-Government Relations in Industrialising East Asia: South Korea and Thailand, Australia-Asia Papers 53 (Brisbane: Griffith University, 1990). 36. Pye (note 34), p. 6. 37. Lim and Canak (note 9). 38. Chandra Muzaffar, Freedom in Fetters (Penang: Aliran, 1986); Wong (note 29); Fatimah Halim, “Capital, Labour and the State: The West Malaysian Case,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 12, no. 3 (1982): 259–280. 39. Wong (note 29); Chandra Muzaffar, (note 38). 40. For studies that review this inequality in wealth ownership, see Lim Mah Hui and M. Anderson, “Concentration of Wealth and Power in the Top Corporations in Malaysia,” paper presented at the Malaysia Economists’ Association Convention, 1976; L. M. L. Sieh, “Size Distribution of Shareholdings in Manufacturing Companies of Malaysia 1974–75,” paper presented at the Fourth Malaysia Economic Convention, 1977; Tan Tat Wai, Income Distribution and Determination in West Malaysia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); L. M. L. Sieh, “The

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Scheme for Bumiputra Investment in Malaysia,” in K. S. Jomo and R. G. Wells, eds., The Fourth Malaysia Plan: Economic Perspectives (Kuala Lumpur: Malaysian Economic Association, 1983); Lim Mah Hui, Ownership and Control of the One Hundred Largest Corporations in Malaysia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), Ch. 5; M. Lindenberg, “Foreign and Domestic Investment in Pioneer Industry Programme, Malaysia, 1965–70,” Ph. D. thesis, University of California, 1973. 41. Bank Negara Malaysia Annual Report 1985 (Kuala Lumpur: 1986). 42. The Sunday Star (Petaling Jaya), September 28, 1986. 43. T. G. McGee, “Joining the Global Assembly Line,” in T. G. McGee, et al., Industrialisation and Labour Force Processes: A Case Study of Peninsular Malaysia (Canberra: Australian National University, 1986), pp. 35–67. 44. Wong (note 29). 45. Malaysian Treasury, Economic Report 1982–83 (Kuala Lumpur: Government Printer, 1982), pp. 183–186. 46. Sunday Times (London), February 2, 1986; New Straits Times (Kuala Lampur), March 12, 1986. 47. Horowitz (note 18). 48. Chee Peng Lim, et al. A Study of Small Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurial Development Programmes in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1979); Abdul Ghani Othman, et al., A Study of Small Bumiputra Enterprises in Kuala Lumpur and Johore Baharu (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya, 1980). 49. M. Brennan, “Class, Politics and Race in Modern Malaysia,” Journal of 48. Contemporary Malaysia 12, no. 2 (1982): 188–215. 50. O’Donnell (note 7), p. 295. 51. Ibid. 52. L. Wong, “A Political Economy of Malaysia,” paper presented at conference, “Racialism in Post-Colonial Societies,” Sydney, 1988; Chandra Muzaffar, “The Barisan’s 2/3 Majority: Why the Opposition Failed,” Aliran Monthly (Penang) (August/September 1986); M. Ong, “The Limiting of a Limited Democracy,” paper presented at workshop, The Political System and Nation-Building in ASEAN, Singapore (mimeo, 1986); S. Barraclough, “The Dynamics of Coercion in the Malaysian Political Process,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 4 (1985): 797–823. 53. Wong, ibid. 54. Muzaffar (note 52). 55. D. K. Mauzy, “The Decline of the Malay Way,” Asian Survey 27, no. 2 (1988): 213–222. 56. Asiaweek, October 23, 1987, and October 30, 1987. 57. New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur) October 29, 1987. 58. Observer (London) November 15, 1987. 59. K. S. Jomo, “Malaysian Detainees Caught in a Tangled Web” (mimeo, 1988); W. Pinwill, “Malaysia: A Crackdown on Democracy,” New Statesman, London, June 3, 1988: 20. 60. Sydney Morning Herald, July 12, 1988; Far Eastern Economic Review June 9, 1988 and June 20, 1988; The Age, July 9, 1988. 61. New Straits Times (Kuala Lumpur), December 5, 1987; International Commission of Jurists (Australian Section), Arrests in Malaysia (Sydney: International Commission of Jurists, 1988). 62. Australian (Sydney) November 11, 1988. 63. Crouch (note 27), p. 152. 64. The Age (Melbourne), July 20, 1991.

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65. C. Bright and M. Geyer, “For a Unified History of the World in the Twentieh Century,” Radical History Review 39 (1987): 69–70. 66. M. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 67. Huntington (note 4). 68. Pinwill (note 59). 69. Star (Petaling Jaya), November 17, 1986. 70. Pierson (note 8), p. 568. 71. G. Hawthorn, “‘Waiting for a Text?’ Comparing Third World Politics,” in Manor (note 1), p. 32. 72. See A. Hirschman, A Bias for Hope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); J. F. Bayart, “Finishing with the Idea of the Third World: The Concept of the Political Trajectory,” in Manor (note 1), pp. 51–71. 73. S. During, “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?” Landfall 39 (1985): 366–380.

12 The World Economy and an Economically Active State: From Economic Radicalism to Neoliberalism in Mexico Stephen R. Niblo As we approach the end of the twentieth century, we face a crisis of political understanding—almost an exhaustion of alternatives. Not only the end of the Cold War, but the crisis of the economically active state, the fraying of the welfare net, and the renewed growth of unemployment and social inequality cause people to feel helpless: their life situations are deteriorating. As the speculative bubble of the 1980s burst, the return of high-level unemployment and increasing inequality convinced many people to give up on politics as a way to make things better. 1 The globalization of the world economy compounds the difficulty by placing a new level of constraints on the ability of any single government to react to growing social problems. Governments feel they cannot act because of the debt crisis, or because of restraints from the International Monetary Fund, or because other government entities will undercut their regulatory efforts by offering more favors or concessions to individual firms. This chapter is a reflection on the experience of one economically active state, Mexico, in the face of its exposure to an ever more integrated world economy. Due to its proximity to the United States, Mexico has for more than a century been faced the kind of limitations presented by what is now referred to as globalization. This phenomenon began to play a major role in Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century, in the period known as the porfiriato. In that era, a long-reigning dictator, Porfirio Díaz (in office from 1876 to 1880 and 1884 to 1911) cast his country’s lot with the foreign investors. The impact was such a severe reduction in the living standards of the poor that, to a considerable degree, it provided a background for the Mexican Revolution (1910–1923).2 There even were moments, as in 1907, when a crash on Wall Street was immediately felt in Mexican banking circles. That episode severely restricted credit for landowners and shifted many of them into the revolutionary camp. 3 The revolutionary movement is beyond the scope of this chapter and, here, it will suffice to note that there was a rapid growth in the globalization of the 189

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economy before the revolution. After decades of struggle, the economic radicals in Mexico asserted themselves.

ECONOMIC RADICALISM

By the 1930s, many of the political ambiguities of the revolution seemed to have been resolved as the governing party, the Party of the Mexican Revolution (the PRM, which after 1947 was called the PRI), committed itself to a program of radical economic nationalism. The party was dominated by the larger-than-life figure of President Lázaro Cárdenas, a man untouched by scandal and whose vision would be satisfied with nothing less than the political reorganization of Mexican society. Cárdenas, president from 1934 to 1940, was someone to be reckoned with. He enjoyed an enormous following—an intensity of support never before seen in national political life. Cárdenas’s challenge to foreign interests included land reform, petroleum expropriation, the nationalization of the railroads, support for labor and peasants, political reorganization, socialist education, experiments in workers’ control, and a major reorganization of political structures. He even, for a time, armed workers to protect the revolution. Above all, there was the most significant redistribution of income, toward the poor, in Mexican history. The deterioration of real wages for the majority of the population in the 1940s was so acute that the working class did not regain the real income level of 1938 until 1971. For many supporters, he personified the revolution.4 Nevertheless, by 1938 Cárdenas was himself pulling back from his most radical reforms—in large part in order to argue to the United States that his nationalization of petroleum in that year was an isolated phenomenon. The considerable degree to which the global economy placed limits upon Cárdenas’ progressive alliance is a theme developed by Nora Hamilton.5 For the remainder of his life—he died in 1970—even during the popular uprising against the PRI at the time of the Olympics in 1968, Cárdenas dominated Mexico’s left wing, even if only by mere hints, or nuance of words. In the 1990s, as the governing party has come full circle back to the neoclassical economic orthodoxy of the prerevolutionary period, his son, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, leads the main opposition party. Cuauhtémoc may well have won the 1988 election: it took the intervention of the Mexican army to prevent opposition deputies from attempting to verify the 1988 vote count, thus keeping the PRI in office. The Mexican Revolution developed an extremely strong state that was committed to a rapid program of industrial modernization. By the middle of the twentieth century, a broad consensus emerged in Mexico as to the way to reverse a birthright of colonial subjugation by and dependence upon a succession of great powers. Earlier beliefs that the achievement of

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national independence and popular sovereignty would improve the lot of the people had been dashed. The nation suffered territorial dismemberment, political and social chaos, decapitalization and financial ruin, religious bigotry, dictatorship, foreign indebtedness, and the continuation, and possibly even the intensification, of the inequities of the colonial class system. Territorial reconquest of the northern borderlands was not a real option: in the nineteenth century, the United States had become too strong. Mexico’s long and painful “northern exposure” led modern Mexicans to conclude that what locked the country into continuing cycles of poverty, dependency, and disappointment was lack of technical and industrial development. Mexican leaders focused on the techniques they believed had made their adversaries strong. A great national commitment to industrialization emerged, and the breadth of that commitment generated political legitimacy for the PRI.

DISMANTLING ECONOMIC NATIONALISM

The height of Mexico’s economic radicalism, under Cárdenas, was in the late 1930s: the petroleum industry and the railroads were nationalized. The dismantlement of Cardenismo followed, largely as a result of wartime cooperation with the United States during World War II. Two administrations (Manuel Avila Camacho, 1940–1946; Miguel Alemán, 1946–1952) confirmed a dramatic shift to the right. By the early 1950s, a pattern had emerged: each new administration orchestrated anticorruption campaigns. The early Ruíz Cortines (1952) administration effectively confirmed the strategy of his two predecessors, limiting the reaction against the corruption of the Alemán years to minor scapegoats. Subsequent reforms did not touch the fundamental mechanisms of the new Mexican system. The United States was central to the complex process that reversed the Cardenista version of revolution. The Roosevelt administration had to start from an awkward moment, with Cárdenas nationalizing foreign-owned petroleum; but Roosevelt pursued an unprecedented policy of accommodation with Mexico. After a general financial settlement (only seventeen days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor) a period of intimate wartime cooperation followed. This opened the door to a tidal wave of foreign investment and influence. Gone was the populism of the 1930s, and with it the nationalist model of industrial development. The power of the state was now at the disposition of developers—foreign and domestic— who promised rapid industrial growth. All they had to do to prosper was accommodate themselves to the rules of the Mexican political system. The earlier goals of reducing poverty were dropped in favor of increased production. Private capital accumulation was supported by the state and an age of opulence for a few Mexicans opened. A conscious policy, culminating

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under Alemán, of wages being frozen in a period of rapid inflation made the poorest Mexicans the biggest contributors to the process of capital accumulation. The success of the Mexican right’s counterrevolution was far from being due only to the will of the series of more conservative presidents. Rather, it was a great historical convergence of forces: the desire to join in the project of industrial modernity (the second Industrial Revolution) and the peculiarities of Mexico’s cooperation with the Allies in World War II.6 The dismantling of Cárdenista’s Mexico is arguably the most important perspective on the country’s contemporary political and economic history. It is imperative to understand the two fundamental elements of Mexican development: radical economic nationalism and orthodoxy, initially called desarrollo estabilizador (stabilizing development) after World War II. These key elements are still relevant to the debate over the proper role of the state today.

WAGES, WORKERS, AND CUSTOMERS

Economic nationalism was based on the line of thought known as underconsumption analysis.7 A significant group of Mexican industrialists came to accept an economic analysis that adopted a nationalist position. Interestingly, these industrialists viewed the Mexican population as their prospective customers. The key figures in this school were in the Cámara Nacional de Industrias de Transformación. Among those involved, at least at some stage in their careers, were José Domingo Lavín, Jesús Cruz y Célis, Jorge Heyser, Antonio Ruiz Galindo, Evaristo Araiza, and José R. Colín. Fundamentally, these leaders wanted Mexican entrepreneurs, aided by the state, to lead the push for rapid industrialization. They realized that their workers would have to have higher wages if they were going to be able to buy—and the employers were to be able to sell—what the new industrialists produced. In their view, a wide variety of specific rules should be slanted to their advantage so that the benefits of industrial growth would accrue both to the nation’s entrepreneurs and workers. Tax breaks, favorable import and export regulations, labor law, rules governing banking and finance, and many other practical measures should favor national over foreign investors (these industrialists were fond of quoting similar protectionist sentiments expressed by Alexander Hamilton to U.S. diplomats). What makes this group of people interesting is their analysis of Mexican industry. Since these producers invariably came from light industry, they focused clearly on the problem of sales. Given the extreme poverty of so many in the population, they understood that only by raising the purchasing power of the poor could they find markets. In an anticipation of

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Keynesianism, they saw they had a community of interests—with organized labor, in general, and with Lombardo Toledano, of the Mexican Confederation of Workers (CTM), in particular. Significantly, even today, it is possible to note business leaders arguing for something other than a perpetual reduction of workers’ wages. Sanford Mosk focused on this group of economic nationalists in Industrial Revolution in Mexico, written in 1954.8 Mosk was unduly optimistic, as it turned out, in viewing them as the dominant group in the business community. The economic nationalists may have been numerous, and even eloquent at times; but they were not to prevail in the long run. The economic nationalists wanted to identify key industries and to preserve them for Mexican capitalists. Both the United States and the Mexican governments of the 1940s opposed the economic nationalists, who ran up against some of the most deeply entrenched tendencies of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Tremendous pressure was generated against any policies that would exclude U.S. entrepreneurs from Mexican markets, finance, or resources. A strong case can be made that, even at the height of the Cold War, antiCommunism was, on a day-to-day basis, of much less importance to U.S. diplomats than the effort to block the economic nationalists. Mexican nationalists and economic radicals were caught in a bind. However much they wanted to oppose U.S. imperialism, they also needed U.S. loans and technology for their industrialization program. Mexican defensive measures that tried to limit the free flow of capital or U.S. products into or out of Mexico threatened Mexican access to capital and technology. Initially, the level of scarcity was such that industrial production was snapped up: saturation of internal markets—the Achilles’ heel of the development program—emerged only later. Even as the postwar period began, Mexican borrowing for large infrastructure projects, such as hydroelectric and irrigation projects, was justified in terms of creating an internal market. There were even moments when U.S. officials were influenced by the underconsumption position, although the U.S. government quickly reined in enthusiasm for this approach. The underconsumptionists’ policies were defeated resoundingly.9 Interestingly, the United States’ introduction of its new National Income Accounting system into other countries—making it a key condition of membership in the International Monetary Fund—was a major step in getting rid of the underconsumptionist policies. After Mexico turned away from its revolutionary model of economic radicalism, the country adopted an import substitution model of industrial development (ISI) and experienced a rapid descent into the debt trap and the fiscal collapse of the state in 1982. In recent years there has been a return to neoclassical economic rationalism.

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STABILIZATION

Mexico based its postwar industrialization program on a forced extraction and transfer of surplus from the poor to the rich, and from the country to the cities, thus stimulating a rural exodus and the extraordinary growth of Mexico City (from fewer than two million in 1940 to approximately twenty-one million today). Since domestic demand was so low, the state was harnessed to the development project in order to provide both capital and markets. For decades, the government argued that there would be a convergence of interests, between the poor and those who benefit from state support of industrialization. The “trickle down” effect, however, was not realized.10 Quickly, Mexican power relationships determined that there would be no continuation of the Cárdenista redistribution of income, helping the countryside. The removal of something like the bottom 80 percent of the population from significant participation in the country’s development program was at the heart of its failure.11 It follows that rediscovery of the underconsumptionist perspective is one of the most urgent matters for contemporary political and economic debate. By contrast, a second key proposition of the early economic nationalists has not been forgotten; indeed, it is at the heart of Mexico’s problem of political understanding today. Nothing was more central to the economic radicalism of the Cárdenas program than the idea that the state should nationalize the means of production if foreign investors or the domestic private sector failed to dedicate themselves adequately to industrial modernization. This seemed reasonable at the time. Investors in Mexico were infamous for a tendency to indulge in rentier activities, rather than backing industrialization projects. And the banks were extremely class-oriented. Even in the face of agricultural shortages generated by cooperation with the Allies in World War II, banks refused loans to small—but efficient—rural producers. Thus, the pattern was established; from the 1930s to the financial crash in 1982, the state supported the drive for industrialization with seemingly unlimited resources. The Role of Nationalization President Cárdenas called himself a socialist, but one must make some key distinctions and not too quickly take his word at face value. He certainly did not envision a total program of the nationalization of the means of production and even kept neoclassical economists in some key financial posts in his administration. Immediately after nationalizing the foreign petroleum companies in 1938, Cárdenas’s first act was to reassure the U.S. ambassador that his move was a reaction to the virtual insurrection of the oil companies, rather than the first step in a general program of nationalization.

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Of course, some Mexicans did harbor such a general plan of nationalization; and the government used this threat effectively in bargaining with intransigent international capital. At times, of course, for specific reasons, they did nationalize some industries. It was in this way that parties of the left played a role that was disproportionate to their numerical importance in the country. They added credibility to the threat of nationalization. The government could argue to international companies that only they could hold the left at bay. That is to say, to the left, talk of nationalization was an end in itself. And, from the government point of view, the rhetoric of nationalization provided bargaining leverage. Most commonly, the threat of nationalization was used to force foreign firms to accept Mexican participation in foreign enterprises. Usually, such joint participation carried with it the support of the state for the enterprise in a variety of practical ways. An example can be seen in Miguel Alemán’s development of Acapulco and his lifelong control of tourism after he left office. The importance of the scheme was its creation of an environment in which international relationships were forged. The link between Mexico’s opulent tourism and the country’s development model should not be underestimated: the jet set followed the entrepreneurs. The government created a National Development Bank (Nacional Financiera) to finance and direct industrialization. The support of the state was so vital during the long boom after World War II that some 65 percent of Mexican industry located in Mexico City, some of it in order to be close to the allocation of state favors. The government became adept at socializing loss and privatizing gain. At times, the socialization of loss was blatant, as in the case of the electricity generation industry in which nationalism was executed only after the investment had been run down and the foreign companies found it a convenient way to retrieve their capital. Some call the pattern “lemon socialism.” It became the norm for the nation to underwrite the private sector, all the while holding on to the radical political rhetoric of the economic nationalist period. That complex process was the core of the Mexican model of development. The Long Boom After the reversal of the radical economic nationalism in the 1940s, there was a long period of rapid industrial growth that roughly corresponds to the period of what many now call the Long Boom (roughly, from the end of World War II to the crisis in the advanced industrial countries of the early 1970s). This was the period when a strategy of import-substitute industrialization, as expounded by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America, was influential. On the surface, there was a parallel with

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the long boom in places like Australia and the United States; however, between Mexico’s development and that of the richer countries, there is an overwhelming difference: the percentage of the population that shared in the long boom was far smaller. Even by the early 1970s, studies listing inequality of income distribution were placing Mexico toward the top of the world list, above even India. The Debt Trap Import-substitution industrialization eventually found its level of exhaustion. By the mid-1970s, the inability of the state to provide markets and finance led the country into the debt trap and by 1982 Mexico was virtually bankrupt. External debt was U.S.$84 billion. There is a direct link between Mexico’s dismantling of economic nationalism and the debt trap.12 The decision to eliminate the redistributive elements of development meant that most Mexicans were affected by industrialization only adversely. That change set in place a chain of events that made borrowing, underwritten by the state, necessary to keep the engine of growth running. The other side of the story is that the pitfalls associated with the nationalization of industry were generally ignored until the 1980s. True, Pemex was generally recognized, by industry standards, as a highly inefficient petroleum producer. Yet Mexico’s industrial growth in the two decades after World War II made it clear that industry was no longer going to provide jobs in the way that it had worked elsewhere. The cruel reality of Mexico’s most rapid period of industrial growth was that state-of-theart industrial technology created pitifully few jobs.13 This, in turn, provided a case for tolerance of corruption and inefficiency within the nationalized industries, on the grounds of employment generation (not to mention the vested interests of the political classes). By the 1980s, when Mexico virtually defaulted on its $84 billion debt, the problem of inefficiency was too much to ignore, and the International Monetary Fund adopted a supervisory role over the country’s public finance system. The pathetic case of the steel company in Ciudad Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán, provides an extreme example. It was bad enough when the company went broke, producing high-cost steel in the face of ever greater international competition; but when, after trying to sell the company unsuccessfully, the government offered to give the facility to Japanese business interests if they would just keep it open—and they refused—it was too much. State management of industrial enterprises was in extreme disrepute. We now know that the price the Mexican people paid for the statebacked program of public and private industrialization was far greater than anyone anticipated. To say that the great Mexican commitment to rapid industrialization has gone astray is to put it mildly. Today, the country

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suffers not only from age-old problems of poverty and underdevelopment but also from a new crisis of advanced environmental decay. Poverty and pollution have combined with the world’s second-largest burden of foreign debt to such a degree that even high rates of economic growth fail to ameliorate the conditions of life for the vast majority of the people. The results of the fall into the debt trap have been astonishing. The speed and depth of reduction in the standard of living for most Mexicans was unprecedented. Labor’s share of the national income dropped from 43 percent to 35 percent and real wages were reduced by 56 percent between 1980 and 1987.14 For a few it was a bonanza. Estimates now suggest that something like 47 percent of the entire GNP is controlled by twenty-five holding companies. The political response of the population was muted, in part since the struggle for subsistence was so much more difficult. Yet the bankruptcy of the economically active state also sapped people’s belief in an alternative vision. That sense of fatalism was also reinforced by the end of the Cold War and the defeat of the revolutionary government in Nicaragua, in which the Mexican left had invested much emotional capital. The Technocrats In the world of ideas, the unexpected beneficiary of Mexico’s acute crisis after 1976 was, of all things, the tradition of neoclassical economics, or economic rationalism. From a historical perspective, it looked like a return to the development policies of prerevolutionary Mexico. Called neoliberalism this time around, recent political changes have seen the dismantling of public enterprises, a further reduction of the limited welfare provisions that did exist, and a fire sale of public assets. Although it is tempting to agree with sceptics who explained the revival of neoclassical economics by noting that it had simply been longer since that model had last failed, there were serious problems that had not been addressed by the economically active state. Those failures, culminating in the financial crisis of 1982, gave an opening to neoliberals. As alternative theories from Keynesianism to Marxism floundered, economists returned to the old neoclassical synthesis. A new generation of technocrats, trained in a mathematical version of neoclassical economics, led Mexico into an intense period of privatization. During the period of economic nationalism and import-substitution industrialization (ISI), there were very few economic rationalists. Recently, two things changed. The most important was the collapse of the ISI model of development and, by 1982, the concomitant crisis of the fiscal system. The second element was that a considerable number of Mexico’s “best and brightest” went to study orthodox economics at elite institutions in the United States. A new generation of Mexico’s elite entered what they call in Spanish la clase politica (the political class), at a point when the long boom after World War II

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had given way to a major economic crisis. The old engine of postwar growth was slowing down; there was a world monetary crisis in the face of stagflation; the cost of oil increased tenfold (Mexico managed to achieve fiscal meltdown in the midst of oceans of petroleum); and there was bankruptcy for the public sector. To make matters worse, humanists and social scientists in large numbers gave up on politics and economics and simply embraced the postmodern analysis of discourse. For a short period, 1989 to 1993, Mexico was widely heralded in the financial press as a world model, a place where stunning economic growth was taking place. Claiming that the pressures of economic globalization left them no alternatives, the administration opened their capital markets, sold off the lion’s share of the public sector, and dismantled many of the reforms of the revolution. Indeed, one of the high points of hubris of the Salinas de Gotari administration was the initiation of a press campaign to convince the media barons of the world to drop the Third World label with reference to Mexico.15 Salinas and his administration did, indeed, please the foreign experts: the degree to which the administration dismantled the icons of the revolution was amazing. At the end of 1991, Salinas de Gotari effectively weakened, if not eradicated, the last remnants of the land reform program of the revolution. Claiming that the ejido (village collective) system, rather than the government-mandated prices for agricultural products, was responsible for Mexico’s poor agricultural production and the nation’s need to import one-third of the food it eats, the president moved to axe the ejido as the basis of the land reform, by allowing individuals to sell off or mortgage ejidoy lands. Foreigners were permitted to buy land along the coast and frontier for the first time since 1917. Thus did Salinas de Gotari make a major concession to foreign interests as well as neoliberal ideology.16 Even the dismantling of the national petroleum company, PEMEX, may have been on the agenda. The decision in August 1992 to allow private foreign petroleum firms to explore, on the basis of “performance contracts,” for offshore petroleum was a major step to reverse the monopoly of PEMEX, the crowning achievement of economic nationalism since 1938.17 (The influence of George Bush was significant here. His oil company had a long relationship with the Mexican petroleum industry.) The administration’s case for moving in this direction was based on their poor administration of the graft-ridden company. In August 1993, the economic rationalists also decided to attack the tenants law that protects renters from exposure to the open market. After a popular outcry, political analysts thought this could seriously hurt the PRI’s chances in the 1994 elections; therefore, officials modified the law so that tenants could not be hit with rent increases for five years. My point is not automatically to defend the tenancy act in all of its intricacies (for

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it is estimated that not a building has been built in Mexico City since 1970 for domestic rentals); rather, the episode shows how far the neoliberals would go, given their choice, and if they thought that they could survive the resulting political flak.18 Postrevolutionary Mexico was heralded as a U.S. intermediary, something of a subimperial power (like Iran before 1979) for directing investment, sales, and marketing to the rest of Latin America. In this sense, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had quite a strategic role to play in the post–Cold War world. The excitement in the financial community over Mexico was based on the convergence of these reforms and the decision to sell off much of the public sector. Soon, the Mexican capital market was caught up in a frenzy of privatization. The celebration again was premature. Neoclassical economic policies had a devastating impact on income distribution. The standard of living has fallen desperately for the vast majority of Mexicans since the crisis of 1982. Income inequality is growing at horrific rates; and in a country in which the poor have been factored out of Mexican politics for decades, this time segments of the middle class, too, are in trouble. The Stock Market The growth that is being celebrated abroad is largely financial speculation fueled by a rush of privatization. The last two presidents of Mexico committed the nation to selling off the 1,050 state enterprises that existed in 1983. They even formed a new agency, Pronasol, to implement and cushion that privatization. At last count, only 285 of Mexico’s state enterprises were left and none will remain at the end of president Salinas de Gotari’s term in 1994. To service the privatization, Mexico’s international financial market grew from virtually zero to $U.S.17 billion in 1992. Reorganizing Mexican business around the private sector made Mexico’s bolsa the fastest-growing stock market in the world in recent years. It also led to considerable poltical instability: the uprising in Chiapas, the assassinations of the presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and the general secretary of the PRI, Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu—whose brother publicly accused the attorney general of covering up evidence of official involvement in the murder. Most of the financial frenzy on the Mexico City Stock Market related to the windfall that the privatization of the profitable bits of the public sector created. It is important to remember that, in spite of the obvious failures, there were many profitable parts of the sector, as foreign investors quickly demonstrated. The world’s great investment banking houses— Morgan, Goldman Sachs, S. G. Warburg, First Boston, and many others— flocked to Mexico. Goldman Sachs oversaw the $U.S.5.4 billion takeover of Teléfonos de México (today in Mexico even national economic data is

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reported in U.S. dollars). First Boston organized the $U.S.12.4 billion reprivatization of the eighteen banks that had been nationalized in 1982. S. G Warburg advised on the privatization of the country’s steel mills. In short, the mergers and acquisitions specialists of the 1980s moved south without losing a beat. Cadbury-Schweppes bought the “water arm” of Femas, the soft-drink group. Anheuser-Busch acquired 18 percent of Modelo brewery. Coke took up a one-third of the soft-drink division of Femsa. The business professors from Harvard University who formed the Boston Consulting Group—the same experts as those who had “advised” during the junk-bond takeovers in the United States during the 1980s and who later were openly reviled by students and colleagues at Harvard graduation ceremonies—advised in Mexico on the financial aspects of privatization in the early 1990s. In short, recent events in Mexico confirm the fundamental inability of neoclassical economics to differentiate between production and speculation. As always in Mexico, corruption is ubiquitous. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, leader of the opposition PRD, made fairly open charges in the Spanish press that the shadowy Grupo Carso, that ended up with controlling interest in the privatized telephone company, was under the control of the president’s brother.19 Other versions of the “story” have Carlos Slim, president of the Telmex Group who made a $1 billion takeover bid, acting as a front, or a prestanombre, for the president.20 Corruption aside, one might well ask what Mexico is doing with the capital freed up from the sale of the public sector. The official answer focuses on the debt. The government claims to have reduced the public debt, as a percentage of GDP, from 68 percent in 1988 to 22 percent in 1993. The government also asserts that interest payments on the public sector debt have fallen from 48 percent to 12 percent of government expenditures in the same period.21 The opposition responds with the slogan, “False statistics do not solve poverty.” Salinas de Gotari did establish an agency to try to deal with poverty, Solidaridad, and funds were spent to alleviate poverty, although it is too soon to evaluate the effectiveness of that effort. Part of the problem is that a separate ministry now exists to juggle what was until recently acknowledged to be a $U.S.105 billion debt. It is extremely difficult now to get an overview of the situation, although events in Chiapas—and even a new round of uprisings on November 20, 1994, the 84th anniversary of the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution—demonstrate that the alleviation of poverty did not reach that region. Certainly the stagnant rate of growth, the overvalued peso, and the exposure of the financial sector to the withdrawal of overseas investment from pension and mutual funds, make it difficult to imagine how the administration of President Ernesto Zedillo will maintain the flow of subsidized food and cheap consumer goods which may have tipped the election to the PRI in 1994. The stock market is already down 11 percent from December 1993 to 1994.

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Mexico has also used the capital freed up from the privatization to fuel a building boom that makes the excesses of the 1980s—from Houston to Melbourne—seem modest. The rush of international finance to Mexico City has pushed the price of prime office accommodation to over $U.S.40 per square meter, double that of Los Angeles. In spite of a GNP that was increasing at only 2.5 percent in 1991/92, Mexico’s building boom is at the top end of the market. More than half-a-million square meters of upscale office building is under way—double the existing stock of comparable office space in all of Mexico City. The municipal government alone is organizing a $U.S.10 billion office development (the Santa Fé building project). Five five-star hotels are also under construction—one of them a fifty-five-story Ritz-Carlton, destined to become the tallest building in Mexico City.22 The spate of privatization is also paying for a boom in imports. In 1987, Mexico imported $U.S.12 billion of goods and services. That flow increased fourfold, to $U.S.48 billion, in 1992. No other country has seen its imports grow at such an astonishing rate during these years. By relabeling the currency—as distinct from developing it—capital now sustains a seriously overvalued peso. But the frenzy of privatization is nearly over: there are clear signs that the office-space market cannot sustain the extremely high prices. One does not have to be much of a prophet to predict a crash similar to that of 1982 when the windfall of privatization subsides. Again the international economy is intricately involved. In recent years, bank interest rates in the United States have been around 2 percent. With one of the most profitable equity markets in the world in the early 1990s, Mexico saw a flood of U.S. funds entering its newly deregulated financial market. Information from the Mexican bolsa suggests that U.S. holdings of cetes, Mexican bonds and securities, increased from 25 percent of the total in December 1992 to almost 75 percent in October 1993. Although yields fell from 18 percent to 13 percent, they were still extremely high by U.S. standards.23 The GDP may have rebounded to an estimated 2.3–2.5 percent for 1994, but the deficit in the current account for 1994 is estimated to reach $26.7 billion, and the reserves of foreign currency fell from an estimated $24.5 billion at the beginning of the year to $16 billion at the end of June 1994. As the privatization of the public sector comes to an end, one might expect to see the international financial community leaving Mexico. Such is not the case, at least for the present (see epilogue to this chapter). It is estimated that Mexico will, in the immediate future, face the need to find yet another $U.S.10 billion to buy the essential public services that they have just privatized. It is as if the country built the public sector, mortgaged the public sector, sold it, and now will have to pay for the same services yet again. Some call it economically rational.

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The Environment There is additional enthusiasm for Mexico’s neoliberal model in the international business community, where so many government regulations have been dismantled. Business may well have legitimate complaints about anachronistic regulations that emerge from the political/bureaucratic process. But in Mexico, deregulation has gone much further than a reduction of pointless bureaucracy: it has turned the country into an environmental nightmare. The country is being used as an industrial dump, and critics of NAFTA (and even the U.S. embassy) have documented an environmental catastrophe that is largely due to recent deregulation. In short, the failure and rejection of the Mexican economically active state has led to yet another crisis.

A CRISIS OF VISION

In 1993 the economy was turning down. During the first half of 1993, the GNP increased by only 1.3 percent (by only 0.3 percent in the second quarter). Overall, even by orthodox accounting procedures, Mexico was looking at only about 1 percent growth for 1993. The manufacturing sector contracted by 5.2 percent in the third quarter of 1993 alone, suggesting that negative predictions in Mexico about NAFTA were not entirely erroneous.24 In the face of the discredited public sector, the deterioration of employment opportunities, growing income inequality, and the environmental nightmare, many Mexicans turn to the never-ending stream of popular soap operas, fantasizing about the lives of the rich and famous. That is as close as most Mexicans (recently described by a sociologist as “urban shadows”) will ever come to the life style promised by the project of industrial modernization. At a political level, it is clear that there is a crisis of understanding and vision. The main Cárdenista opposition longs for a return to the economically active state; however, they have not entirely digested a critique of what went wrong with the ISI model, state-backed industrialization. In addition, given the ending of the Cold War and the failure of many nationalized industries around the world, international capital can bargain much harder. Why should they yield anything? The experience of nationalized industry is frequently bitter. Since governments seem poorly organized to sustain the discipline necessary to keep state industries solvent, this has cast the broader role of government into doubt. Moreover, as ever greater percentages of the state budget are diverted to pay interest on the internal and external debts (in Mexico, the former is actually larger than the latter), governments are unable to maintain

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a safety net to protect the poor from the rapacity of the marketplace. As governments tell taxpayers they must shift to “user pays” principles, taxpayers ask what they are getting for their taxes. Even those who have long believed that the government must be part of the solution now wonder if it has not become the problem. The most important conviction I formed from my studies of Mexico’s economically active state was that the worst thing a government can do is to mortgage the people’s future by playing entrepreneur with a guarantee based on the country’s public finance system. Elsewhere, I have argued that the debt crisis was, above all, a crisis of distribution: the people underwrote massive borrowing, the proceeds were privatized, and only the debt was left—a bitter heritage. That process was clear in Mexico by the early 1980s. At the heart of the debt crisis, I contend, is the socialization of loss and the privatization of gain, and it appears to be happening again—for the second time in a generation in Mexico. Private entrepreneurs get the profitable parts of the public sector and the public inherits a double debt. On the one hand, the government has underwritten the entrepreneurial effort associated with a significant part of the building boom. If the Santa Fé building project, mentioned above, fails, the taxpayer will again be left with the liabilities. Much of the capital raised to privatize the public sector carries government guarantees. Then—and finally—there is the additional cost of buying back the services that have just been sold, since debt-for-equity swaps are really another form of deferred borrowing. It seems imperative for the political debate to move beyond public vs. private. The debt crisis of recent decades demonstrates that mechanisms abound to erase the difference between the public and private sectors. For students of the state in transition, the focus needs to be on the role of government in setting the rules of the game. Attempts to compete with the private sector have led governments around the world into the debt trap, and in discussing the proper role of government, we must indulge in fewer sweeping generalizations and examine in detail specific policies that can give people more (rather than fewer) alternatives. This means that students of politics will have to learn a great deal more about, for example, law, accountancy, and technology. Otherwise, as increasing numbers of people give up on the political process and join the “urban shadows,” we, too, may face a breakdown of civil society, as is now occurring in Peru, Brazil, and perhaps Los Angeles.

EPILOGUE

It is funny how things work out. Just as some were celebrating the “end of history” (code words for the absolute triumph of neoclassical economics), Mexico awoke, on New Year’s day, 1994, to the astonishing news

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of an Indian uprising in Chiapas. All of a sudden, “prospering” Mexico became the flavor of last month. That same international press that had supported Salinas’s neoliberal agenda now discovered the poverty in which Indians in Chiapas live. Poverty studies quickly flowered. One of the largest private banks, Banamex, vied with the official statistics bureaus, Eclac and Inegi, in arguing that between 2.1 million households and 13.6 million individuals live in absolute poverty—in spite of the official claim that the welfare agency, Pronasol, in 1992 spent 9.2 percent of the GNP to alleviate poverty. Rebel leaders claimed that they faced physical extinction in the face of neoliberal reforms and few contradicted the plight of the Indians. At the same time, a financial crisis emerged. By mid-1994, it was clear that the peso was again in trouble. According to media reports, in forty days, $11 billion fled the country. In March alone, investment in the stock market had declined by $5.9 billion. Bancomer, a private bank, announced that in its transactions alone people were downloading pesos at the rate of $218 million a day; and the Banco de Mexico spent $3 billion in defense of the exchange rate. Given the known reserves of approximately $23 billion (IMF figures from October 1993) the big question became, How much of these reserves would be available to defend the peso? With growth estimates of no more than 1 percent, inflation at 8 percent, interest rates running at 18 percent, and a projected decline of current account by a likely 23 percent, the fruits of neoliberalism were withering. The international support of $6 billion offered to Mexico at the time of the Colosio murder (see below) was reiterated in May as a permanent line of credit to support the peso at current levels. Sure signs of denial proliferated: Lloyd Bentsen, U.S. secretary of the treasury, said this had nothing to do with problems in the Mexican economy; and Pedro Aspe, Mexico’s finance minister, came up with the novel statement that, since the Banco de Mexico was now independent of the government, he could not comment on reserves. The United States also announced that, in the first month of operations of NAFTA, trade increased by 21 percent (U.S. exports up by 19 percent and Mexican exports up by 25 percent). This representation of the statistics glossed over the central reality that the monthly trade deficit for Mexico was still growing rapidly. As if that were not enough, the long-heralded political stability of the country came under question in March following the assassination in Tiajuana of the candidate-designate of the PRI, Luis Donaldo Colosio. The governing party replaced him with an even “drier” candidate for the August elections, Ernesto Zedillo. The 1994 elections were by no means perfectly clean; however, the consensus among commentators is that the high rate of electoral participation and the election of Zedillo were authentic. The conversion of Cárdenas to neoliberalism and the appearance of a second party claiming to be

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the true heirs of Lázaro Cárdenas doomed the PRD to come in third behind the Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), which is the traditional party of the lower middle class in Mexico. If serious political instability was to emerge in conjunction with economic decline there could be serious consequences. The most revealing barometer of events in Mexico in the immediate future is likely to be the degree to which the United States will continue to prop up the peso. Washington has invested a considerable amount of political capital in NAFTA and will be unhappy to watch another crisis of the 1982 variety develop. However, the extent of privatization limits government influence over the economy considerably. What is likely is that, as the revolt in southern Mexico accompanies the economic downturn—not to mention serious political instability—the private capital that rushed to Mexico during the frenzy of privatization will rapidly retreat. Unfortunately, the global economy is not yet finished with Mexico.

NOTES 1. See, for example, the discussion of the limitation of state sovereignty in Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Aldershot, England: Elgar, 1992), pp. 44–68, 230–232. 2. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution; Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants, Vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 127–150. John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and the Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 129–162. 3. James D. Cockcroft, Intellectual Precursors of the Mexican Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), pp. 36–37. 4. Jorge Basurto, Cárdenas y el poder sindical (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1983); Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); and Jeffrey Bortz, El Salario en Mexico (Mexico City: Ediciones “El Caballito,” 1988). 5. Hamilton, ibid., pp. 142–183. 6. This argument is developed at length in Stephen R. Niblo, War, Diplomacy and Development: The United States and Mexico, 1938–1954 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, forthcoming). 7. Michael Bleaney, Underconsumption Theories: A History and Critical Analysis (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), pp. 208–252. 8. Stanford A. Mosk, Industrial Revolution in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954). 9. David Green, The Containment of Latin America: A History of the Myths and Realities of the Good Neighbor Policy (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 37–58. 10. Stephen R. Niblo, “Progress and the Standard of Living in Contemporary Mexico,” Latin American Perspectives 5, no. 2 (1975): 109–124. 11. Ilfignia M. de Navarette, El Perfil de México en 1980. La Distribución del Ingreso y el desarrollo económico de México, Tendencias y proyección a 1980 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores), pp. 30–59.

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12. For an exploration of the links between the two, see Stephen R. Niblo, “Mexico: Development Without the People,” Journal of the West 27, no. 4 (October 1988): 50–63. 13. Saúl Trejo Reyes, Industrialización y empleo en México (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1973). 14. Jeffrey Bortz, “Wages and Economic Crisis in Mexico,” in Barry Carr and Anzaldúa Montoya, The Mexican Left, the Popular Movements, and the Politics of Austerity (La Jolla, Calif.: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1986), pp. 33–46. 15. Mexico and Central America Report, July 18, 1991. 16. Mexico and Central America Report, December 5, 1991. 17. Mexico and Central America Report, August 20, 1992. 18. Diario Oficial, July 21, 1993. 19. This was from the Spanish magazine Cambio 16, as quoted by Mexico and Central America Report, February 18, 1993. 20. Mexico and Central America Report, May 9, 1991. At the same time, the Iranian-born British commercial agent, Kaveh Moussavi, has made regular accusations that a series of Mexican officials asked for bribes of $1 million to get their support in his effort to sell the country a new air-navigation system. Financial Times, London, February 3, 1993. 21. Mexico and Central America Report, November 18, 1993. 22. Financial Times, as quoted by the Australian Financial Review, July 15, 1993. 23. Mexico and Central America Report, December 2, 1993. 24. Mexico and Central America Report, September 23, 1993 and January 20, 1994.

PART 4 REFLECTIONS ON THE STATE IN TRANSITION

13 State, Civil Society, and Economy Joseph A. Camilleri

“Bringing the state back in” is an underlying theme of much recent theorizing.1 Yet to insist on the omnipresence of the state in social and economic life, as in the political, is one thing; to describe the meaning and function of that presence quite another. Several studies, not least Michel Foucault’s analysis of microscopic “circuits of power,”2 have stressed how the interaction between the individual and the wider society is assimilated to the state’s logic and often subjected to its structural power. But important questions remain: How does the state intervene in society and in the economy? What are the origins and consequences of such intervention? Does state intervention imply an agency that is not only strong but autonomous? Is the state a purposeful entity acting independently of major interest groups, be they located inside or outside its boundaries? Though much of the conventional literature, especially in the field of international relations, has evaded many of these questions, usually by treating the sovereign nation-state as an uncontested fact of political life, the tensions and ambiguities surrounding the notions of state, nation, and sovereignty have become progressively more acute. The principal contention of this chapter is that the state cannot be understood in isolation from the contingencies of contemporary political, cultural, and economic life. Any attempt at reconceptualization must, in particular, focus on the relationship between the state and civil society on the one hand, and between the state and the market on the other. Before fleshing out the implications of such a theoretical point of departure, it may be useful to retrace, however briefly, the development of the modern European state, grounded as it was in the historical and geographical space vacated by the dissolution of two sacred realms: the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. The emerging centralization of the state was a direct response to the religious and political upheavals ushered in by the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and subsequent wars of religion. Ruggie has aptly characterized the transition as “a transformation in social

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epistemology”3 involving new ways of imagining and symbolizing political community. The resultant Westphalian order gave rise to a system of territorially bounded sovereign states, each equipped with its own centralized administration, and each claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. In time, the combined impact of the scientific and industrial revolutions gave added weight to social contract theory, whether in its absolutist form as enunciated by Hobbes, or in the more liberal version favored by Locke.4 Statism and individualism became the mirror images of an atomized society held together by the authority and coercive power of the state. As notions of voluntary association and spontaneous community became less fashionable and less relevant to the separate, but closely related, processes of bureaucratization and commercialization, the state emerged as the only source of legitimacy, and the sovereign as an agency with a distinctive, identifiable will and a capacity for rational decisionmaking. The democratic impulse, coupled with the requirements of industrialization, would in due course qualify the statist formulation of the social contract through the partly constructed, partly spontaneous symbolism of the nation. The principle of national self-determination, and in particular the claim that each nation was entitled to its own state, provided the basis for greater cultural and political integration, thereby enhancing the state’s unity and the legitimacy of its institutions. The postulated coincidence of state and national boundaries reinforced the tendency, so well encapsulated by Walker in Chapter 2, to interpret the sovereign nation-state as the repository of all politics, and—to quote Ruggie—the system of states as comprising “territorially defined, fixed, and mutually exclusive enclaves of legitimate dominion.”5 In time, the absoluteness of this hypothetical geopolitical entity lost sight of the dynamism and variability of the historical process. As Ruggie has pointed out, systems of rule need not be territorially fixed, or indeed territorial, at all, and even where territoriality prevails, it need not entail mutual exclusion.6

INDICES OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Walker is right to insist that the state’s dominion over our understanding of the character and location of the political is a distinctive feature of modernity. Yet precisely because the modern conception of statehood derives largely from the specific experience of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe and the particular definition of political space to which it gave rise, it seems timely to reassess the empirical and theoretical validity of that conception, particularly in the context of the steeply rising curve of technological, economic, and cultural change. With successive waves of technical innovation has come the retooling and reorganization of production, the large-scale reshaping of transportation and communication systems, and profound changes to rural and urban

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life, leading to a much more integrated global system of social and economic interaction, and most recently to the transnationalization of trade, production, and finance. Underpinning the homogenizing architecture of technological change has been the ideology of modernity, with its emphasis on technical expertise, increasing mastery of the natural environment, continuous increases in economic production and productivity, and— above all—the unifying power of the world market. Understood in this sense, the ideology of modernity, with the state acting as one of its principal agents, has become the dominant image of change, not just in the capitalist West but, by virtue of capitalist expansion and Western hegemony, in postcolonial and post-Communist societies alike. One of the most important features of contemporary social change, perhaps its distinguishing characteristic, is the process of deepening internationalization. The closely interconnected economic, social, and political transformations of the last three centuries, ushered in by secularization, industrialization, the geographical extension of market relations, and, paradoxically enough, nationalism and bureaucratization, have now assumed global dimensions.7 Social change, understood as a global phenomenon, has belatedly become the subject of scholarly analysis in a range of disciplines; to name some, anthropology, sociology, political economy, history, and even, somewhat grudgingly, international relations theory.8 In what sense is social change global? First and foremost in the space it occupies. Boundaries, whether underpinned by law, culture, or physical force, have not withstood the tidal flow of change. National and other boundaries may persist, but they are increasingly porous. Nowhere is this more evident than in what Elliott (Chapter 10) describes as the “high consequence risks of modernity” (e.g., nuclear accidents, nuclear winter, global warming) that have become integral to the functioning of society. Second, social change is global by virtue of the norms or principles (e.g., free trade, comparative advantage, modernization, universal human rights, collective security) that both state and nonstate actors invoke to explain or justify their conduct. Third, the function of social change has been to create a global architecture of power, in which production, distribution, and communication are increasingly structured by international networks and strategies. And fourth, many of the agents of social change, including transnational corporations, professional associations, and diverse cultural and political movements, have developed objectives, structures, policies, and patterns of socialization that are international in scope and ethos. All of this is not to argue, as is often the case in postmodernist writings, that the quality of change or the pace of globalization is so intense or cataclysmic as to produce a decisive breakdown in our experience of subjective reality. On the other hand, proliferating images and messages are constantly interacting at the national, subnational, supranational, transnational, and international levels to produce diverse, and at times contradictory, outcomes. The state itself is both agent and victim of the ebb and

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flow of change, with the result that changing circumstances have produced different kinds of state at different times and in different places, a conclusion that very clearly emerges in the analysis by Wong and Blaskett of the postcolonial Malaysian state. The unevenness and differentiation inherent in the process are a continuing source of tension and a catalyst for further change.9 Given the porosity of state boundaries, social change, even when it does not originate with the state, soon permeates the political and administrative apparatus of the state. Some have sought to underline the autonomy of the state by pointing to the expansion of the state system in the wake of decolonization, or, in the words of Ronnie Lipschutz, “the long term socialisation of all remaining geographical territory . . . into nationstates.”10 Change, it is argued, can no longer be accommodated through the colonization of new territory; it must be channeled through existing national territory. Ironically, however, the expanding number of national states has, if anything, circumscribed their capacity to perform the various functions on which their legitimacy ultimately depends. It is presumably because of the considerable difficulties they have experienced in discharging their security and welfare functions, made all the more complex by the globalization of social change, that states have, since 1945, found it increasingly necessary to shed at least partial functions to a range of subnational, supranational, and international organizations. The contemporary predicament of the state, strikingly evident in the area of financial and environmental policy, reflects a diminishing ability to manage competing pressures within the confines of national boundaries and the limitations of national resources. The predicament is especially pronounced in circumstances where the state confronts ecological disorders that have their origins outside its domain (e.g., transborder pollution); or where it is compelled to navigate powerful economic forces over which it has at best limited control (e.g., developing states beset by high and rising levels of foreign debt).11 It has been argued, perhaps rightly, that the deficiencies of the state’s institutional infrastructure do not of themselves make the case that other established or embryonic structures, be they larger or smaller or more complex, are likely to “prove superior in structural capacity in a phase of stress and change, and prove capable of acquiring sufficient legitimation.”12 The key question, however, is not whether this or that institution or agency is superior to the state and therefore likely to supersede it, but whether the institutional deficit or “legitimation gap” confronting the state is such as to dictate multiple and still unfolding forms of coexistence and interaction among a variety of agencies and institutions. If this latter scenario is the more plausible—if, in other words, we are seeing the gradual return of a more complex configuration of different historical forms—we may do well to focus on the triangular relationship between the familiar dualities of state and market, state and civil society, and state and nation.

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The dialectic of these interconnected dualities may help to illuminate the confused pattern of integration and fragmentation that is the hallmark of an emerging multicentric world.

THE STATE-ECONOMY NEXUS

If the present period suggests accelerated economic and technological change and with it discontinuity of experience and emergence of new structures and functions, then the conventional interpretations of the state as sovereign geopolitical entity may need to be substantially revised or qualified. The difficulty, of course, is that the old coexists with the new; stability coexists with crisis. The transnationalization of economic activity continues to gather pace, while states continue to increase their military power. For some, the vast economic transformation of the last few decades represents no more than a temporary rearrangement of the “raw materials” or bargaining chips that states use as part of the same competitive game. The trump cards and handicaps may have changed, but the geopolitical game remains essentially unaltered. Such a conclusion is at odds with much of the available evidence. It is now generally accepted that national economies have become increasingly interdependent and that the closely related processes of production, circulation, and exchange have assumed a global character. The progressive lowering of the costs of transportation and communication have been an important factor contributing to internationalization, as has the new “production structure,”13 which, by virtue of the accelerating rate of technical change, is now predicated on continuous product innovation (and obsolescence); that is, the introduction of new products and services and new systems of information gathering, storage, and dissemination. The compressed time scale of the productive cycle and the associated costs of research, development, and production dictate higher profits than those likely to be derived solely from local or national markets; hence, the shift to global markets and the adoption of global production strategies. In the process, the state, regardless of the size or structure of the economy or the complexion of its political institutions, is constrained to accept the competitive logic of the world market. To this rule, the supposedly strong NIC state is no exception. All states must negotiate with transnational firms that have acquired a decisive role in shaping the balance of costs and benefits, of risks and opportunities, within the international political economy. That role is a function of their command of technology and their ready access to global markets and global sources of capital and their ability to play off one sovereign jurisdiction against another.14 The emergence of “global factories,” “global offices,” and “global labs” suggests that national governments, as much in developing as in industrialized

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countries, have come to operate within a global production system that substantially shapes the strategic options as well as policy instruments at their disposal. Paralleling and reinforcing this trend is the globalization of financial markets and the consequent pressure exerted by transnational financial institutions for the deregulation of national banking and finance. It is entirely possible that, in years to come, states may attempt to reverse the “casino capitalism” of the 1980s and reassert financial controls, or at least moderate the leverage exercised by financial capital over productive capital. But the inescapable fact is that the ebb and flow of national regulation is itself now subject to external factors; or, to be more precise, to pressures generated by an increasingly integrated, geographically unrestricted system of transnational finance.15 As Robert Cox points out, “the global economy has become something distinct from international economic relations.”16 There now exists a global social structure of production that penetrates national economies and the policymaking structures of national governments. To borrow once again from Robert Cox’s felicitous formulation, “there is a transnational process of consensus formation among the official caretakers of the global economy”17 involving unofficial forums like the Trilateral Commission and the Bildeberg Conferences and official bodies like the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the G7. Significantly, the most powerful ministries and agencies of government are those that are most closely connected with the global economy and its institutions. This may help to explain why, despite wide national variations in political traditions and institutions, so many advanced capitalist states have, since the late 1970s, abandoned the strategy of Keynesian demandmanagement and substantially lowered the expectations associated with the welfare state; all of this in the name of greater international competitiveness.18 In the process, it is the state itself that is both internationalized and denationalized, with global integration creating and feeding upon differential rates of productivity, technical innovation, economic growth, and income within, as much as between, national societies. The periodic reorganization of the productive process and the uneven development to which it gives rise reinforce the essential dualism of the national state, which corresponds to the double movement so incisively portrayed in Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. In the first phase, the market is self-regulating and the state’s primary task is that of enforcing the rules of the market. However, as the socially destructive effects of the fiercely competitive, self-regulating market become more visible, the state is obliged to intervene to ensure minimum levels of social welfare. This oscillation between free market and state regulation persists to the present day. However, in this most recent phase, the unregulated global economy has greatly reduced the state’s capacity for intervention, even though

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demands for such intervention are becoming increasingly vocal, especially in those quarters that have been seriously disadvantaged by global integration. Faced with these contradictory pressures, the state may pursue one of two strategies: delegation, or reassertion of authority. The first strategy involves the formal or informal transfer of powers to a range of supranational or international (regional or global) institutions charged with developing mechanisms of consultation, cooperation, and coordination. The World Bank, the IMF, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the OECD, the Western Economic Summits (the G7—Group of Seven), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Bank for International Settlements, the Standing Committee on Banking Regulations and Supervisory Practices (the Cooke Committee), and a burgeoning web of macroregional organizations—the European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—all these are part of the institutional infrastructure that has been created to provide a degree of systemic and subsystemic regulation in the wake of the state’s diminishing capacity for economic management. From a realist perspective, these attempts at institutional innovation may be discounted as peripheral to the main game on the grounds that they do not give rise to agencies exercising real autonomy in the formulation of collective goals and strategies. Such an interpretation, however, is overly simplistic. International institutions have assumed expanded functions and resources, enabling them to operate as “transgovernmental coalitions” connected to a web of bureaucratic structures within each of the member states. By setting agendas and defining policy options, they help to establish the consensual framework that underpins the state apparatus. Though deviant behavior remains possible, it is effectively discouraged by virtue of the penalties that such behavior invariably attracts. The state may choose an altogether different strategy. It may reassert its national interests and national authority by a degree of reregulation and the revival of trade protectionism, but such a strategy is unlikely to restore national control over the instruments of economic policy, much less over economic outcomes. It may simply provide one or more states with temporary leverage in an intensified competitive struggle in which the transnational structure remains unchanged and that may even have the effect of extending and deepening the complex network of interactions associated with the internationalization of production and finance. Neither the state, viewed as a single structure or agency, nor the fragmented system of sovereign states taken as a whole, can be theoretically or practically separated from the institutional framework of a rapidly integrating world economy. As Ruggie rightly reminds us, “the possibility of fundamental discontinuity in the international system”19 can no longer be ignored.

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THE STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY

If the state-economy nexus is central to the analysis of the contemporary state, so are state-society relations; and, as we shall see, partly for similar reasons. The notion of civil society has a long history, dating back at least to the ancient Roman notion of jus civile. In the more recent Western tradition, the tendency has been, despite considerable variations, to define civil society as the realm of autonomous activity; that is, as public activity separate, or at least distinct, from that of the state.20 The diverse associations that fall under this category include extended families, clans, villages, local communities, unions, craft guilds or firms, groups for leisure or charity, and religious organizations; indeed, the whole gamut of voluntary associations formed to advance particular interests or objectives. The experience of community afforded by these associations lies at the heart of the concept of civil society, since it is that experience and the accompanying sense of identity and belonging that point to and animate a public sphere functioning side by side with, yet independently of, the state. These communities, insofar as they express the fundamental sociality of the human person, often call into question the atomistic individualism favored by many social contract theories. They are distinct from the state in that their interests do not derive from those of the state. They do not exercise legally enforceable jurisdiction over their members or the physical space they occupy, and they do not normally have fixed boundaries. These communities, which we may describe as the building blocks of civil society,21 can give rise to multiple, overlapping, and intersecting layers of political association. The resulting federal, confederal, and consociational arrangements, which for many centuries were an important feature of European political life but declined sharply with the consolidation of the Westphalian state system and the emergence of nationalism, are again the subject of considerable theoretical and practical interest.22 In many postcolonial societies, the state, despite the best efforts of nation-building, may come to be regarded as alien to civil society, as imposed by force (whether from within or without), and as inimical to traditional networks of association. 23 Whether postcolonial states generally, or the Malaysian state in particular, can shape, define, create, or suppress civil society quite so easily or effectively as Wong and Blaskett (Chapter 11) suggest, is open to question. In developing as in industrial societies, technological change fosters new connections and solidarities, while at the same time reviving older loyalties and identities. Much of this cannot be adequately captured or expressed by the nation-state; hence, the rise of collective actors (sometimes referred to as social movements) whose preferred political terrain is civil society, for the simple reason that their preoccupation with the body, health, sexual identity, neighborhood, land rights, natural environment,

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and even human survival represents a break with the conception of time and space privileged by the sovereign national state.24 Civil society is thus constructed and reconstructed, as people from a given locality (or from a multiplicity of interacting localities) penetrate each other’s space, pursue common tasks, and establish, or reestablish, communities that cut across spatial boundaries. With the reciprocal communication of messages and images there emerges a consciousness of the interconnection of issues and interests, and with it complex networks and coalitions operating at the local, microregional, national, macroregional, and international levels. The contemporary relevance of this “Althusian”25 model derives from the increasing frequency and potency of these interconnections, which counters, or at least qualifies, the widespread disillusionment with official politics and the attendant trend toward depoliticization. To the extent that their function is the rediscovery or redefinition of civil society, the “new social movements” are new only in the sense that they reject the separation of the public and private spheres and the conception of “cylindrical, homogenous empty time” so deeply embedded in the architecture of modernity and in the structure of state sovereignty of which it is an integral part. They challenge the authority of the modern state to impose its history either on local communities that come under its domestic jurisdiction (i.e., nation-building) or on foreign societies (i.e., conquest). In this sense, the new social movements foster forms of association—articulate ways of experiencing time and space and of interpreting history and identity—that sit uneasily with the boundary-maintaining ethos of sovereign jurisdictions. Though they are often animated by the immediacy of locality and neighborhood, they are also capable of cultivating long-term horizons and appealing to a forward-looking, inventive imagination (e.g., ecological, peace, and human rights movements). In all of this, the recurring theme is the rediscovery or recreation of civil society, which assumes a variety of spatial forms (relating to national, but also local, regional, global, and even functional space), and in the process can give rise to different expressions of political community. Civil society, then, need not be conceived as exclusively or even primarily national in scope; that is, as coinciding with the boundaries of the nation-state. Several of the trends we have already reviewed, not least the rise of an integrated world economy, point to a complex multilateralism that is global in scope and constitutes more than the sum of all national or subnational civil societies, or even the interlinking of these societies. The international mobility of capital, labor, information, and messages is now such that it may be appropriate to speak of a paradigmatic shift to a global, though deeply divided social structure characterized by a marked specialization of functions—a transnational division of labor, a web of formal and informal institutions, and diverse cultural flows. To quote Robert Cox, globalization may be viewed as “an arena of conflict between the endeavour

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to buttress the freedom of movement of powerful homogenizing economic forces, and efforts to build a new structure of regulation protecting diversity and the less powerful.”26 We may, in fact, speak of an emerging global society, not in the sense that a single set of values or principles sustains the operation of the world system, but in the deeper sense that the plurality of highly differentiated cultural interpretations have one thing in common: they all relate to and seek to define “the modern global circumstance.”27 At one end, we see the interconnected centers that sustain the process of globalization and cultural homogenization; at the other, the peripheral movements and organizations whose very subordination is itself a reflection of globalizing tendencies. The national state, it is true, retains a considerable capacity to funnel transnational interactions through the assertion of its considerable power and authority, thereby constraining the articulation and organization of civil society in its diverse manifestations. Yet the sources of power and legitimacy on which state authority depends (even national police and military forces) are themselves increasingly shaped, and at times subverted, by ideas, images, symbols, and institutions whose domain cuts across the boundaries of the nation-state. In other words, the state’s “capacity,” not to mention its “internal” [and . . . ] external autonomy,”28 is constrained by a range of social, political, and technological networks, some operating from below (subnational) and others from above (international, supranational, or transnational).29 While the participants in these networks interact with states and governments, and often include bureaucrats and diplomats, the networks themselves, even when directly instigated by governments (e.g., UN operations and agencies), tend, by virtue of the functions assigned to them, their membership, orientation, and mode of operation, to penetrate the structures of the state and at least qualify the logic of the state system. It is not simply that technical innovation has enhanced the resources and freedom of action available to nonstate actors, but that the diffusion of social control is eroding the state’s competence to shape outcomes even within the confines of the national domain. The emergence of a global civil society has been aptly described as “an ongoing project of civil society to reconstruct, re-imagine, or re-map world politics.”30 Central to this project are new forms of accountability and responsibility with far-reaching implications for policy formulation and implementation, not least at the international level. The pressures for institutional accountability generated within the world system by the rise of global civil society may be compared to the demands of a previous era for greater accountability at the national level. These new pressures emanate from the needs and interests of state and nonstate actors alike, including the international scientific and professional communities, international civil servants, and a range of social movements organized around such issues as development, environment, gender,

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human rights, security, democracy, ethnic and religious identity, sexual liberation, and the rights of indigenous peoples. These groupings must now be considered full-fledged or “normal” participants of international society.31 Their twin demands for participation and accountability reflect the emergence of a new reflexivity that both defines a range of global problems and assigns responsibility for their solution. The net effect of these pressures is to establish an institutional culture that permeates not only global civil society but gradually percolates through to the state system and its agencies. Over the last twenty years or more, a series of UN-sponsored declarations, conferences, and agencies specifically dealing with the “global human circumstance” have graphically illustrated both the scope and limitations of global civil society. On the one hand, these gatherings have acted as an important meeting point for both state and nonstate actors and a catalyst for a new “macropolitical” agenda that no state, however powerful or antipathetic to its demands, has been able to ignore. On the other hand, both industrialized and developing states have, for different reasons and to different degrees, resisted demands for the global monitoring and implementation of developmental, ecological, and human rights standards. It is true, as Richardson points out in Chapter 9, that international institutions and networks often rely for policy implementation on the resources of states. Yet they also help to articulate universal strategies, goals, and tasks that intrude with increasing frequency and intensity into the public debates and decisionmaking processes of national politics.

STATE AND NATION

Two important conclusions emerge from the preceding discussion: first, though the state may exert a controlling, even coercive influence over civil society, it cannot obliterate it; secondly, civil society is sustained by the interaction of associations or communities that vary greatly in form, size, and membership. To this extent, nationhood may be seen as one communal claim among others, albeit one that has exerted extraordinary influence over the modern political imagination. The idea that there is something preordained that requires human beings to live in nations, and nations to form states, has been one of the most potent myths of contemporary social and political experience. Nevertheless, as Seth, in Chapter 3, makes clear, the claim to nationhood has been liable to considerable variation across time, space, and social context, which explains why it has given rise to such different and often contradictory political practices. The recent collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and the sharp, often violent divisions that characterize multiethnic societies, whether in Iraq, Turkey, India, Canada, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, or Britain, suggest that

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ethnonationalism is alive and well. In their respective chapters, VeitBrause and Lawson (Chapters 4 and 5) are right to stress the unresolved ambiguities that surround the relationship between state and nation. The paradoxical result of such ambiguity is the increasing difficulty of erecting or maintaining state boundaries that can withstand the buffeting of rapid economic, social, and technological change. Historically, one of the more important functions of national community has been to delineate the psychological boundaries separating the insider (national) from the outsider (foreigner), and within those boundaries to establish the cultural unity and legitimacy on which is built the political edifice known as the sovereign state.32 The primacy of nationhood—and its capacity to deliver independence and material well-being—has come to depend on its connection with statehood, but it is precisely that connection that is now under increasing theoretical and practical scrutiny. To begin with, few societies have ever constituted the idealized national state; that is, few societies have achieved the more or less exact coincidence of state and national boundaries. Secondly, even those that attained a reasonable approximation of the idea have since been subjected to profound, often irreparable divisions. Thirdly, the principle of national self-determination remains for numerous communities entirely out of reach. All of this is not to say that nationalism is a spent force, but that its divergent manifestations and contradictory effects often serve to destabilize the state; or at least, to deny it the centralization of power and authority to which it aspires. At one level, nationalism has been portrayed as a political tool used by elites to unify or strengthen the state and its institutions and in the process solidify their own hold on power.33 The instrumental role of the nation, many have argued, is most conspicuous in periods of rapid industrialization (e.g., in Europe and the United States between 1870 and 1914), when the aspirations and activities of the public must be channeled in ways that ensure the necessary degree of social order and cohesion.34 Central to this strategy are the processes of institutional innovation and routine ritualization, 35 which instill into society a sense of continuity with the past and strengthen the attachment to traditional values and institutions. This is not to suggest that nationalism is a mere exercise in political manipulation. Whatever its utility as an instrument of socialization and mobilization, nationalism would have had a relatively short life had it not been solidly grounded in the preexisting memories, myths, symbols, and achievements of nation, or ethnie. One must distinguish, then, between popular nationalism, which emerges from the traditions, customs, and institutions of a shared past, and bureaucratic, or official, nationalism, where the state promulgates an official “standardised set of values taught in a single, standardised set of public educational institutions.”36 In practice, the national state, in industrialized as in postcolonial societies, has incorporated both types of nationalism. As often as not, we see the state trying to create the nation as

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the nation trying to establish its state.37 Nationalism may best be understood as the complex interplay between what Ben Anderson calls the “fatality” of human linguistic diversity38 and the changing architecture of the state, which is itself continuously interacting with the rapidly evolving system of production and productive relations. The difficulty arises when, as history frequently shows, a disjunction emerges between the two types of nationalism: between communal identity and state power and authority, between the cultural boundaries of the nation and the legal boundaries of the state, between the resources, competence, and autonomy of the state and the constraints imposed by the rapid integration of the world capitalist economy. If we interpret nationalism as the political ideology that attempts to construct a new social and political order based on a particular definition of time, space, and community (enshrined in the history and geography of the nation), it is reasonable to ask whether and to what extent the forces that activated that exercise are still at work, or whether they are reconstituted by new social and economic conditions and new possibilities for the articulation of time, space, and community. From one vantage point, it may appear as if events since World War II have reinforced the combined aspiration to nationhood and statehood, and even the potency of national symbols. From another vantage point, the scaffolding linking state and nation seems to have been seriously weakened. Paralleling and reinforcing the impact of economic transnationalization are the ethnic, religious, and class cleavages contributing to political fragmentation, the continuing tensions between tradition and modernity, and the unresolved contestation between productivism and ecology and between particularism and universalism. It is not that national symbols of identification have suddenly been superseded by a new set of local, regional, or global loyalties, but that these multiple identities, attachments, and jurisdictions now overlap and coexist. The key question here is not, as several writers suggest, whether or not one set of loyalties has been “superseded” by another: the fact is that each has to operate in close proximity to and interaction with the others.39 To use Walker’s phrase, a “complex field of possibilities” has given rise to a rich mosaic of material conditions and subjective perceptions, and to patterns of local, regional, national, and international interaction that exceed the explanatory power of much conventional state-centric theorizing. By questioning the assumed relationship between protector and protected, Ann Tickner’s gendered analysis of the state’s security practices (Chapter 8) points to the same conclusion.

THE WORLD SYSTEM RECONSIDERED

The question arises: Does the cumulative impact of these observations call for a paradigmatic shift? To use Cerny’s phraseology, is the international

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system transforming itself into a society with a complex structure?40 Has the crucial process of “structural differentiation” reached the stage where the state itself is undergoing profound mutation? Cerny is right to answer the question in the affirmative, but his conception of international society or “transnational structure,” illuminating though it is, is overly mechanistic and insufficiently attuned to the economic and cultural dimensions of change. As Cerny suggests, the international system—the term world system is preferable if we are to avoid the suggestion that states or nations are the only significant actors—has acquired an increasingly complex structure, with structural differentiation a determining feature of that complexity. This observation leads Cerny to conclude that “the hierarchy of holistic actors, the states, which impose order through power or hegemony” is giving way to “a more complex set of interactive self-regulating mechanisms or webs of power.”41 Though his conclusion is entirely consistent with the observable trend toward the progressive diffusion of social and political control, there is, in Cerny’s analysis, an excessive preoccupation with structure and function and with the integrationist implications of conflict. There is, as a consequence, a tendency to overlook the sources and manifestations of fragmentation and division and to neglect the historical process that gives shape to the emerging global architecture of power and authority. World system theory in its various guises is helpful to the reconceptualization of world politics (and of the state) because it seeks to situate the globalization of human affairs (with its simultaneously integrative and fragmental tendencies) within a historical context. Two recent contributors, Rosenau and Wallerstein, deserve particular attention because they seek in different ways to depict an increasingly integrated yet structurally differentiated world. Rosenau postulates two systems of world politics: (1) a highly decentralized, almost chaotic multicentric system comprised of subnational and supranational sovereignty-free actors; and (2) a relatively coherent and structured state-centric world of sovereignty-bound actors.42 The problem with this division is that it does not adequately explain why “implicit legitimacy and equality” should be the organizing principles of the multicentric system (with the “autonomy dilemma” its overriding concern) and sovereignty and the “security dilemma” the functional equivalents for the state-centric system. What is lacking is a theoretical framework that effectively links the two systems and explains their interaction in the context of contemporary social and economic change. What gives Wallerstein’s representation of the world system greater explanatory power is its historical perspective and detailed consideration of the structures and processes of economic internationalization; for the relationship between capitalist production (for a competitive world market) and the system of territorial states gives rise to a series of historical changes that plot the trajectory of a global political economy. The systemic model

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developed by Wallerstein and his associates is theoretically instructive, in that it synthesizes three interacting relationships: that between the state and the expansion of capital; that between the international division of labor and the world market; and that between states and varying configurations of power. 43 There are, nevertheless, as several observers have pointed out, severe limitations to this analytical framework; notably, the failure adequately to integrate either: 1. cultural processes as they unfold within and between societies; or 2. the politics of localities, movements, and communities whose identities, interests, capabilities, and modes of action are distinct from those of states. There is, in other words, a reductionist tendency to assume that all forms of community, all facets of civil society, are contingent on the state; and that their connection with this political space is ultimately mediated by their relationship to the international division of labor. The reality is that state, civil society, and market are inextricably intertwined; and that all three are drawn further and further by the very process of transnationalization into a “structured field of action,” by which we mean that fluid pattern of fragmentation and integration deriving from the deepening, at times contradictory, interconnections between world polity, world economy, and global civil society. For Cerny, this complex structure, which is “characterised by a cross-cutting division of labour and bonded through organic solidarity,” constitutes a “plurilateral international system.” This representation comes closer to reality, except that it still does not adequately encapsulate the international, or to be more exact, the global character, either of the system as a whole or of its constituent entities (i.e., civil society, market, and polity).44 In any case, the notion of the political must itself be widened to include not merely states and their agencies but the range of subnational, supranational, regional, and international institutions and processes with a stake in the authoritative allocation of resources.45 The societal, economic, and political areas of systemic interaction are closely linked and occupy the same transnational public space; but each has a global logic of its own, and access to a different set of resources; none is able to shape the world system solely in its own image or according to its own logic. The world system cannot be represented as a set of interconnected civil societies, or as the system of states and its accompanying (interstate or international) institutions, or as the world market. Each is, in fact, dependent on the other two. The state, for example, depends on the energy and participation of civil society for its legitimacy and its capacity to structure the pattern of transnational activity. Societal actors (civil society) depend on the state for the institutional infrastructure to engage in subnational and transnational interactions.46 The world market depends on the state for the material infrastructure needed for industrial development and for the legal and administrative framework that makes possible commercial and financial transactions within and

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across state boundaries. To summarize, the world system encompasses different actors and facets of interaction (i.e., political, legal, strategic, economic, ecological, and sociocultural), different structures and levels of organization (subnational, national, supranational, transnational, international), and different developmental tendencies, all of which are dynamically interwoven.47 It is the coexistence and fluctuating relationship of these variables that give the world system its distinctive profile at any given stage of its evolution. In the contemporary period, the distinguishing characteristics of the world system include an integrating global economy (marked by uneven development and intensifying competition) and an emerging global culture and world public opinion (coexisting with ethnic, national, religious, ideological, and other forms of segmentation). The net effect of these two contradictory but interacting trends is to accentuate the interdependence of states and accelerate the growth of international organization (i.e., integration of the world polity). In the process, the function of the state is redefined, as in its relationship to the culture and institutions of civil society, on the one hand, and the structure of the market, on the other. International integration, it should be stressed, coincides with and fosters domestic fragmentation, giving rise to a more complicated pluralism than the one suggested by either the realist or liberal paradigm. The problems of multiculturality and polyethnicity experienced by national states are one manifestation of this phenomenon. So is the proliferation of regional and multilateral processes and institutions, which continues at a furious pace, in part because of the growing disparity between the economic and political functions traditionally assigned to the state and the diminishing efficacy of its intervention. Even in the security field, long regarded as the exclusive domain of the state, exogenous and endogenous pressures are combining to redefine the meaning and content of the security dilemma and to reorganize the institutional arena within which competing security claims can be advanced and negotiated. Striking confirmation of this trend is offered by various forms of institutional innovation, which predate the end of the Cold War, particularly in Europe, but have since gained considerable momentum both in other regions and internationally. The localization and internationalization of security relations point not to the demise of the state or the establishment of a single, authoritative superstructure but to the redefinition of the state’s role and the growth of multiple institutions and practices, none of which is likely to establish a hegemonic position. This complex diffusion of power and authority and the ensuing erosion of preexisting forms of “order” and “hierarchy” are giving rise to a large and growing number of federal, confederal, and perhaps most significantly consociational arrangements and proposals (as much in Canada as in the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, Western Europe, China, Taiwan, and ASEAN), all of which seek, in different ways

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and to varying degrees, to achieve symbiotic relationships that preserve segmental autonomy within a larger cooperative system.48 The noteworthy development here is the search for institutional mechanisms that do not rest on the enforcement of the state’s sovereign will but instead provide a plurality of communities with the space (and the instruments) for the coexistence of identities and the conciliation and mediation of interests. The attraction—and relevance—of the consociationalist formula is one of the factors contributing to the steady expansion and increasingly complex fabric of regional, supranational, and international organizations. This process requires, but is in no way confined to, the active participation of states. A range of ethnic, religious, and other societal actors, in advanced-capitalist, industrializing, and developing societies alike, are all, in their own right, pressing either for more effective consultative mechanisms or for alternative constitutional arrangements. The resulting delegation and reorganization of powers, functions, and resources is narrowing the range of strategic options available to the national state, while at the same time integrating it more firmly into a transnational network of contacts, coalitions, and interactions. Though modernity may still be with us, it is undergoing rapid and profound change. Globalization is one important aspect of that change, but so are two other interconnected processes, described by Johann Arnason as pluralization and relativization. 49 By pluralization he means the coexistence of several competing logics to which we have already referred. By relativization he draws attention to the ambiguities of modernity itself, since the break with tradition is never complete, and the uneasy relationship between the two gives rise to changing patterns of fusion and fission.50 All of this reinforces the conclusion that a flexible, multidimensional construction of political space is needed to conceptualize the variable location of the state in a pluralistic world subject to diverse pressures and accumulating levels of social pathology. For some time to come, the global polity may therefore be expected to undergo considerable institutional innovation designed to handle, on the one hand, the competing demands of economic integration, and, on the other, the interaction of multiple, overlapping, and still evolving identities and allegiances. “Creative reflexivity” is likely to suggest that such innovation be nonterritorial in inspiration and execution, less committed to the conventional inside/outside dichotomies, and more attuned to the cultural imperatives of community and cosmopolis. NOTES An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Reflections on the State in Transition” in Paul James, ed., Critical Politics (Melbourne: Arena, 1994). 1. See Peter Evans, Dietrich Rieschmeyer, and Theda Skoçpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); also Pierre

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Birnbaum, La logique de l’état (Paris: Fayard, 1982); Theda Skoçpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Eric A. Nordlinger, On the Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Stephen Krasner, “Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16, no. 2 (1984): 223–246. 2. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, 1977); also Philip G. Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics: Structure, Agency and the Future of the State (London: Sage, 1990), pp. 85–110. 3. John Gerard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47, no. 1 (1993): 157. 4. For a more detailed discussion of these theoretical formulations, see J. A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? Politics in a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Aldershot, England: Elgar, 1992), pp. 19–22. 5. Ruggie (note 3): 151. 6. Ibid.: 149. 7. Jan Aart Scholte, “From Power Politics to Social Change: An Alternative Focus for International Studies,” Review of International Studies 19, no. 1 (1993): 8. 8. See Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); K. Ekholm and J. Friedman, “Towards a Global Anthropology,” in L. Blussé, et al., eds., History and Underdevelopment: Essays on Underdevelopment and European Expansion in Asia and Africa (Leiden: Leiden Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1980), pp. 61–76; W. E. Moore, “Global Sociology: The World as a Singular System,” American Journal of Sociology 71, no. 5 (1966); E. A. Trikayan, “Sociology’s Great Leap Forward: The Challenge of Internationalization,” International Sociology 1, no. 2 (1986); A. Bergesen, ed., Studies of the Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1980); Roland Robertson, “Global Culture and Images of World Order,” in H. Haferkamp and N. Smelser eds., Social Change and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 9. See Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics (London: Sage, 1990) p. 104. 10. Ronnie D. Lipschutz, “Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global Civil Society,” Millennium 21, no. 3 (1992): 399. 11. See Camilleri and Falk (note 4), pp. 192–196. 12. Cerny (note 9), p. 100. 13. Susan Strange, “Big Business and the State,” Millennium 20, no. 2 (1991): 247. 14. Susan Strange, “States, Firms and Diplomacy,” International Affairs 68, no. 1 (1992): 6–7; also Robert Cox, “Global Perestroika,” in Socialist Register 1992, Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch, eds. (London: Merlin Press, 1992), p. 30. 15. See Camilleri and Falk (note 4), pp. 73–77. Susan Strange has characterized this as a shift from “a predominantly state-based system with some transnational links” to “a predominantly global system with some local differences.” See “Finance, Information and Power,” Review of International Studies 16, no. 3 (1990): 260. 16. Robert W. Cox, “Multilateralism and World Order,” Review of International Studies 18, no. 2 (1992): 177. 17. Cox (note 14), p. 130. 18. Cerny (note 9), pp. 200–203. 19. Ruggie (note 3): 143.

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20. See M. J. Peterson, “Transnational Activity, International Society and World Politics,” Millennium 21, no. 3 (1992): 374–375; see also John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State (London: Verso, 1988); Lawrence Krader, Dialectic of Civil Society (Amsterdam: Van Gorean, 1976). 21. See Anthony Black, “Nation and Community in the International Order,” Review of International Studies 19, no. 1 (1993): 80. 22. Ibid., p. 84. 23. See Jean-Francois Bayart, “L’énonciation du politique,” Revue française de science politique (1985): pp. 343–373. 24. For a much fuller examination of this disjuncture, see Camilleri and Falk (note 4), pp. 206–221. 25. Anthony Black describes this trend by reference to what he calls the “Althusian” model; that is, the confederal forms of association advocated by the sixteenth-century political philosopher Johannes Althusius. See Black (note 21): 85–87. 26. Cox (note 16): 177. 27. This argument is developed at some length by Roland Robertson and Frank Lechner, “Modernization, Globalization and the Problem of Culture in World-Systems Theory,” Theory, Culture and Society 2, no. 3 (1985): 103–117. 28. For a discussion of the relevance of these conceptual distinctions for an understanding of the state, see Camilleri and Falk (note 4), pp. 105–106. 29. Nongovernmental organizations have been characterized in terms of three functions: the shaping of world public opinion (particularly on issues of development, environment, human rights, and peace); direct intervention at the transnational level; and questioning of the legitimacy and efficacy of state and interstate organizations. See Paul Ghils, “International Civil Society: International Non-Governmental Organizations in the International System,” International Social Science Journal 133 (1992): 417–431. 30. Lipschutz (note 10): 391. 31. See Martin Shaw, “Global Society and Global Responsibilities: The Theoretical, Historical and Political Limits of ‘International Society,’” Millennium 21, no. 3 (1992): 431. 32. For Gellner, it is first and foremost the limits of the common “national culture” that determine the boundaries of the nation-state. See E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 134. 33. See Anthony D. Smith, “The Nation: Invented, Imagined, Reconstructed?” Millennium 20, no. 3 (1991): 354. 34. Ibid.: 355. 35. See Eric Hobsbawn, “Mass Producing Traditions: Europe 1870–1914” in E. Hobsbawn and T. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 263–307. 36. This distinction is based in part on Anthony D. Smith’s conceptualization in “Thuse and Nation in the Modern World,” Millennium 14, no. 2 (1985): 131. 37. See Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1991), p. 69. 38. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 46. 39. The tendency to pose the question in this way is evident in M. J. Peterson, “Transnational Activity, International Society and World Politics”: 379; see also Anthony D. Smith, “Towards a Global Culture,” in Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990), p. 185.

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40. Philip G. Cerny, “Plurilateralism: Structural Differentiation and Functional Conflict in the Post–Cold War World Order,” Millennium 22, no. 1 (1993): 29. 41. Ibid.: 31. 42. James N. Rosenau, “Patterned Chaos in Global Life: Structure and Process in the Two Worlds of World Politics,” International Political Science Review 9, no. 4 (1988): 327–364. 43. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1–36, 152–164. 44. Robert W. Cox suggests another component as integral to world order; namely, the “biosphere or global ecosystem” (see “Multilateralism and World Order,” p. 161). Although in this brief exposition I treat environmental constraints as an outcome of the functioning of the world economy, a strong case can be made for treating the global ecosystem as conceptually distinct, as functioning in accordance with its own logic, and as setting its own limits on the functioning of civil society, polity, and market. 45. See Evan Luard, The Globalization of Politics: The Changed Focus of Political Action in the Modern World (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 163–191; Contrast this approach with that favored by John W. Meyer, “The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State,” in George M. Thomas, et al., eds., Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society and the Individual (London: Sage, 1987), pp. 43–44. 46. Peterson (note 20): 386. 47. Scholte (note 7): 20. 48. See Paul Taylor, “The European Community and the State: Assumptions, Theories and Propositions,” Review of International Studies 17, no. 2 (1991): 113. 49. Johann P. Arnason, “Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity,” in M. Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage, 1990), p. 219. 50. Ibid., p. 221.

The Contributors

BEVERLEY BLASKETT is lecturer in the Department of Urban & Social Policy at Victoria University of Technology and senior researcher in the Social Work Department at the Royal Children’s Hospital. JOSEPH A. CAMILLERI is professor of International Relations in the School of Politics, La Trobe University. JOHN D. CASH is lecturer in the Department of Political Science, and director of the Graduate Program in Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Melbourne. ANTHONY M. ELLIOTT is Australian Research Council fellow in the Department of Political Science and director of the Graduate Program in Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Melbourne. JOHN FITZGERALD is senior lecturer in Chinese and Japanese politics in the School of Politics, La Trobe University. ANTHONY P. JARVIS is lecturer in International Relations, in the School of Politics, La Trobe University. STEPHANIE LAWSON is fellow in the Department of International Relations, Australian National University. S TEPHEN R. NIBLO is senior lecturer in the School of History, La Trobe University. ALBERT J. PAOLINI is associate lecturer in the School of Politics, La Trobe University.

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CONTRIBUTORS

JAMES L. RICHARDSON is professor in the Department of International Relations, Australian National University. SANJAY SETH is lecturer in political theory in the School of Politics, La Trobe University. J. ANN TICKNER is associate professor in the School of International Relations, University of Southern California. IRMLINE VEIT-BRAUSE is associate professor in the history of ideas, Deakin University. R. B. J. WALKER is professor of political science at the University of Victories, B.C. Canada. LOONG WONG is head of Undergraduate Studies at International College (Koleg Antarabangsa), Penang, Malaysia.

Index

absolute state, 44 Acton, Lord, 51 Addams, Jane, 128 Adorno, Theodore, 169 advanced modernity, 159, 169–170. See also late modernity; postmodernity AIDS, 3 Africa, 77 agency, 125, 128, 163, 215; of the state, 209, 210 Alemán, Miguel, 191, 192, 195 “Althusian” model, 217 Althusser, Louis, 106 ambivalence, 159, 160 anarchy, 22, 34, 125, 126, 131 ancient Greek city-states, 129 Anderson, Benedict, 6, 49, 55, 85, 221. See also imagined community; nation; nationalism Anglo-Irish Accord, 122 anthropology, 31 Aquinas, Thomas, 44 Arblaster, Anthony, 144 Aristotle, 44 Arlow, Reverend William, 119, 121 Arnason, Johann, 225 Arthur, Paul, Northern Ireland Since 1968, 111 Ashley, Richard, 6, 127 Aspe, Pedro, 204 Association of Southeast Asian Nations, 215 attachment, 62, 71 Australian civility, 72 authentic community, 77, 80, 86, 87 authentic state, 9, 78

authenticity, 83, 85 authoritarianism, 173 authority, 25, 26, 28, 41, 49, 79, 80, 109, 168, 174. See also legitimacy; power; sovereignty; state autonomy, 3, 12, 13, 22, 24, 34, 69, 83, 87, 107, 125, 162, 169, 170, 183, 209, 224 Balandier, George, 82 Ball, Nicole, 126 Bank for International Settlements, 215 Baudrillard, Jean, 160 Bauman, Zygmunt, 164 Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, 157, 158–163. See also reflexive modernity; risk Beijing, 95, 102 Bellarmine, Cardinal, 44 Benjamin, Jessica, 14 Benston, Lloyd, 204 Bhaskar, Roy, 108 “Big Mac imperialism,” 78 Bilderberg Conferences, 214 borders, 14, 15 Bosnia-Herzegovina, 68–69, 130, 166–167 bourgeois society, 30 Bramsted, E.K., 144 Bright, C., 182 Brown, Chris, 141 bureaucratic systems, 7, 157, 163, 164, 166–167, 170 bureaucratization, 210, 211 Bush, George, 198 Camacho, Manuel Avila, 191

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232

INDEX

Camilleri, Joseph, 87, 127, 174 Campbell, David, 127, 132 capitalism, 3, 22, 33, 41, 144, 174 Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc, 190, 200, 202, 204 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 190, 191, 194, 204 Cardenismo, 191 Carr, E.H., 147 Carter administration, 145 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 7, 157, 164, 170 Catholic Church, 209 Catholic/Nationalist movement (Northern Ireland), 13, 105–122 Cerny, Philip G., 221–222, 223 Chen Duxiu, 99 Chiang Kaishek, China’s Destiny (1943), 97 Chiapas, 199, 200, 204, 205 China, 6, 11, 91–103; authority, 92, 102; autonomy, 102; class, 6, 93, 94, 99; community, 97; cosmopolitanism, 94; difference, 98, 103; diversity, 95, 97; ethical questions, 101–102, 103; ethnic nationalism, 102; Enlightenment thought, 96; federalism, 102; flags, 95–100; international community, 103; international state system, 93, 96; legitimacy crisis, 11, 101; local autonomy, 103; local community, 103; nationalism, 92, 94, 95; nation-state, 93, 94, 96, 97, 101, 103; particular, 92, 93, 95, 99, 101; primordialism, 95; race, 93, 94, 97; racism, 96; region, 93, 94, 102; regional autonomy, 91, 102; sovereignty, 91, 92, 93, 101; unity, 6, 91, 95; unity-in-diversity, 93, 96; universal, 93, 95, 96, 99, 101; universal community, 95; Westphalian model, 101; world order, 93, 101. See also Chinese state; Chen Duxiu; Chiang Kaishek; Communist China; Communist Party (China); Deng Xiaoping; Kang Youwei; Li Dazhao; Liang Qichao; Mao Zedong; Nationalist China; Nationalist Party (China); Republican China; Sun Yat-sen Christianity, 43, 44 citizen, 5, 12, 23, 32, 34, 48, 50, 80, 127, 131 citizenship, 7, 13, 60, 69, 70, 71, 127, 135

civil law, 46 civil society, 7, 15, 69, 105–122, 184, 185, 203, 217, 224 civility, 72 class, 35, 55 class conflict, 3 Cloots, Anacharsis, 43 Cold War, 126, 131, 132, 141, 143, 147, 148, 189, 193 collective security, 211 colonial countries, 51 colonialism, 132 Colosio, Luis Donaldo, 199, 204 common descent, 71, 86, 87 common security, 78 commonwealth, 44 communications, 3, 64, 141, 161, 211 communicative actions, 107–108, 169. See also Habermas, Jurgen Communism, 79 Communist China, 99–100; class, 99–100; Cultural Revolution, 100; ethnic differentiation, 99; federalism, 99; legitimacy crisis, 101–102; nation, 100; nationalism, 99; particular, 99; People’s Liberation Army, 102; regional differentiation, 99; selfgovernment, 99; sovereignty, 99, 102; state, 100, 101; unity-in-diversity, 99; universal, 99. See also One World; China Communist Party (China), 6, 11, 98, 101 Communist revolution, 94, 100 community, 3, 22, 25, 31, 43, 45–49, 50, 51, 59, 63, 66, 67, 71, 82, 85, 87, 93, 174, 216, 221, 223, 225; of states, 35 comprehensive security, 125, 126, 127, 132 confederal arrangements, 216, 224 connectedness, 15 Connor, Walker, 63, 65, 71 consent theory, 79. See also obligation consociational arrangements, 216, 224, 225 Cooke, Henry, 117 Cortinas, Ruíz, 191 cosmopolitanism, 70, 81 Cox, Robert, 150, 214, 217 Craig, William, 121 creative reflexivity, 13, 168, 170, 225. See also critical self-reflection; imaginary; reflexivity; unconscious

INDEX

Croatia, 68 critical self-reflection, 13, 14, 162, 168–170. See also creative reflexivity; imaginary; reflexivity; unconscious cultural analysis, 22 cultural diversity, 66, 78 cultural homogeneity, 60, 63, 64, 65, 82, 218 cultural plurality, 65 cultural politics, 33, 82. See also culture cultural processes. See culture culture, 8, 23, 30, 33, 49, 53, 59, 72, 80, 82, 87, 93, 107, 222, 223 Czech Republic, 68 De Gotari, Salinas, 198–200, 204 debt crisis, 189, 212 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1793), 42, 80, 145 decolonization, 52, 65, 79, 212 democracy, 50, 51, 52, 53, 69, 79, 152, 185, 219 democratic model of security, 13 democratic theory, 31, 63 Democratic Unionist Party, 117 Deng Xiaoping, 100 denial, 165 desire, 13, 23, 161, 162, 169, 170 Deutsch, K.W., 60, 65 development, 152, 174, 183, 218; and legitimacy of the state, 175 Diaz, Porfirio, 189 difference, 13, 35, 65, 69, 86, 88, 92, 167, 169, 170 displacement, 161, 166, 168 Doyle, Michael, 143 Drew, Thomas, 117 dualisms, 28 Dunn, John, 41, 144, 169 Durkheim, Emile, 71 Eastern Europe, 52, 59, 65, 67–69, 87, 128 ecological/enviromemtal crisis. See ecology ecological/enviromental destruction. See ecology ecology, 7, 10, 21, 32, 127, 146, 148–149, 158, 159, 211, 212, 218, 221 economic growth, 173, 174, 214 economics, discipline of, 31, 150 economy, 15, 23, 30

233

Elliott, Anthony, 14, 161 Ellul, Jacques, 164 Elshtain, Jean, 134 end of history, 78, 203 Engels, Friedrich, 55 Enlightenment, 25, 42, 50, 54–55, 79, 80, 81, 93, 158, 160 Enloe, Cynthia, 132 equality, 12, 55, 136, 145 essentialism, 54 ethical claims, 11, 91 ethical universalism, 43, 50, 51, 53 ethics, 25, 48, 91, 101, 148 ethnic cleansing, 78, 85, 166 ethnic conflict, 3, 68, 167 ethnic heterogeneity, 88 ethnic homogeneity, 68 ethnicity, 9, 10, 12, 60, 69, 70–72, 77, 83, 173 ethnie, 62, 70, 71, 220 ethnomethodology, 108 ethnonationalism, 9, 10, 11, 59, 65, 71, 77–88, 219; and territoriality, 78 ethnos, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88 Eurocentric perspective, 16, 173 Europe, 28, 55, 59, 66, 72, 85, 92; earlymodern Europe, 28, 35, 64 European Community, 69 European integration, 66–67, 69, 71. See also European Union; integration European unification. See European integration European Union, 67, 149, 215 exclusivist ideology, 7, 13, 105–122 Falk, Jim, 87, 127, 174 fanaticism, 85 fantasy networks, 10, 157, 163, 167 federalism, 98, 216, 224 feminist theory, 31, 33, 125; of international relations, 33, 128 fetishism, 164–165, 166 feudalism, 44, 80 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 80, 83 Fiji, 87 Filmer, Sir John, 48 flux, 7, 36 foreign policy, 128, 129 Foucauldian perspective, 9 Foucault, Michel, 9, 31. See also microphysics of power Fourteen Points, 51

234

INDEX

fragmentation, 3, 5, 213, 221, 222, 223, 224 France, 64, 85 free market, 10, 11, 16, 214. See also market Free Presbyterian Church (Northern Ireland), 117 free trade, 148, 211 French Revolution, 42–43, 50, 80; Constitution of 1791, 42; Girondin committee, 42 Freud, Sigmund, 107, 165 Fromm, Erich, 107 Fukuyama, Francis, 141 functionalism, 60, 71 geist, 49, 54 Gellner, Ernest, 64 gender, 11, 12, 14, 23, 33, 125–136, 218 gendered analysis of security, 11, 12, 14, 125–136, 221 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 215 geopolitics, 28, 36 German Democratic Republic, 67 German reunification, 67–68 German romanticism, 81, 83. See also Herder, Johann Gottfried; Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Germany, 67, 85 Geyer, M., 182 Giddens, Anthony, 60, 66, 106, 107, 108, 157, 159–163. reflexive modernity; See also structuration global, 7, 10, 14, 15, 16, 30, 32, 91, 92, 127, 134, 223; architecture of power, 211, 222; capitalism, 127; civil society, 15, 218, 219, 223; commodification, 33, 162, 170; community, 12, 93; culture, 224; economy, 15, 21, 32, 133, 149, 173, 213, 214, 217, 224; governance, 144; integration, 3, 143, 183, 214, 215, 224; order, 146; political economy, 222; political space, 4, 5; politics, 4; security, 164; society, 218. See also integration; world economy; world market Global One World (Datong), 93–94 globalization, 4, 5, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 59, 66, 69, 78, 141–143, 147, 149, 157–170, 173, 189, 211, 213–214,

217, 218, 225; and peripheral states, 185; time and space, 158, 170 Gobineau, 86 government, 46, 50 Gramsci, Antonio, 107 Great Depression, 151 Greek ethnos, 83 Greek Macedonians, 85 Green, T.H., 144, 145, 152 grounding the state, 41, 48, 49, 50, 56 G7, 147, 214, 215 Habermas, Jurgen, 31, 70, 106, 107, 169. See also communicative actions habitus, 71 Hanna, Reverend Hugh, 117 Harries, Owen, 142 Harrington, Mona, 134–135 Hartz, Louis, 148 Hawthorn, Geoffrey, 184 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich, 43, 49, 107 hegemonic stability theory, 153 hegemony, 107, 109 Held, David, 168 Hellenisitic monarchies, 43 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 80, 83 history, 11, 23, 49, 54, 62, 78, 79, 81, 86, 87, 88, 91, 101, 160, 162 Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 23, 25, 26, 27, 31, 33, 34, 36, 44–46, 56, 210; Leviathan, 44 Hobbesean maxim, 6, 143 Hobsbawn, Eric, 55 Holy Roman Empire, 209 human element, 12, 169 human rights, 145, 146, 148, 166, 174, 211, 219 Huntington, Samuel, 179 idealism, 32 identity, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 22, 28, 33, 54, 60, 65, 71, 72, 79, 80, 83, 85, 105–122, 128; communal, 221; cultural, 69, 84, 86; ethnic, 10, 33, 84, 85, 86, 105, 219; ethnocultural, 70; gender, 14; imaginary, 7, 12, 13, 14; national, 10, 54, 60, 65, 70–72; political, 33, 60, 83, 84; and reflexivity, 7; religious, 33, 105, 219; sexual, 129; subjectivity, 12; and territorial boundaries, 69. See also multiple identities

INDEX

ideological rules, 7, 13, 105–122 ideology, 7, 10, 12, 16, 26, 36, 183. See also ideological rules imaginary, 13, 161, 164–165, 168–170. See also creative reflexivity; critical self-reflection; unconscious imagination. See imaginary imagined community, 6, 9, 49, 65, 67, 87. See also Anderson, Benedict; nationalism imperialism, 25 inclusivist ideology, 7, 13, 14, 105–122 indeterminacy, 169 indigenous peoples, 219 individual will, 80 individualism, 31, 144, 152, 210, 216 Indonesia, 175 industralization, 209, 210, 211 insecurity, 12, 126, 157 inside and outside, 4, 35, 127, 132, 133, 163, 167, 220, 225 instituted reflexivity, 13, 157, 165–169 integration, 213, 223, 225. See also European integration; European Union; global integration interconnectedness, 14, 15, 218 interdependence, 78, 142, 143, 213, 224 international, 4, 11, 12, 14, 47, 211, 218, 223, 224, 225 International Atomic Energy Agency, 215 international capital, 16 international community, 11, 134 international division of labor, 217, 223 international law, 27 International Monetary Fund, 189, 193, 196, 214, 215 international organizations, 143, 146, 212, 215 international politics, 4; liberal tradition, 79; orthodox theories about, 78 international relations, discipline, 3, 4, 8, 23, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 125, 127, 131, 143, 209, 211 international society, 219, 222 international state system, 6, 168 international system, 4 internationalism, 78 internationalization, 59, 174, 211, 213, 215, 222 intersubjectivity, 13, 105–122 Irish Council of Churches, 119

235

Irish Republican Army (Provisional), 110–111, 113, 114, 119, 120, 121 irrationalism, 81, 85, 164 Islam, 151 Jameson, Fredric, 160 Jeffrey, Keith, Northern Ireland Since 1968, 111 Johnston, William, 117 Just, Roger, 83 justice, 152 Kafka, Franz, 25 Kang Youwei, 93–94, 103; and Global One World, 93–94 Kant, Immanuel, 25, 36, 56, 80 Kedourie, Elie, 52, 80 Keohane, Robert, 146 Keynes, Maynard, 145, 152 Keynesian model, 151, 193, 197, 214 Kim, Samuel, 101 kinship, 71 Kissinger, Henry, 126 Klein, Melanie, 157, 165–166, 170. See also splitting Kohn, Hans, 52 Kosowo, 65 Kothari, Rajni, 126, 141, 142, 153 Kristeva, Julia, 14 Lacan, Jacques, 161 language, 49, 62, 63, 64, 79, 81, 87, 160 Laplanche, Jean, 161 Lash, Scott, 160 late modernity, 8, 12, 13, 15, 158–170. See also advanced modernity; postmodernity Latin America, 132 “law of nature,” 46 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 85 legitimacy, 12, 15, 16, 26, 36, 48, 49, 50, 51, 59, 62, 64, 67, 71, 77, 79, 80, 83, 105–122, 126, 127, 174, 175, 220, 223. See also authority; state; sovereignty legitimation crisis. See legitimacy Leninism, 55 Li Dazhao, 98–99 Liang Qichao, The New Citizen (Xinminshuo), 93–94, 96 liberal. See liberalism

236

INDEX

liberal internationalism, 143. See also Wilsonian tradition liberal state, 48, 50; in feminist analysis, 134 liberal paradigm. See liberalism liberal theory. See liberalism liberal values, 144 liberalism, 3, 15, 16, 17, 48, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 62, 77, 78, 79, 141–153, 224; “blindspot” of the South, 147; critique, 146–150; free-market liberalism, 145, 148; intervention/nonintervention in states, 146, 148; political community, 152; welfare, 145 liberty, 42, 51, 52, 53, 55, 63, 64 Lipschutz, Ronnie, 212 local, 4, 7, 11, 14, 15, 30, 32, 127, 217, 221 Locke, John, 44, 46–48, 63, 210 long-distance nationalism, 85 Loyalist News, 114 loyalty, 48, 87, 127 Lyons, F.S.L., Ireland Since the Famine, 111 Lyotard, J.F., 160 Maastricht Treaty, 66 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 132 Macintyre, A., 179 macroregional organizations, 215 Malaysia, 6, 16, 17, 173, 175–185, 212, 216; Alliance government, 176; anticolonial voice, 16, 182; anti-Western voice, 16, 182, 183, 184; authoritarian, 182; authority, 180; autonomy, 185; bourgeoisie, 175, 176, 178; capital accumulation, 175, 177, 178; capitalism, 177; civil society, 175, 183; class, 175, 177, 181, 183; colonial history, 176; communalism, 179, 182; democracy, 182, 183; dissent, 176, 184; ecology, 175, 182; economic growth, 175, 179; economy, 176; Essential (Security Cases) Amendment Regulation, 181; ethnic populism, 180; First Bumiputera Economic Congress, 178; foreign policy, 182; global space, 16, 184; globalization, 179; hegemony, 175, 176, 183; heterogeneity, 184; human rights, 182; ideology, 180; Industrial

Coordination Act, 179, 180; internal dissent, 16; Internal Security Act, 181; international arena, 182, 184; internationalization, 183; Islamic opposition, 181; labor, 177; legitimacy, 16, 179, 180, 184; and liberal paradigm, 16; New Economic Policy, 176–177, 178, 180; Official Secrets Act, 181; pluralism, 184; Police Act, 182; political space, 16, 17, 173, 175, 182; postcolonial identity, 176, 184; power, 184; Printing Presses and Publication Act, 181; Promotions of Investment Act, 179; pro–Third World voice, 16, 182; race, 176; Rukunegara, 175; Second Malaysia Plan (1971–1975), 176; Sedition Act, 181; Societies Act, 181; sovereignty, 16; state-civil society relationship, 173, 183; state surveillance, 181; supranational concerns, 175; UMNO, 176, 181; Universities and the University Colleges Act, 181; world economy, 179; world system, 182 Mao Zedong, 94 market, 3, 143, 146, 151, 213–214, 224. See also free market; world market Marx, Karl, 55, 56, 107 Marxism, 54, 55, 56, 77, 197 masculinity, 11, 129, 131, 132. See also gendered analysis of security Massieu, José Francisco Ruiz, 199 Mayall, James, 65 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 53, 146 McKeague, John, 115 medieval period, 43, 49, 84 Melhuish, K.J., 144 Mexican Revolution. See Mexico Mexico, 6, 16, 189–205; Cámara Nacional de Industrias de Transformación, 192; corruption, 200; debt trap, 193, 196–197, 203; development, 195, 196; ecology, 197, 202; economic growth, 195–198; economic/radical nationalism, 190–197; economic rationalism/neoclassical economics, 193–201, 203–204; economically active state, 16, 197, 202, 203; economically rationalist state, 16; global economy, 190, 201, 205;

INDEX

globalization, 198; import-substitution model, 193, 195–196, 197; industralization, 191, 193–196, 202; land reform, 190, 196; Long Boom, 195–196; Mexican Confederation of Workers, 193; Mexican Revolution, 189, 190, 200; modernization, 190, 194, 202; nationalization, 190, 191, 194–196; Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRI), 190, 191, 200; privatization, 192–205; public sector, 198–203 micro-physics of power, 9, 209. See also Foucault, Michel Middle Ages, 81 Middle East, 126 migration of peoples, 3 militarism, 131 military, 128, 129 Mill, John Stuart, 51, 63, 79, 146 Milosevic, Slobodan, 84 misogyny, 130 modern age, 43, 47, 64, 127, 163 modern experience, 13 modernity, 3, 4, 6, 9, 22, 25, 26, 30, 36, 41, 44, 48, 53, 56, 60, 87, 93, 105, 157–170, 173, 174, 184, 210, 211, 217, 221, 225; as ambigious, 56 modernization, 64, 77, 109, 157, 158, 211 Morgenthau, Hans, 127, 131, 146–147 Mosk, Sanford, Industrial Revolution in Mexico, 193 multicentric world, 213, 222 multiculturalism, 59, 69, 224 multiethnic societies, 219 multilateralism, 217, 224 multiple identities, 71, 221, 225 Mussolini, Benito, 84 Nairn, Tom, 54 naming, 85 Napoleonic armies, 42 nation, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 33, 48, 49, 55, 59–72, 91, 209; as ambigious, 77, 88, 209, 220; as constructed, 64, 70; cultural, 71; definition of, 65; essentially contested concept, 62; as ethnically defined, 77; reimagining, 6; as sovereign, 63, 71 national, 4, 7, 12, 14, 127, 211, 224 National Convention (1792), 4

237

national economy, 15 national interest, 7 national liberation, 64, 65, 128, 131 National Organization for Women in the United States, 129, 130 national security, 11, 32, 125–136 nationalism, 5, 6, 9, 25, 33, 41–43, 48, 50–54, 59–60, 63, 66, 80–81, 128, 170, 211, 216, 220, 221; bureaucratic/official, 220; colonial movements, 52; Eastern European nationalism, 52, 59; ethnic, 78; as Janus-faced, 6, 54; of Milosevic, 84; and modernity, 41–56; of Mussolini, 84; popular, 220; postcolonial societies, 220; territoriality, 56; Western nationalism, 52 Nationalist China, 94, 97, 98, 100 Nationalist Party (China), 6, 95, 100 nation-state, 4, 11, 48, 50, 51, 55, 59, 62–64, 66, 67, 69, 83, 91, 92, 128, 161, 168, 216; essentially contested concept, 62; modernist view, 77 NATO, 166 natural law, 46, 47 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 54, 131 Nelson, Sarah, 114 neoliberalism, 16 neo-Nazis, 85 neorealism, 125, 132, 133 New Right, 150–151 new world order, 173 NIC state, 147, 150, 213 nominalism, 25, 26, 31, 36 nonstate actors, 153, 211, 218, 219 North American Free Trade Agreement, 199, 202, 204, 205, 215 North-South relations, 15, 147, 148 Northern Ireland, 6, 7, 10, 12–13, 14, 105–122; civil rights movement, 109, 111, 113, 114; class, 122; ethnic identity, 105, 110; history, 122; paramilitary violence, 111, 112, 115, 120; religious identity, 105, 110, 122; sectarianism, 110, 111; ultra-loyalism, 114. See also Catholic/Nationalist movement; exclusivist ideology; inclusivist ideology; Unionist movement Northern Ireland Labour Party, 110 nuclear arms, 126, 132 nuclear war, 126, 159

238

INDEX

obligation, 48, 71, 79. See also consent theory O’Donnell, G., 180 One World (shijie datong), 98, 103. See also Li Dazhao O’Neill, Terence, 110, 111 order, 126, 131 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 147, 149, 214, 215 Others, 10, 183 otherness, 85, 169, 170, 183 Pacific, 77 Paisley, Ian, 115, 117, 119, 121 Papua New Guinea, 87 paradox of nationalism, 41 particular, 10, 11, 28, 29, 31, 32, 36, 41, 44, 46, 48, 50, 53, 54, 80, 85, 91, 94, 98, 170, 221 particularism. See particular Pateman, Carole, 47 pathology, 165, 167, 225 patriarchy, 30, 131 patriotism, 129, 134 Pentagon, 10, 166 Peterson, V. Spike, 128 Pierson, C., 183 Pinwill, W., 183 Pitkin, Hannah, 132 Plamenatz, John, 52 pluralization, 10, 161, 225 Polanyi, T., The Great Transformation, 214 political, 4, 7, 23, 24, 26, 29 political allegiance, 7 political association, 216, 217 political attachment, 15 political authority, 15, 43, 46 political being, 7, 22 political community, 3, 7, 9, 12, 43, 44, 45–48, 60, 77, 83, 87, 88, 142, 152, 175, 210, 217 political economy, 22 political society, 47 political space, 4, 5, 7, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 30, 34, 59, 66, 78, 80, 83, 175, 183, 225; domestication of, 6, 183; and ethnicity, 77, 88; and ethnonationalism, 87; globalization, 14, 59, 167; and nation-state, 59; reimagining, 4, 5 political theory, 22

post–Cold War era, 77, 199 post-Communist societies, 211 post-international politics, 4 postcolonial societies, 11, 16, 17, 132, 173–174, 211, 216 postmodernism, 9, 77, 157, 161, 198, 211 postmodernity, 13, 162–170. See also advanced modernity; late modernity postnational politics, 59, 67, 71 postsovereign politics, 134 poststructuralism, 106, 160 power, 8, 9, 26, 109, 146, 147, 165, 173 power/knowledge, 26 power politics, 33 primordial, 70, 71, 82, 84, 108, 167 production, 141, 143, 210, 211, 221 projection, 10, 165–166. See also Klein, Melanie proletarian revolution, 55 protectionism, 215 Provisional Sinn Fein, 119 psychoanalysis, 13, 106, 157, 161 public-private, 49, 130, 131, 136, 165, 184, 217 Purdie, Bob, 109 Puthucheary, M., 178 quality of life, 126 race, 6, 49, 54, 86, 92 racism, 71, 170 rationalism, 41, 54, 71 rationality, 157, 161, 163 rationalization, 41 Rawls, John, 152 Reagan, Ronald, 126 realism, 3, 8, 32, 126, 132, 133, 141, 142, 147, 224. See also statist paradigm Rees, Merlyn, 119 reflexive modernity, 160–170. See also Beck, Ulrich; Giddens, Anthony reflexive modernization. See reflexive modernity reflexivity, 7, 12, 157–170, 219. See also creative reflexivity; critical selfreflection; imaginary; reflexive modernity; unconscious refugees, 130 region, 6, 93, 127, 223 relativization, 10, 225 religion, 49, 62, 79, 87

INDEX

religious conflict, 3. See also Northern Ireland, religious identity Renan, Ernst, 49, 54, 62 Report of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security, 126 representation, 157, 161, 163, 167, 170 repression, 165 Republican China, 95, 96–97 Republican Party (China), 6 risk, 12, 157, 158–162, 211. See also Beck, Ulrich Robespierre, 42 Roosevelt administration, 191 Rosenau, James N., 22 Royal Ulster Constabulary, 112 Ruddick, Sara, 130 Ruggie, John G., 145, 209, 210, 215 rule of law, 131 Said, Edward, 85 Saint Paul, 43 Scandinavian experience, 12, 135–136 Schmitt, Carl, 34, 36 secessionist demands, 78 second wave of feminism, 14 secularization, 211 security, 8, 11, 12, 32, 33, 219, 224; dilemma, 11, 126, 224; and women, 11, 125–136 self, 5, 10, 12, 91, 159 self and other, 23, 28, 29, 32, 35, 117, 127, 165–166, 170 self-constitution, 34 self-determination, 9, 50, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 78, 79, 82, 83, 87, 88, 143, 210, 220 self-fulfillment, 12 self-government, 62, 63 self-transformation, 13 Sen, Amartya, 152 Serbs, 9, 65, 84 Shankill Defence Association, 115 Shapiro, Michael, 183 Sinhalese, 9, 82 Slovak Republic, 68 Slovenia, 68 social change, 211 social contract, 46, 210, 216 Social Democratic and Labour Party, 113, 120 social movements, 15, 92, 152, 161, 174, 216, 217, 218

239

social structure, 13 socialism, 53, 54, 55, 144, 145 society, 46, 48, 60, 63 society of states, 27, 63 sociology, 22, 31 solidarity, 59, 67, 68, 71 Somalia, 130, 148 South, the, 17, 126, 128, 132 South Africa, 87 sovereign law, 25 sovereign state. See state sovereignty sovereignty, 3, 7, 9, 15, 25, 26, 27, 29, 33, 50, 80, 134, 173; Christian sources, 28; Greek sources, 28; as institution, 27, 29; medieval conception of, 15; and political space, 7, 129; popular or national sovereignty, 62–63, 64, 80, 127, 131; as practice, 28, 29; as principle, 27, 29, 78; sovereignty-bound actors, 222; sovereignty-free actors, 222. See also Locke, John; Hobbes, Thomas Soviet Union, 59, 65, 67, 77, 126, 128, 132 Smith, Anthony D., 71 space, 6, 7, 10, 15, 16, 22, 28, 29, 32, 35, 36, 107, 127, 135, 160, 173, 217, 221 speed, 30, 36, 85 splitting, 10, 165–166, 167. See also Klein, Melanie Sri Lanka, 9, 82 Standing Commitee on Banking Regulations and Supervisiory Practices, 215 state: as ambigious, 77, 88, 129, 209, 220; authority, 210, 215, 217, 218, 221; autonomy, 15, 212; bureaucraticauthoritarian state, 180; centralization of, 209; and church, 43; and civil society, 174, 209, 212, 216–219, 223; claims to statehood, 6; and class, 175; as contested concept, 27; definition of, 22; economically active state, 189; and economy, 209, 213–215; essentially contested concept, 62; and ethnicity, 175; European state system, 71; and gender, 11, 125–136; and globalization, 151; as hermeneutic circle, 9, 26; intervention in economy, 144; legitimacy, 11, 36, 68, 210, 212; and market, 209, 212, 223; in motion, 5, 6, 8, 22, 34; multiethnic, 68; and

240

INDEX

nation, 10, 35, 41, 59–72, 212, 219–221; and nationalism, 49; nature of, 5, 22; ontological claims to, 11, 12, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 35; organic conception, 80; and political space, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 77, 210, 223; power, 3, 8, 17, 41, 125, 210, 218, 221; reconceptualization of, 4, 17; Reformation/Counter-Reformation, 209; reification of, 9, 24, 34, 35, 41; and religion, 175, 209; and society, 209; study of, 3; territoriality, 6, 7, 24, 28, 30, 35, 36, 49, 60, 62, 67, 83, 146, 210; and time, 6, 7; theory of, 8, 24; and the transnational, 218 state-centric, 9, 127 state in transition, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 17, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 34, 66, 91, 92, 173, 203 state of nature, 45–46, 47, 132 state sovereignty, 3, 11, 25, 27, 30, 31, 32, 34, 50, 68, 78, 82, 83, 88, 128, 146, 174, 209, 210, 217, 220 statist discourse. See statist paradigm statist paradigm, 7, 8, 9, 13, 23, 24, 25, 30, 31, 33, 87, 221. See also realism statist politics. See statist paradigm Stiehm, Judith, 129, 130, 135 Stormont regime (Northern Ireland), 110, 113 Strange, Susan, 147 Strategic Defense Initiative, 126 structuralism, 106 structuration, 13, 106, 107, 108, 114, 121 structure, 59 subject, 12, 13, 21, 23, 33, 34, 36, 161; as decentered, 160, 161 subjectivity, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 21, 23, 28, 33, 34, 36, 105–122, 160, 161; and reflexivity, 7 subnational, 211, 212, 217, 218, 222, 223, 224 Sun Yat-sen, 94, 97 supranational, 67, 78, 173, 174, 211, 212, 215, 218, 222, 223, 224, 225 symptoms of globalization, 12, 13 Taiwan, 95, 100 technoexpert systems, 10, 157–158, 163, 165, 167 technology, 21, 30, 32, 213, 216, 218; homogenizing architecture of, 211

technological change/innovation. See technology technoscience. See technoexpert systems Tengku Abu Rahman, 181 territoriality. See state, territoriality terrorism, 3 theocratic notion of kinship, 44 Thillainathan, R., 178 Third World, 12, 15–16, 65, 146, 149, 152, 173, 184; and liberalism, 146, 149, 152; liberation struggles, 78 Thucydides, 142 time, 6, 10, 22, 28, 29, 32, 35, 82, 107, 135, 169, 217, 221 TNCs, 16, 151, 211, 213 tradition, 78, 79, 81–83, 86, 87, 88, 174, 221 transnational, 3, 12, 59, 67, 141, 149, 150, 152, 153, 161, 211, 215, 218, 221, 224, 225 transnationalization, 211, 213, 223 Trilateral Commission, 214 Tun Salleh Abas, 181 Ulster Unionist Party, 110 Ulster Volunteer Force, 115 unconscious, 7, 10, 12, 13, 105–122, 161, 163, 169, 170 Unionist movement (Northern Ireland), 13, 105–122 United Kingdom: New Right agenda, 150–151 United Malaysia National Organization, 176 United Nations, 27, 130, 146, 166, 219; Development Programme, 152; Economic Commission for Latin America, 195; Security Council, 148 United States, 54, 126, 129, 132, 147, 149, 166, 197; Declaration of Independence, 145; imperialism, 193; New Right agenda, 150–151 unity and diverstiy, 10, 11, 24, 35 universal, 10, 11, 28, 29, 32, 36, 41–43, 46, 48, 53, 91, 92, 94, 98, 170 universal community, 43, 93 universalism, 50, 54, 70, 77, 80, 81, 91, 145, 221 universalization, 25, 30 utopeanism, 32

INDEX

values, 33, 91, 92, 93, 218 Vanguard movement (Northern Ireland), 121 Vattimo, Giacomo, 160 violence, 11, 25, 27, 85, 126, 135; domestic, 130; legitimate use of, 22, 35, 174, 210; structural, 134 Volk, 80. See also Herder, Johann Gottfried Volkgeist, 80. See also Herder, Johann Gottfried voluntary association, 210 Walker, R.B.J., 50, 127 Wall Street, 189 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 222, 223 war, 131, 143 Weber, Max, 22, 25, 34, 36, 80 Weberian, 24 welfare state, 70, 130, 136, 150, 151, 189, 214 West, the, 30, 53, 59, 167, 211 West Europe, 59, 67, 128 West Germany’s Basic Law, 67 Western hegemony, 16, 211 Westminster, 114 Westphalia, Treaty of, 44 Westphalian order, 210, 216 White, Barry, 111 Wilson, Woodrow, 51, 63

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Wilsonian tradition, 143–144, 145. See also liberal internationalism withering state, 9, 78, 173, 174 World Bank, 180, 215 world community, 92, 174 World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993), 146 world economy. See global, economy; world market world market, 16, 211, 213, 223. See also global, economy; world economy world order, 11 world politics, 3, 4, 15, 29, 30, 34, 36, 127, 168, 218; transformation of, 3, 4, 8, 141 world polity, 15, 223, 224 world security, 127 world system, 222, 223 World War I, 51, 55 World War II, 65, 87, 110 Wuchang Uprising, 98 xenophopia, 85 Yugoslavia (former), 9, 65, 68–69, 77, 85, 166–167, 169 Zedillo, Ernesto, 200, 204 Zhang Binglin, 94 Zizek, Slavoj, 164–165, 167

About the Book

Until recently, the bounded, territorial, and sovereign state has been the foundation of modern understandings of political space. Now, however, as the patterns of world politics undergo major transformations through the competing processes of global integration and fragmentation, we are faced with the problem of how to conceptualize new and complex relationships. Further, addressing this problem requires a rethinking of the very categories we use in understanding local, national, and international politics, as well as a reimagining of the nature of political space itself. This book explores these issues conceptually and through case studies. The authors deal with the problems of identity and political space, analyze in detail the impact on the state of a globalized political space, and conclude with an effort to locate the state in these various developments and to characterize its trajectory as it struggles to adapt and survive. Joseph A. Camilleri is professor in the School of Politics at La Trobe University (Australia). Anthony P. Jarvis and Albert J. Paolini are assistant lecturers in the School of Politics at La Trobe University.

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Other Books in the Series

Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War David Campbell Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations Jim George The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory Yosef Lapid and Friederich Kratochwil, editors A Question of Values: Johan Galtung’s Peace Research Peter Lawler Transcending the State-Global Divide Ronen P. Palan and Barry Gills, editors The Global Economy as Political Space Stephen J. Rosow, Naeem Inayatullah, and Mark Rupert, editors

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