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The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow
11. The Present State of States
We have shown that the modern, territorial state is a unique historical creation of relatively recent vintage. It is not eternal, and no form of it is universal. Moreover, it now exists within a world order in which managerial states seem to dominate; indeed, most people live in states whose sovereignty is regulated and disciplined by norms of the international system and by the organizations of the global capitalist economy.
Military, economic, and social forces are calling into question the state’s territorial imperative, as well as the modern state’s insistence on a politics of control from the center. The ability to represent the state as territorially sovereign is diminished by the latest phase of warfare, the globalization of capitalism, the proliferation of international managerial institutions, and the tremendous mobility of peoples around the globe. Present developments not only seem to be challenging the current forms of the state, but are also questioning the possibilities of territorialized, sovereign power.
This is not to argue that the nation-state is disappearing, but that the state is in transition, although it is still unclear what its future form will be. Territorial states have always had to confront forces that overflow the representation of a sharp boundary between sovereignty inside—that is, the realm in which states claimed to be “in control” and in which the subject population was pacified—and sovereignty outside, that is, the state’s independence in a system of juridically independent states in a world of perpetual violence and war. In this chapter we examine three forces that challenge nation-state sovereignty: (1) post-territorial warfare; (2) the globalization of civil society; and (3) the fracturing of political identity.
Post–Territorial Warfare
Although the reliance on sharply defined borders that could be defended by the rational use of violence has constituted modern states, the territoriality of the modern state has always been unstable. As we saw in Part 2, the ability of states to defend their borders, and the ways in which resources were extracted and organized to do so, gave particular form to states and was important to their survival as sovereign entities. The idea that violence was a tool that states used rationally to protect themselves, and the specific ways in which they did so, marked their self-identity as states.
Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the state system has been constructed around the imaginary of “hard-shelled” and impenetrable territorially sovereign states capable of defending their subject populations from rival states. As one student of the state put it, “The large-area state came to occupy the place that the castle or fortified town had previously held as a unit of impenetrability.” 1 But reimagining spatial boundaries as impenetrable borders of a territorial state instead of the boundaries of the town had enormous significance. Constructing and defending borders involved more than physical defenses. Not only did borders have to be established through such signs as border crossings, flags, and military uniforms, but the people living within them had to be convinced to accept them and had to be made to identify their needs and interests as primarily enclosed within the state’s borders. In Chapter 9 we saw that this led to the construction of nations within states.
The twentieth century has witnessed a dramatic overriding of the territorial boundaries of the state by military technologies. Here we focus on how the transformation of warfare, in both its normative and technological aspects, has outstripped the state’s ability to use war as a rational strategy to defend its territorial borders.
In major part, the military overriding of territorial boundaries was the result of the industrialization of warfare. With the advent of industrialized warfare, the distinctions between civilian and soldier, between socioeconomic infrastructure and military resources, were blurred by technologies that compressed space and time. Industrial weapons rendered warfare more mobile, and more able to penetrate the “hard shell” of the territorial state’s imagined borders.
Industrialization ushered in what is generally considered the age of total war. This term refers to the way that war with machine weapons targets the entire social and economic fabric of states, not only killing thousands or even millions of people (military and civilian; men and women; young and old), but destroying the infrastructure on which social and economic life in industrial states depends. Total war also refers to the fact that to make war with machine weapons, the state must mobilize the entire industrial and social capabilities of the state. In total war, the distinctions between military and civilian, and between war and peace, essentially dissolve.
The new conditions of total war reorganized the internal structure of warmaking by rendering it increasingly dependent on science and technology, which require formal and informal connections between the military and weapons industries. What the U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) called in 1957 the “Military-Industrial Complex” has been maintained in the United States despite the end of the Cold War.
Paradoxically, industrial warfare also created new attitudes and social organizations to promote peace and to limit the destructiveness of war. Beginning in the 1890s, international conferences were convened to codify and expand the laws of war. These international laws of war regulated both when it was just and legal for states to go to war, called jus ad bellum or “justice of war,” and how wars should be conducted, called jus in bello or “justice in war.” Perhaps most important were attempts to limit or prohibit the use of “cruel and unusual” weapons and prohibitions against targeting civilians. Industrial warfare also generated an international social movement for peace, including the creation of nongovernmental, international organizations the aim of which was to promote peace. 2
Industrialization also changed the rationale for war, creating a “peace interest” in states. States became more inclined to seek peace and avoid war not out of ethical considerations or concerns for humanity, which animated the international peace movements, but because some sectors of the industrial economy considered peace as necessary to promote industrialization and economic growth. Of course, many other industrialists, especially those directly involved in producing and supplying weapons, recognized how war could be a driving force for an industrial economy and therefore promoted more aggressive foreign policies. The most important sectors of the industrial state that supported peace policies were those whose profit derived in some significant way from trade, especially finance capitalists, who put up the money for industrial enterprises engaged in trade. 3
Industrial warfare, by allowing mass killing at extremely long range (distances beyond the senses or comprehension of the soldier), also fundamentally altered social attitudes toward the meaning of war and, more generally, toward violence and killing. World War I, for example, generated in England a remarkable body of writing, especially letters and poetry, by soldiers who attempted to come to grips with the implications of industrial war for human life. 4 Contemplate the following two excerpts from very different U.S. writers and times, the first a reflection on the implications of World War I, the second a reflection by a contemporary Native American writer on the implications of modern war:
We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that. 5
. . . .
“You were with the others,” he said, “the ones who went to the white people’s war?”
Tayo nodded. . . .
He didn’t know how to explain what had happened. He did not know how to tell him that he had not killed any enemy or that he did not think that he had. But that he had done things far worse, and the effects were everywhere in the cloudless sky, on the dry brown hills, shrinking skin and hide taut over sharp bone . . .
But the old man shook his head slowly and made a low humming sound in his throat. In the old way of warfare, you couldn’t kill another human being in battle without knowing it, without seeing the result, because even a wounded deer that got up and ran again left great clots of lung blood or spilled guts on the ground. That way the hunter knew it would die. Human beings were no different. But the old man would not have believed white warfare—killing across great distances without knowing who or how many had died. It was all too alien to comprehend, the mortars and big guns; and even if he could have taken the old man to see the target areas, even if he could have led him through the fallen jungle trees and muddy craters of torn earth to show him the dead, the old man would not have believed anything so monstrous. Ku’oosh would have looked at the dismembered corpses and the atomic heat-flash outlines, where human bodies had evaporated, and the old man would have said something close and terrible had killed these people. Not even oldtime witches killed like that. 6
Representations of industrialized, machine warfare in which soldiers are transformed into machines that kill without human feeling, in which the enemy has become nothing more than an object to be routinely, coldly, and rationally annihilated, have become staples of modern culture. The efficiency and rationality of this form of destruction, rather than being seen as a virtue, are represented as irrational and inhuman, either too efficient or otherworldly and supernatural. Such representations captured and helped to form powerful critiques of not only particular wars but of warfare in general.
Important normative frictions between the institution of war as a rational tool of the state and the actual practices of war predate industrialization, however. In general, the industrialization of war intensified a dynamic that European states had to obscure in order to legitimate and secure themselves—that is, the dynamic of conquest that in part stemmed from the Crusades, perhaps with deeper roots in Roman militarism and the invasions of Rome by Germanic tribes, as well as expansion by Charlemagne and his successors. Historically, the practice of European war involved penetrating boundaries, occupying territory, and vanquishing the enemy on its own ground. Thus, borders, where they existed, were not secure markers of political space but contingent objects to be overcome, manipulated, rearranged, or ignored. Initially, this idea of war had little or nothing to do with protecting or defending sovereign territory. Such war was about conquering peoples and plundering their wealth. Conquest continues to constitute the discourse of war.
Warfare in the eighteenth century was essentially a contest limited to relatively small, mostly mercenary armies that engaged each other in formal, set-piece battles. These duel-like battles did not much directly involve civilians. A clear line of demarcation was drawn between combatants and noncombatants. 7 Thus, this late-medieval and early modern idea of war as a series of formal battles, which recognized the distinction between civilians and soldiers and which confined fighting to the battlefield so as to do the least damage to infrastructure, was a counterpractice, in a sense, to the idea of war as conquest. In a similar way, the idea of war as a defense of territorial borders was a counterpractice to war as conquest. 8
The republican tradition of the citizen-soldier, which has been so important to constituting political identity in sovereign states, was by no means fully consistent with the modern state’s identity as a rational user of war for territorial defense. On the one hand, the idea of the citizen-soldier, developed by Renaissance republicans such as Machiavelli, was important to the constituting of the modern state by limiting the soldiery to those within the territory and by eliminating foreign mercenaries and private armies within the state. The practice and the idea of the citizen-soldier also helped refashion the identity of the person so that his first loyalty was to the state. But this made the subject population itself into a legitimate target in war, if not directly then indirectly through economic blockades and psychological warfare. 9
Although they were developed to defend territory, modern industrial weapons render the very borders of the state increasingly vulnerable. The most significant developments appear, interestingly, at opposite ends of the spectrum of weapons: large-scale nuclear weapons on one end, and small-scale, even miniaturized weapons on the other, such as portable, easily concealable bombs, and guns and missiles that can be broken down into their component parts and easily smuggled across borders.
Air warfare and nuclear warfare have affected the territorial impenetrability of nation-states most radically, however. With the development of tactical air warfare during World War I, the perfection of strategic bombing with conventional and nuclear bombs in World War II, and the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) during the Cold War, the hard shell of the nation-state was decisively blasted away. The development of long-range strategic bombers during World War II made it possible for air forces to fly over the outer defenses of enemy states and directly attack their “soft” hinterlands. Cities, factories, roads, bridges, and civilians came under direct attack. Often the purpose of strategic bombing was not to destroy military targets but to terrorize civilians so that they would refuse to fight or support the war. The normative discourses of war discussed above made such attacks appear morally defensible.
The scale of nuclear destruction, however, challenges the very idea that nuclear weapons are “weapons” like other weapons that can “win” wars and achieve political goals. The blast from a nuclear weapon can leave deep craters in the earth of more than a mile in diameter within which everything is instantly vaporized. Nuclear weapons generate tremendous heat, which causes “firestorms” that instantly incinerate buildings, trees, roads, and people within a wide radius of ground zero. They also produce radioactivity that slowly kills thousands more and adversly affects future generations. The scope of their destructive force makes most, if not all, nuclear weapons unusable on the battlefield, although attempts have been made to design tactical nuclear weapons that would confine the effects of blast, heat, and radioactivity. The inability of technology to achieve what many strategic planners consider acceptable limits, along with the concern of military commanders that, in the “heat” and uncertainty of battle, escalation is inevitable, has led many military and civilian strategists to conclude that nuclear weapons are unusable as rational weapons of war. That is, their use serves no strategic purpose in protecting armies and territory or in winning battles.
Nuclear weapons, thus, challenge state sovereignty not only because of the scale and scope of their destructive power but also because of the ways they are delivered to enemy territory. The first form of delivery was, of course, the intercontinental bomber that dropped the first atomic weapons as gravity bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. Aircraft have remained an important delivery vehicle for weapons, although current technology allows them to avoid flying directly over their targets. Instead they release missiles, called cruise missiles, which use computerized maps to guide themselves to their targets within enemy territory. In order to ensure a retaliatory nuclear capability that could survive any first strike by an enemy nuclear attack, U.S. strategic planners have developed two additional delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons: land-based and submarine-launched ICBMs. Using computerized guidance systems, ICBMs, launched from hardened land-based silos or from submarines, fly outside the earth’s immediate atmosphere across several continents to their targets in enemy territory. Both Russia and the United States continue to maintain all three delivery systems, and other nuclear powers, such as England, France, and China, maintain one or two. All three delivery technologies allow the weapons to jump over, as it were, the territorial borders of an enemy state. Moreover, advanced guidance systems, or “stealth” technology, which makes bombers less detectable by enemy radar, and the sheer speed of ICBMs, which can fly halfway around the globe in less than 30 minutes, have made these weapons impossible to detect with sufficient certainty to ensure a reliable defense against them.
Therefore, air warfare and nuclear weapons have made the territorial sovereignty of even the most powerful nation-states increasingly anachronistic. Even one or two medium-sized nuclear weapons could devastate large swaths of a state’s territory. Nuclear weapons especially have put an end to the ability of the nation-state to guarantee the security of the subject population because there is no realistic defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs. Such weapons make it impossible for states that possess them to go to war against each other without the risk of mutual suicide. In the words of one scholar: “Nuclear weapons . . . [have] finally put an end to the nation-state’s ability to guarantee the security of its citizens . . . There is simply no defense against nuclear weapons.” 10
Nuclear weapons have been subject to the rationality of industrialization as much as to strategic considerations. 11 Improvements in them have been subject to the dynamic drive for greater productivity of the large corporations that produce them. In a sense, they are as much the result of the modern penchant for instrumental, means-end rationality as is the zip-lock sandwich bag or double-entry bookkeeping. 12 Improvements are also the result of the modern attitudes toward scientific progress that feed the advanced capitalist economy: if an object (tool, machine, procedure, human behavior) can be improved (i.e., made more powerful and efficient), it should be, according to what is technically possible. The social and political consequences of such technical improvements are seen as exogenous; therefore, technological improvements take on a life of their own. Moreover, the development of miniaturized electronics used to upgrade ICBMs, such as advanced guidance systems that allow multiple, independently targetable warheads to be placed on a single missile, have “improved” conventional weapons as well as making them more powerful, mobile, and concealable.
With the development of miniaturized electronics and the advent of new, more portable means of violence, the global order has become generally militarized. This new technology is not separable from the global context of militarization during the Cold War, which has created both the means and the economic impulses to “microtize” weapons further, and to spread them to private and nonstate groups. 13
During the Cold War, nuclear weapons produced an uneasy peace that was based on the production of nuclear weapons, which everyone agreed could never be used rationally. State territory came to be defended not by national armies and navies but by the fear of mutual destruction. The deaths of hundreds of millions of civilians and the complete destruction of the enemy state’s capacity to function as a viable industrial society was sufficient to keep the peace, at least among the European nuclear powers.
Outside of Europe, however, war was frequent, and in almost all cases, warring factions and states were supplied with advanced weapons by the nuclear powers, although neither transferred nuclear weapons to their client states. Most often, this made the client states dependent on the military-industrial complex of their patron, most often the United States or the Soviet Union. Several other European states, such as Britain, France, and Czechoslovakia, became major arms suppliers as well, because client states lacked the industrial and scientific base to produce and maintain modern weapons. Also, wars outside of Europe in which the superpowers directly participated—the U.S. war in Vietnam (1964–1975) and the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979–1985) being the most important—spread enormous quantities of surplus weapons throughout the world, such as automatic rifles, tanks and antitank missiles, artillery pieces, antipersonnel mines, and plastic explosives. Finally, arms production became an important industry in many advanced economies as well as in some newly industrializing non-European states such as Brazil, Argentina, and Israel. These non-European states have generated, along with the “leftover” weapons from the proxy wars of the superpowers, a network of arms markets throughout the world in which weapons of all types can be purchased by private persons, movements, or states that cannot produce them themselves. 14
Such military developments have created a severe challenge to the state’s ability to use military force to defend its territory, and have led many observers to the conclusion that the continuance of a politics based on allegiance to a territorially based state is neither warranted by the empirical realities of postmodern warfare nor ethically defensible. 15
Globalization of Civil Society
The state is also challenged by the globalization of civil society. Globalization has expanded not only the scope of economic activity, but also the ways in which the increasing connections between people across state borders have induced changes in people’s perceptions of social space and its boundaries. Social relations that nation-states assume to take place inside their borders—family connections, voluntary associations, economic communities, friendships—are increasingly constitutive of networks of social interaction across national borders. Civil society at the end of the twentieth century, in important respects, moves rather freely across and through the territorial boundaries of states. This has rendered national civil societies less easy to manage by states and made the imagining of sovereignty less central to people’s identities and more difficult for states to sustain.
Much of the challenge of global civil society stems from the globalization of the capitalist economy. Globalization refers to “the complex of economic, technological, ecological, and cultural structures that are emerging on a global scale which ignore or deny the relevance of any state’s territory.” 16 Globalization challenges the effectiveness of the territorial state as a guarantor of the economic well-being and the national identity of its subject population. States can still intervene in their national economies, often with considerable impact. However, in many important economic areas, states either have chosen not to constrain globalization, by supporting free trade and refusing to restrict capital flows and labor markets, or have felt too restricted by global financial markets or the international division of labor to make any active attempts at managing the economy.
The industrial capitalist system has always been a global system. Historically, capitalism has relied on the nation-state and at the same time challenged its sovereignty by undermining the ability of the state to enclose civil society within territorial boundaries. The industrial capitalist system increased the importance of trade in local economies and made long-distance trade economical. 17 It also created a new system of global inequality based on the uneven deployment of industrial technologies. Regions that supplied the raw materials of industrial production, both within states and in relations between states, gained less of the profit from industrial production than did those regions or states that supplied the manufactured goods or provided the financing for manufacturing and trade.
Steam-powered trains and ships, which became large and fast during the nineteenth century, compressed time and space. Steam power resulted in more goods being traded over greater distances more quickly than ever before. This had the effect of spreading the industrial system to all parts of the world, often destroying indigenous economies because imported manufactured goods could be sold more cheaply than locally produced goods.
The British created and dominated the emerging global industrial capitalist system through much of the eighteenth century. By the 1870s Germany and the United States rivaled Britain in industrial power. In the last half of the nineteenth century the Japanese would also embark on the rapid industrialization of their economy. Industrialization became a global phenomenon. A core of states with industrial economies came to dominate the world economy by spreading advanced technologies over which they maintained control, promoting norms of free trade, and recolonizing other states through the control of their raw materials and markets.
After the World War II, the United States created a globally managed free-trade system, as part of the Fordist social economy, in which goods and investment flowed freely across national borders. The main beneficiary of the system was the large transnational corporation (TNC). These corporations maintained headquarters in their home states but invested directly in other states, where they built factories and bought and otherwise established foreign subsidiaries in order to penetrate foreign markets. They began to organize themselves transnationally in the sense that their “bottom lines” were calculated to include the multinational markets in which they operated. This system has led during the past 40 years to a tremendous concentration of wealth that is organized internationally and is highly mobile across borders. According to one estimate, the largest 300 TNCs, many of which boast sales greater than the gross national product of most nation-states, control nearly a quarter of the world’s productive assets. 18
During the 1980s and 1990s those large corporations that dominate the world economy maintain multinational operations and a network of subsidiaries, many of which are becoming global. These “global corporations are the first secular institutions run by men (and a handful of women) who think and plan on a global scale.” 19 They develop products—of which Coca-Cola and the Sony Walkman are two significant examples—that, with minor modifications, can be sold in any country in the world, and they plan their production and distribution to fit a global market. For example, McDonald’s adjusts its menus to fit local sensitivities and religious practices. In Israel Big Macs are served without cheese; in India mutton-based Maharaja Macs and Vegetable McNuggets are served; in Turkey cold yogurt drinks are available; in Italy espresso coffee and cold pasta can be purchased; in Japan teriyaki burgers are available; in Norway grilled salmon sandwiches; in Germany frankfurters and beer; and in Uruguay egg hamburgers. 20
Such globalization has been made possible by improvements in transportation (bigger trucks, jet-powered air freighters, containerized cargo, superhighways) and spectacular advances in computing and telecommunications (digital systems, satellites, fiber optics) technology. These improvements and advances have (1) reduced transaction and communication costs, making goods and services globally tradable that were not before, such as perishable, seasonal items (e.g., flowers, grapes, oranges), fashions, back-office accounts, and design work; (2) made it possible for corporations to coordinate effectively and efficiently on a global scale their production, planning, and financial operations; (3) made information, such as films, compact discs, tapes, software, television news, and programs, tradable; and (4) allowed capital to become highly mobile, which has created a global market for currencies and securities. 21 These developments have made representing the state as securer and manager of an economy inside its territorial boundaries more difficult to sustain. Also, it is more difficult to paint the international and global aspects of economic life as fully outside the territorial state when, for example, subtle changes in interest rates in one state can severely affect jobs in others and when multinational corporations rapidly and frequently shift jobs to low-wage states, producing unemployment and lower wages in other states.
Globalization has, paradoxically, disciplined all states to become more or less managerial; at the same time, management of the economy by the state is increasingly problematic, and has become so in a number of ways. First, the amount of profit-seeking, financial capital flowing electronically around the world far exceeds the amount that any state can marshal from its reserves in order to control the value of its currency. Second, a substantial amount of trade is now intra-industry, rather than international, owing to the specialization of TNCs; therefore, the state can no longer easily distinguish national exports from foreign imports for trade policy purposes. This means that states have lost much of their ability to protect their domestic markets with tariffs. Third, many TNCs have dissociated themselves from their states of origin and seek to locate their operations where wages and taxes are lower and regulations fewer. For example, the Boeing Corporation, a major aircraft manufacturer located in Seattle, Washington, has recently declared publicly that it no longer considers itself a U.S. company but a global one. In 1996, Coca-Cola Corporation, located in Atlanta, Georgia, eliminated the distinction between its domestic and international operations. This means that states have much less control over what happens economically within their territories. States now compete with one another to provide an attractive business environment, such as good infrastructure, deregulated markets, a trained and docile workforce, and financial stability, in order to attract and retain more capital and investment from TNCs. 22
Thus, the global market has increasingly taken on the role of a regulator of sovereignty, creating institutions and generating norms and discourses that make it appear necessary and inevitable that states both adopt free market economic policies and proffer interpretations of the national interests that conform to the norms of global competitiveness. This is especially true of the poorest states, whose economies are heavily influenced by international regulatory agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), also known as the World Bank, through the conditions they impose on states seeking to obtain new loans from international sources or to renegotiate old ones. In effect, the IMF and the World Bank set monetary and fiscal policy for indebted states. 23
Despite claims that economic globalization is beneficial for all, the distribution of winners and losers in the global economy does not neatly respect territorial borders. It has created intractable mass unemployment in some states and high levels of unemployment in most states. In others it has led to resource depletion, pollution, and ecological damage. As two analysts of the global economy put it:
The most disturbing aspect of this system is that the formidable power and mobility of global corporations are undermining the effectiveness of national governments to carry out essential policies on behalf of their people. Leaders of nation-states are losing much of the control over their own territory they once had. More and more, they must conform to the demands of the outside world because the outsiders are already inside the gates. Business enterprises that routinely operate across borders are linking far-flung pieces of territory into a new world economy that bypasses all sorts of established political arrangements and conventions. Tax laws intended for another age, traditional ways to control capital flows and interest rates, full-employment policies, and old approaches to resource development and environmental protection are becoming obsolete, unenforceable, or irrelevant. 24
Deeper challenges to the state, moreover, stem from the limited possibilities for generating identities bound to territorial sovereignty in the context of a globalized civil society. Two factors are most significant: (1) the density of nonterritorial-based networks of social relations, and (2) the speed and frequency of movements of people, images, and ideas across borders. To these we now turn.
The Fracturing of Identity
Nation and state have rarely coincided in the history of nation-states. State boundaries have rarely conformed to a particular linguistic, religious, and/or cultural community. Therefore, the persistence of representations of the state as a homogeneous national community has had tremendous costs for those marginalized by the national community. Such representations have brought to bear on these peoples powers of self-discipline (e.g., to make oneself assimilate to the dominant national ideal) as well as overt force and covert surveillance, because those outside the dominant nationality are, in principle, suspect and seen as potential threats. Even those who fit the dominant national representation are forced at times to demonstrate their “true national identity”—their Americanness, Frenchness, Indianness, and so on.
Almost all nation-states contain significant minority ethnic groups, many of which are claiming the internationally recognized “right of self-determination of peoples” found in Article I, Section I, of the charter of the United Nations. Many ethnic groups, such as the Basques and Catalans in Spain, Corsicans and Bretons in France, Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, Chechens in Russia, Tibetans in China, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Chiapas Indians in Mexico, Québécois in Canada, Kashmiris in India, Ibos in Nigeria, Eritrians in Ethiopia, and Native Americans in the United States, to mention only a few, have demanded autonomy within the state or outright independence from it. Many ethnic groups have come to imagine themselves as a nation and to seek statehood for the following reasons: (1) a sense that the identity of the group is being eroded by strong assimilationist policies of the majority ethnic group that controls the state; (2) a belief that cultural identity and economic prosperity can be maintained and/or achieved only by breaking away from the existing state; and (3) the belief that nationalist aspirations cannot be completely achieved without full, independent statehood. 25
Such fissiparous forces have begun to transform the present state system by producing new states from existing ones. The collapse of the Soviet Union yielded twelve new independent states, and the collapse of Yugoslavia produced five more. According to one observer, the number of new ethnically based states could go as high as 150. 26 Another observer indicates that the number of potential ethnically pure states could be as high as 8,000! 27 No matter the number, there is little doubt that we have entered an age of violent nation-state reconstitution. The boundaries imposed by the European states during the age of imperialism are being redrawn by the local ethnic groups who were disregarded in the process of creating the present global system of states.
These new states have also begun to transform the global Westphalian state system, which rests on European principles, regarding the separation of the spiritual and the secular. Increasingly the imagined nationhood of these new states appeals to religion both as an important source of challenge to European hegemony and as an important form of social solidarity and common will.
The paradigmatic identity as a sovereign identity has also fractured along gender lines. The state as representation of a sovereign nation continues to marginalize women as a subordinate group. Traditional representations of territorial sovereignty have privileged the ideas of military engagement and soldiering as the most important social role in the state. These roles were tied to the protection of the domestic life of the members of the state and drew symbolically on gendered discourses of public and private. Women and children constituted the private sphere, which male soldiers protected. Modern concepts of responsibility within sovereign, territorial states have clearly drawn on such ontological assumptions of a split between public and private and the representation of women and children as the ones to be protected.
In states in which women have traditionally played important roles in local communities, especially in the agricultural sector, the creation of territorial state sovereignty and nationhood has resulted in a diminution of their position and left them prey to multiple forms of oppression. This is especially the case in the context of globalization, where many states promote export industries and mass industrialization by transforming the local environment in the name of economic development. In such cases, the idea of the sovereign state becomes identified with economic and social trends that destroy the traditional forms of women’s (and indigenous men’s) authority. Native American women in South and Central America, for example, have organized to protect the environment by promoting representations of identity in which people are presented not as sovereign agents standing outside the environment in order to use it for state development but rather as integral parts of the environment. 28
An internationalist consciousness among many women’s organizations and feminist groups has taken hold; either it challenges the sovereign nation-state or it seeks to reimagine sovereignty in ways more inclusive of not only gender difference, but all sorts of differences that affect the position of women, such as local versus national development, and environmental protection versus economic development. By seeking to reintegrate strong conceptions of liberalism and tolerance into representations of a national community, some women’s groups have sought to reimagine sovereignty to be more inclusive of the particular differences of persons. Others have sought new forms of empowerment that often leave the nation-state, and representations of sovereignty, behind, forging alliances with transnational organizations and social movements across national borders.
Because membership in a nation-state can no longer reasonably assure employment, security from poverty and destitution, or a meaningful family and social life, membership in a political community becomes a fleeting and constantly moving horizon for many people rather than a secure, permanent, and lifelong identity. The imagining of politics as located in some central representation of unified, territorially based power (i.e., the state) is difficult to conjure in the minds of ever more nomadic people. Many of the world’s poor—and not so poor working class—are left to move in and out of states and to seek new political identities that might secure them a livelihood. In today’s global system, one is neither assured of being born into a nation-state nor likely to be able to create one out of some collective will as was assumed by the idea of popular sovereignty. For many in the current global order, one takes whatever nation-state one can find, often at great cost to one’s sense of cultural identity.
Economic elites in the global economy are also losing a sense of national political identity. Loyalty to the company—increasingly transnational and global—has supplanted allegiance to a nation-state for managers of major corporations. The pursuit of wealth as a human good and valuable human achievement for the capitalist elite is no longer bound up with the health and well-being of the nation-state into which they were born. This has always been true for many from non-European states, who would leave their home states to be educated and to seek opportunities in advanced capitalist states. But even many of these would eventually return to their home state; this is less the case in the current global economy. 29
Refugees (political and economic, if they can really be meaningfully distinguished in the current world of drastic inequality), guest workers (who together with their descendants perform a significant amount of the less skilled work in many managerial states), migrants, and dispossessed peoples, among others, are also ripe for appeals of alternative political identities to those of the nation-state. 30 The nation-state promises prosperity and security within secure boundaries, which it can no longer deliver or is not any longer willing to deliver, to the poor as well as much of the working population. Therefore, although many still seek the security, prosperity, and popular sovereignty of nation-states, at the same time they seek out other identities, often ethnic, which require ethnic “cleansing,” or religious, which require the elimination of the “infidel” or “heretic.” As one analyst describes the current predicament: “Where there is no nation, there is no community; where there are no territorial boundaries, there is a search for origins. If you do not define yourself by the place where you live, tell me where you come from.” 31
Identity in the current world order is becoming increasingly ambiguous, a situation with the potential for a multiplicity of possible futures, some including and some ignoring the nation-state.
Summary
The ability to represent the state as territorial sovereign has been diminished by the emerging global context of politics. The twentieth century has witnessed a dramatic overriding of territorial boundaries by military technologies and global capitalism. Peoples within states as well as those migrating across state boundaries are being forced to renegotiate their identities. The expansion of global corporations and organizations has extended, and privatized, managerial and bureaucratic control.
In this context, popular sovereignty has diminished. The organs of the state have become less subject to popular input and accountability. Having lost a relatively secure relation to territory, the state has ceased to be able to secure itself as the representation of a distinct people. The globalist and neoliberal ideologies that inform the international organizations and modes of cooperation states enter into in order to manage global capitalism have freed the bureaucratic and managerial powers of the state from their anchors in ideas of ”the people“ or the “body politic.” Hence, state power has grown and politics has become increasingly trivial. In the final chapter we turn to this paradoxical condition.
Endnotes
Note 1: John H. Herz, The Nation-State and the Crisis of World Politics (New York: David McKay, 1976), 104. Back.
Note 2: For a history of the attempts to codify the laws of war, and the international organizations that arose to promote peace, see Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Back.
Note 3: For an account of the peace interest as promoted by finance capitalists up to World War I, see Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), chap. 1. For an account of the complex relations between industrial capitalists, finance capitalists, and international power in the twentieth century, see Kees Van der Pjil, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso Press, 1984). Back.
Note 4: These have been studied and presented vividly by Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Back.
Note 5: Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), 29. Back.
Note 6: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 36-37. Back.
Note 7: In our discussion of the machine gun in Chapter 8, we saw how the maintenance of modern war’s rational, territorial boundaries and limits was socially and culturally conditioned. When nonwhite peoples who did not share the European traditions of Christianity and the sovereign state were the objects of war, the traditional boundaries between civilian and soldier, or the limits of a rational use of force for territorial defense, did not hold. Back.
Note 8: The difficulty of relating two inconsistent discourses of war, one of conquest and one of defense, goes back at least to St. Augustine and enters the self-identity of the territorial state via Christian just-war theory and its natural law variants. The seeming opposition between offensive wars of conquest and the principle of war as a rational and, therefore, legitimate tool of territorial defense, reflected in the continued practice of wars of conquest, was to relate “defense” not only to the contingent defense of the state but also to universal principles of Christian justice or natural law. At the root of the idea of war as defending territory, then, is an undecidability about exactly what is being defended. The ability to slip between discourses defending the contingent state on the one hand and universal principles of right and justice on the other makes defensive war work as the primary legitimating discourse of the state. On the history of just-war theory, see James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). Back.
Note 9: On economic war and psychological war as forms of warfare that penetrate the hard shell of the territorial state, see John H. Herz, The Nation-State and the Crisis of World Politics, 104. Back.
Note 10: David Beetham, “The Future of the Nation-State,” in Gregor McLennan, David Held, and Stuart Hall, eds., The Idea of the Modern State (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1984), 215. Back.
Note 11: On the connections between industrial capitalism, technology, and nuclear weapons, see Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970). Back.
Note 12: This is most evident in the logic President Truman used to justify the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II, whatever else one thinks of the morality of the decision. Truman’s justification calculated the number of U.S. soldiers who would likely be killed in a full-scale invasion of the Japanese homeland and compared these with the number of Japanese deaths the bombs would cause. He decided, using a calculus that denied the relevance of the distinction between civilians and soldiers and that had racist overtones, that dropping the bombs was more efficient in terms of U.S. lives saved than an invasion; an invasion would also have had significant economic costs, especially to the Americans, and might have had diplomatic costs, too, by giving the Russians the opportunity to enter the Pacific War, which would have allowed them to influence the postwar settlement there. Back.
Note 13: On the idea of a world military order, see Mary Kaldor, The World Military Order (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). Back.
Note 14: See Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lockheed (New York: Viking Press, 1977), and Michael T. Klare, American Arms Supermarket (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1984). Back.
Note 15: See especially Richard Falk and Robert J. Lifton, Indefensible Weapons (New York: Basic Books, 1982); and Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982). Back.
Note 16: Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development and Prospects (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 117. Back.
Note 17: Peter Saunders, Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 24. Back.
Note 18: Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), Back.
Note 20: James L. Watson, ed., Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 23-24. Back.
Note 21: Vincent Cable, “The Diminished Nation-State: A Study in Loss of Economic Power,” Daedalus 124 (spring 1995): 25-26. Back.
Note 22: Cable, “The Diminished Nation-State,” 26-29, and Vivien A. Schmidt, “The New World Order, Incorporated: The Rise of Business and the Decline of the Nation-State,” Daedalus 124 (spring 1995): 79. Back.
Note 23: Beetham, “The Future of the Nation-State,” 213. Back.
Note 24: Barnet and Cavanaugh, Global Dreams, 19. Back.
Note 25: Raju G. C. Thomas, “Nations, States, and Secession: Lessons From the Former Yugoslavia,” Mediterranean Quarterly 5 (fall 1994): 47. Back.
Note 26: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Pandemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 168. Back.
Note 27: James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Back.
Note 28: A good summary of the growing literature on women and development is Jan Pettman, Worlding Women (New York: Routledge, 1996). Back.
Note 29: Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995). Back.
Note 30: Myron Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis: Challenges to States and to Human Rights (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). Back.
Note 31: Jean-Marie Guéhenno, The End of the Nation-State, trans. Victoria Elliott (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 37. Back.
The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics
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