Political Culture and the Making of Modern Nation-States

Edward Weisband, Courtney I P Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317254096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on transformations of political culture from times past to future-present. It defines the meaning of political culture and explores the cultural values and institutions of kinship communities and dynastic intermediaries, including chiefdoms and early states. It systematically examines the rise and gradual universalization of modern sovereign nation-states. Contemporary debates concerning nationality, nationalism, citizenship, and hyphenated identities are engaged. The authors recount the making of political culture in the American nation-state and look at the processes of internal colonialism in the American experience, examining how major ethnic, sectarian, racial, and other distinctions arose and congealed into social and cultural categories. The book concludes with a study of the Holocaust, genocide, crimes against humanity, and the political cultures of violation in post-colonial Rwanda and in racialized ethno-political conflicts in various parts of the world. Struggles over legitimacy in nation-building and state-building are at the heart of this new take on the important role of political culture.

PART I
TRANSFORMATIONS OF POLITICAL CULTURE FROM TIMES PAST TO FUTURE PRESENT

CHAPTER 1
POLITICAL CULTURE

Culture and Continuity

Culture begins in moonlight. As Astronomers Without Borders notes, “every culture on Earth has a view of the moon that is unique to them, their heritage, and their identity as a people.”¹ Our earliest human ancestors marked the stages of life and developed cultural values according to their observations of the phases of our closest celestial neighbor. The moon served as a “guide to the natural world” signifying “when to plant crops, when to harvest, when to fish or hunt certain types of animals, when the women were fertile and what type of personality the child would possess upon being conceived under a certain phase of the moon …. [It was] a practical guide to the rhythms of the universe, the cycles prevalent in nature.”² The moon has been deified in many cultures. It has served as the inspiration for festivals, dances, myths, and legends. It has acted as the centerpiece of the communal experience, the guiding force that provided a sense of cultural continuity against the uncertainties of transient life. For example, Native American cultures have names for the full moons that appear during each month of the year. October’s “Hunter’s Moon” follows the “Harvest Moon” (the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox) and is named for the moonlight hunts that allow native communities to stockpile food for the winter months. The moon seems to have lent meaning to life in early societies, linking individual persons to the values and traditions that endow human life with communal significance.

Culture: The Silent Codes of Human Development

What is culture and what are its functions? Culture refers to the universal human capacity to classify, codify, and communicate knowledge and experiences symbolically and intergenerationally. It inheres in symbolic meanings. These endow human existence with significance. Communities adopt cultural values and meanings in order to communicate, understand, and validate the institutions that regulate their social practices. Culture functions in ways that govern interpersonal relationships, discipline human behaviors, and provide context to collective social and political experiences.

Culture grounds human existence by allowing persons to interpret life from birth to death, from entry into the human condition to passage beyond material existence. It provides moral and spiritual foundation. On such fundamental meanings, human beings, in what we are about to call traditional kinship communities as well as in modern society, situate themselves as members of family, social, or national groups, and today, even as participants in global networks. Our identities, the ways that we project ourselves into the world, are products of culture, its traditions, its values, and its meanings. Culture grounds us as we wrestle with questions of association, affiliation, allegiance, and even our own cosmic self-worth. From a traditional communal perspective, culture serves to strengthen the sense of intergenerational continuity. Culture thus, in effect, teaches us how to think about who we are, what is expected of us. It influences how we judge ourselves and others against the normative standards that define what we might, should, and/or must do in life. It guides and shapes our understanding of metaphysical reality, that is, how we interpret the possibilities of a world beyond our own, and it thus facilitates human comprehension and belief as to where we “go” once we pass from this life. Culture thus helps shape our sense of what it is to be a human being among others. Often, it supports the belief that life and living are or can be grounded in elements larger than life, be they conceived in religious, philosophical, or ideological ways.

Cultural cues are everywhere. In some cultures children are taught to “speak only when spoken to” or to “be seen and not heard”; in others, they are encouraged to “speak their minds.” Some cultures socialize men to be assertive and women to be submissive while others idealize gender equality. In some cultures it is taboo to make eye contact with a person of a higher social or economic class while other cultures regard the same practice not as a sign of deference, but rather as an indication of disrespect. And because we absorb cultural practices into our behaviors from our infancy, we reproduce them “naturally.” In this way, culture presents itself as given and thus as part of the natural world rather than as a contrivance of human invention. As Terry Eagleton writes, culture is “‘history turned into nature’ … a social order [that] strives to naturalize its own arbitrariness.”³ Yet cultural practices are never completely arbitrary. They are instead invented and reinforced through dynamics of transmission across generations that involve learning and various forms of rational confrontation with the natural world of material circumstances. For these reasons culture is coconstitutive. We are at once the products and the creators of the cultures that anchor and guide our lives. What we do with culture is as important as what culture does through us. We learn to know ourselves through culture. In infancy, we take into ourselves the culture of those who nurture us. From our earliest moments we absorb cultural sensitivities, habits, and modes of relation without self-conscious awareness and without critical analysis. In doing so, we learn without learning. We do not know how we know what we know and yet through culture we become aware of ourselves as knowing persons. We learn not only what to desire but how to desire. Cultural influences instruct us often without our self-awareness, guiding us not merely in what we think but in how we think.

Culture represents the “silent codes” of human bonding and belonging and thus of collective social or political identity. It acts as the root of our communal beliefs, values, and ethical perspectives. It becomes symbolized in our traditions, customs, and norms. Culture surrounds us and we are embedded in it. It is present in our language, our mannerisms, and our habits. It structures our interactions with others and establishes the parameters of social interactions. In these ways, culture reinforces constructions of collective identity. Political culture refers to our concepts and symbolic meanings attached to forms of governance. How are we governed? How do we justify or validate governing methods and institutions? How do we convert power through force into authority through rules? What is the meaning of legitimacy and why is legitimacy of government and governing institutions critical to an understanding of the modern world?

Political Culture and the Legitimacy of Governance

When we glance at a map of the world, we see a globe. The planetary universe called Earth is divided into a cartographic design etched by sovereign state borders and the national boundaries that define collective identity. Borders and boundaries are human artifacts. They are not the creatures of nature and do not stem from the natural world. They are the consequence of political history. Nation-states emerge from this history. Each nation-state possesses its own sets

Key Concepts

Political Culture

Political culture refers to the ideas, beliefs, values, traditions, and practices that provide the foundation for a political system. All culture is constructed rather than the product of nature or predestination. It is the product of history, contingency, environment, and other variables that interact to frame social, political, and economic attachments. For this reason, every country or state in the international system has its own unique political culture. States vary widely in terms of leadership, representation, civil and human rights, taxation, entitlements, and rule of law. Even countries in the same region will often have dramatically different political structures and values. For example, democratic ideals developed differently in England, where a strong nobility limited the powers of the monarch, from how they did in France, where the absolute monarch was overthrown by a middle-class revolution.

However, over the past three hundred years the international system has developed its own political culture, one that is defined by states, nations, sovereignty, nonintervention, legitimacy, citizenship, and self-determination. These constructions emerged in Europe in the aftermath of the Second Agricultural Revolution and were refined over centuries of revolution, warfare, and diplomacy. They were then exported globally through colonialism, first to the New World and then to Africa and Asia. Today, they are the foundational institutions of international relations. However, as we will see, the imposition of these modern values on cultures beholden to traditional communal values has created challenges for international order that have often resulted in political oppression, instability, and violence.

In recent decades multiculturalism has become an important political value in the international system. As a nation of immigrants, the United States has struggled to create a multicultural society throughout its history. It has tackled slavery, ethnic cleansing, structural discrimination, class bias, as well as gender and income inequality. Various forms of inequality persist in contemporary American society. Many European countries are today confronting multicultural pressures in unique ways. Great Britain, for example, has experienced a large influx of Indian and Pakistani immigrants in recent decades. These immigrant populations have brought ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity to British society as well as political challenges associated with assimilation and coexistence. Similarly, French society has experienced large-scale immigration from its former colonies in North Africa consisting predominantly of Muslim and Arabic-speaking persons, and thus it has struggled to accommodate cultural and religious differences. In 2010, for example, France passed a law that banned face-covering headwear in public areas. This prohibition extended to traditional Muslim veils such as the niqab and burqa. This has been a controversial policy as it appears to limit religious expression among devout Muslim women in France. But its legal validity was confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights in 2014 on the grounds that a person’s complete social presence constituted a human right that would be violated if females were to cover their full face in society. European societies thus struggle to define appropriate balances between their own cultural ways of life and immigrant traditions and values as they attempt to incorporate increasingly diverse populations into historically homogenous societies. As a result, they are challenged to create new political cultures that emphasize multicultural toleration, acceptance, and support alongside national cohesion.

of narratives and nurtures its own collective stories that indicate the ways of self-understanding within each political culture.

Political geography imposed on the topologies of the earth reveals the contemporary universalization of one particular political form: the nation-state. The globe is demarcated by nation-states across the entire globe. This is the outcome of political history and reflects the consequences of political culture over many centuries. The study of political culture refers to the examination of cultures and cultural values, meanings, and institutions focused on governance and its legitimacy. Analysis of the political culture of nation-states concentrates on what such terms as nations, states, and nation-states mean conceptually from the perspective of cultural values and meanings. To speak of political culture in the making of modern nation-states is to suggest that particular values and meanings arise during the historical development of political culture that make nation-states as a kind of governance even possible.

We ask, therefore, what nation-states are and what they signify in terms of political culture. Not all nation-states share the same forms of political culture. We must review contrasts as well as similarities. Certain political cultures, for example, are more homogenous than others while some suffer from a range of cultural conflicts and debates over the nature of collective identity and state legitimacy. All nation-states seek recognition of their legitimacy in two ways: first, internally relative to governing domestic society; second, internationally in terms of their rights to act as a sovereign agent among other sovereign entities in the international society of sovereign nation-states. Sovereignty does not guarantee full and complete autonomy for each and every nation-state. It is a doctrine of international law that attests to the primacy of nation-states as the legitimate form of governance within the international scapes of political interaction. Sovereignty also supports the primacy of domestic legitimacy that derives from the people of each nation-state in terms of popular consent. Popular consent as a doctrine does not mean that each and every nation-state is governed according to the principles of democracy any more than sovereignty at the international level means that each and every nation-state enjoys full autonomy among other nation-states. It does, however, underscore the fundamental role played by citizens conceived as a single population that inhabits the territory of a sovereign state, a population that in so doing constitutes a nation empowered with the rights and obligations exerted through popular consent. This further underscores the importance of political culture in the making of modern nation-states. For the very concept of popular consent, along with such notions as sovereignty and legitimacy, is essentially a form of political culture that has universal meaning and relevance but that emerges differently in different places at different times.

Traditional perspectives on sovereign states hold to the view that states are centralized political entities, governed by an administrative apparatus and bounded by territory, that enjoy a monopoly over the means of violence and are thus responsible for their own survival among all other states. Often it is theoretically alleged that such states are trapped by a security predicament: each must prepare for its own defense and survival; the more each does so, the less each feels secure. Since all states are responsible for their own military preparedness, no state is able to depend entirely on others for their safety. Providential reasoning and prudential judgment call forth a specific kind of rationality or set of rational calculations. As a result, each nation-state acts as a sovereign rational agent among other sovereign rational agents in the name of self-preservation, however defined. The question of legitimacy becomes all the more important as a result. What authorizes or justifies sovereign state action to engage in preparedness for purposes of security and survival? What legitimates state behaviors based on sovereign rational agency if this implies the ever-present possibilities of war and political violence? The immediate answer to questions pertaining to legitimacy is popular consent. Popular consent permits military preparedness in response to the security predicament. But where is popular consent vested? The answer refers back to the citizenry or population of a state that manifests the political culture of peoplehood and/or nationhood.

Peoplehood represents a cultural kind of belonging in which a population, large or small, recognizes among themselves special features that they share collectively and that render them a singular formation with a unique set of bonds, whether material or metaphysical. If we speak of “the Arabs” or “the Jewish people,” we speak of the bonds that tie a people together on the basis of a common language, religion, characteristic, cultural condition, or social circumstance. Nationhood addresses a political and cultural reality relative to mostly centralized and sovereign states. We speak of “the Palestinians” as a people who make claims for the rights to citizenship and bounded statehood, and we speak of “the Israelis,” whether Jews or Arabs or those who were formerly Ethiopian, precisely because they enjoy such rights as citizens of the State of Israel.

The historic rise of nations relative to sovereign states is linked to the history of state conflict and the perceived need for centralizing political actors such as classical kings to extract wealth and to place forces under arms for purposes of defense, security, and even, in the course of history, to arm for ostensible reasons that justify acts of aggression against other states and their rulers. As classical kings extracted more and more, especially in the course of European history, the issue of legitimacy arose with greater and greater urgency. The result was a series of extraction crises such as the American War of Independence and the Boston Tea Party, which resounded with the slogan “No taxation without representation.” In similar fashion, the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia contested the rights of rulers to tax and to conscript citizens for purposes of war and military preparedness in the absence of popular consent. Modern political cultures of nations and of nationhood grow out of these episodes of contestation.

Nationhood is a concept of political culture that refers to a kind of people-hood of those governed by centralized sovereign states but who, as a nation, by definition represent or exercise popular consent with respect to state extraction. The term nationhood is thus rooted in notions of legitimacy. Nationhood as a political-cultural concept refers to a specific common feature of peoplehood, that is, exertion of the legitimacy of sovereign state governance relative to extraction. The “nation” as a concept of political culture speaks to the political values of legitimacy and even accountability with respect to government extraction. Extracting men and women under arms and ordering them into harm’s way are state prerogatives that must be legitimated. So too is the extraction of economic wealth from citizens for state objectives. Here again, no concept, however ideal, is meant to imply perfect applications. The existence of nationhood relative to statehood and state extraction does not suggest that legitimacy functions perfectly everywhere and for all time. On the contrary, even democracies on occasion face legitimation crises, as did the United States during the era of the Vietnam War and interventions in Indochina when a sizable number of draft-eligible youth, including future president Bill Clinton, burned their draft cards and/or moved to Canada to avoid arrest. Nonetheless, nationhood (bottom-up) and centralized sovereign statehood (top-down) represent the two essential valences or value-sets in interpreting the political culture of nation-states today.

Sovereignty thus represents a conceptual kind of political-cultural glue binding statehood and nationhood together. The making of the nation-state as a political-cultural artifact is the consequence of history in wh...