National Identity and State Formation in Africa

Manuel Castells, Bernard Lategan, Manuel Castells, Bernard Lategan

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509545612, 9781509545605
• eBook ISBN: 9781509546329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines how the interplay between globalization and the assertion of local identities is reshaping the political landscape of Africa. While defending their values against external forces, people simultaneously – and paradoxically – use the interconnectivity of global networks to maximize their particular interests. Focusing on the relation between national identity and state formation, the authors explore the far-reaching consequences of these contradictory dynamics. Although Africa shares many common trends with other parts of the world, it also displays distinctive features. A region characterized by the increased mobility of people, goods and ideas challenges some conventional assumptions of statecraft and also highlights the advantages of federalism – not merely as a constitutional option, but as a pragmatic device for managing diversity and holding fragile states together. The book further explores emerging types of state formation in the same political space, as exemplified by the combination of elements of a kingdom, an independent state and a national power base in the province of KwaZulu-Natal and the careful crafting of an alternative state within a state by the Solidarity Movement in South Africa. Informed by examples and case studies drawn from different parts of Africa, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Africa, politics, sociology, media studies and the social sciences more generally.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Identity, Networks and State Formation in Africa

Manuel Castells and Bernard Lategan

The contradictory dynamics reshaping our world in the twenty-first century are characterized by the relationship between globalization and identity. On the one hand, the core activities that define the economy, technology and geopolitical power are organized around a global network of glocal networks. This is the case for financial markets, international trade, multinational manufacturing, advanced business services, research and technology, military strategies, media production and distribution, and internet communication. On the other hand, historically rooted cultural identities, at the source of the creation of meaning, are stronger than ever everywhere, as a counterpart to the global flows of capital and communication that attempt to overwhelm the specificity of every human community, to merge them in a global culture that ultimately rationalizes the domination of certain values, multinational economic actors and political institutions in an interconnecting network of local and global hierarchies. To no avail. Deprived of their ability to exercise control over global forces, people around the world retreat into their own values, asserting their identity and using whatever means available to them to claim their autonomy vis-à-vis global networks that embody domination under the cover of instrumentality. In doing so, they are also mobilizing their energies to maximize their interest in the interconnecting global and local hierarchies in which they find themselves.

The world in the twenty-first century is dominated by conflicts of identity: religious, national, territorial, racial, ethnic, age, gender, ideological and otherwise. The failure to recognize the essential role of identity in structuring social life creates a key epistemological obstacle to understanding our world. The ideology of the Enlightenment (which recognizes identity only in the categorization of its opposites) that refuses to see identity as the source of self-definition, in favour of the abstract construction of the citizen, defined by the state, leads to intellectual dead ends. Even if we do not like the primacy of identity, we must acknowledge and deal with it as social scientists and philosophers.

This fundamental development can be observed everywhere, not just in the previously dominated/colonized areas of the world, but also in the United States and in Europe. The American nationalist movement, built around Trump, or the mobilization for Brexit in the UK, are clear expressions of the power of identity – a trend that often leads to xenophobia.

Sources of collective identity (always a cultural construction) are diverse. One of the most significant in the socio-political evolution of our societies is national identity. National identity is the set of interrelated cultural attributes that provide meaning and self-recognition to a collective of humans that define themselves as a national community. The term ‘national’ specifies the aspiration of this community to be acknowledged as a distinct social group that transcends primary ascription attributes, such as ethnic or territorial, and to emphasize their shared experience over time and space. It is suggestive of a congruence between polity and culture. Fundamentally, nations are cultural communities, but they are not ‘imagined’; they are constructed with the materials of history and geography.

Nations must be clearly distinguished, conceptually and practically, from states, because states are political-institutional constructions, sometimes derived from a pre-existing nation, but more often resulting from the integration/annexation of several nations, that are fused, through political domination, into a given state. In fact, the nation-state of the modern era is an exception in the high diversity of institutional constructions resulting from the interaction between nations and states, from city states to imperial states, and from communal institutions to tribal confederations. The multicultural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual composition of many (if not the majority of; cf. Welsh 1993) states gave rise to the idea of ‘multinational states’ (cf. Peleg 2007; Kraus 2008).

Moreover, when a nation-state is constituted, it defines a new identity: citizenship as established by the state. Citizenship tends to reflect the cultural identity of the nation that prevailed in the construction of the state, although in some cases, the project of state formation may include the negotiated recognition of pluri-national states – always a fragile construction because it does not necessarily respect equal access to the resources of the state. This is where federalism becomes a critical intermediate institution between the state and the nation. In some situations (South Africa is one example), despite the formal structure of a unitary state, many ethnic groups would rather understand and speak of themselves as nations. This is especially the case in previously colonized countries who see themselves obliged to operate under the label of modern nation-states, post-colonialism.

The existence of nations without states is widely acknowledged as a result of the diversity of the historical process. The most often cited examples are Scotland, Wales, Quebec, Catalonia, Euskadi, Kurdistan, Palestine (still without a state), Tibet and multiple quasi-national communities still entangled in struggles, violent or not, in their aspiration to statehood. The boundaries between nationhood and statehood are fluid and often change over time. Moreover, nations tend to persevere longer than states, the most important examples being the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The role of identity in both founding and dissolving the institutions of the state can be better understood by differentiating three major types of national identities: resistance identity, legitimizing identity and project identity.

Resistance identity occurs when a materially produced, culturally experienced collective identity is not recognized in the institutions of the state, when states are formed on different constellations of culture and power. Then, social movements and political projects emerge in what could be a protracted confrontation that results in a new institutional system. However, when the force of the existing states prevails, resistance identity becomes the source of multiple forms of negation of the dominant state institutions, sometimes for centuries. Pluri-national states based on consensus (such as Switzerland or Canada) become stable institutions that weave a new political actor by sharing in the construction of meaning. States that include various nations without recognition of national rights are periodically torn by confrontations, often intensified by ethnic or religious conflicts.

Legitimizing identity is the collective identity produced by the state on the basis of a period of sharing the building of common institutions, usually under the predominance of one particular identity, and a given set of interests. Most of the nation-states created in the last three centuries follow this pattern, so that national identities are constructed by the state, with the education system being primordial in this construction. The school of the French Third Republic epitomizes this cultural hegemonic development.

Project identity is the collective identity defined by a process of becoming rather than that of being. It is the national or pluri-national community that people would like to be, not as the expression of a pre-existing cultural community but as the will of discovering new institutional forms on the basis of a set of values in the making. The project of the European Union would qualify as a national identity project. The United States of America was also built on the quest for a common goal – not without conflicts, as manifested by the atrocious civil war fought not only due to economic interests but also to the divergent fundamental values of the two national identity projects that clashed on the battlefield.

The nature of this relationship between nations and states is variegated. The nation-state, historically produced by the formation of states as an expression of cultural identities that became national by becoming embedded in the state, is under stress in our time because of the use of the state by globalizing forces, to enhance their power and interests, in increasing conflict with the identity and interests rooted in the national community. The opposition between globalizers and nationals, between cosmopolitans and locals, is evident everywhere. Ultimately these trends lead to the separation between the nation and the state in the course of history.

It would seem paradoxical that at the time of universal globalization, and networking of states, the old issues of nationalism and nationalistic politics have emerged at the forefront of current affairs. In fact, it is precisely because of the political projects aiming at superseding the largely obsolete sovereign nation-states that national cultural constructions emerge as a powerful alternative to the dissolution of meaning in instrumental networks of power without identity roots. ‘Citizens of the world’ is only fitting for the masters of the world, that is the financial, technological and cultural powers that do not need cultural roots to assert their power.

However, we want to focus this major issue on the interplay between nations, states and nation-states in Africa, a continent in which the identities of colonizers and colonized have been woven for centuries without necessarily finding a stable institutional construction that could reflect this human diversity. Africa is characterized by high levels of diversity related to a range of issues like race, ethnicity, language, culture, history, territory, colonialism, power struggles and wars. Congruence between the political and national as envisaged by Gellner (1983: 1) is therefore the exception rather than the rule. Accordingly, the need for nation-building (in the sense of making the boundaries of the state and the nation coincide; cf. Mylonas 2017: xx) and ways to achieve this are pervasive themes and a priority on many a national agenda.

While countries in Africa share many of the characteristics and trends to be found in other parts of the world, there are also specific features which shaped their histories and influenced their constitutional and statehood options. An important factor is that the process moved through different constellations of power and a variety of governing traditions, spanning many centuries and covering pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial phases. The result is a kaleidoscope of experiences, legacies and attitudes, which still influences contemporary developments, and which requires a long durée perspective (Braudel 1958; Erk 2018) in order to make sense of a complex and multi-faceted history.

Despite this diversity on the level of individual states, there are some common, meta-level forces that shape the interplay between global networks and local responses in a less visible way. In his contribution, Francis Nyamnjoh highlights the importance of mobility which characterizes both global forces and local responses. He reaches into the ‘deep past’ before the advent of modern tools of communication and of containing human mobility to remind us of the ‘primordial’ forms of border crossing when waves of migration moved out of Africa. But the ‘nimble-footedness’ does not pertain to humans alone – it is equally true of things and ideas.

Nyamnjoh links the ancient past to present-day protest movements via the intermediate figure of Cecil John Rhodes. This dominant nineteenth-century personage embodies in one person the contradictory roles of imperialist and makwerekwere/Uitlander, of outsider and insider, of settler and native, thereby illustrating the interchangeability of these positions, but also the underlying ability of mobility which they all share. What was not interchangeable for Rhodes was his whiteness and his superiority, something that resonates with present-day populism across Europe and in the United States under President Donald Trump.

At the same time, mobility is ambiguous. It can imply freedom of movement and thought, but it can also be used to invade, conquer and possess. It fuels social mobility – either ‘upwards’ into the middle class or as ‘whitening up’, or to retreat into right-wing movements or fundamentalism of all kinds.

But mobility is not restricted to movement within existing social categories or frameworks. For Nyamnjoh its real significance lies in its ability to cross borders and to rupture the restrictive frameworks of the status quo – be it the frameworks of identities or of state formations. Nonetheless, rupture is not a goal in itself, but rather the first step towards repair. Hence his plea for conviviality as a necessary precondition for the processes of social renewal, reconstruction and regeneration – and even for a new kind of scholarship for African universities.

Finally, what kind of African citizenship is emerging out of the present turmoil on the continent? Against the background of these ‘visible and invisible mobilities’, Nyamnjoh (p. 11 below) pursues specific questions:

How do ideas and practices of mobility evolve, in a world of border protections and exclusionary practices? How do convivial forms of interaction counter such trends? How do they bond fictional insiders and perceived outsiders? How are race, citizenship and belonging constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed across the fluid yet sometimes oppressive frontiers that link ‘nation-states’? What can we all learn from the twenty-first-century nimble-footedness of humans, things and ideas? How do students of society make scholarship more convivial by factoring in human mobility as the norm in being human? How do ethnographers such as myself and my students (and some of you) decolonize the alienating tendencies that lead to the objectification of the people with whom we study by denying them the very essence of being – mobility?

Nyamnjoh’s analysis provides the framework for the subsequent chapters, arranged in two parts: The first (chapters 3–6) focuses on more ‘conventional’ strategies and responses to the aspirations of national identities, such as attempts at federalism, secession or accommodation within a unitary state. These case studies are drawn from across a geographical and political multiplicity of contexts including Nigeria, the Cameroons, Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. To maximize the comparative potential of this collection, the second part (chapters 7–10) then inverts this analytical logic to focus on new emerging articulations and ‘unconventional’ strategies within the same geopolitical space, namely the Republic of South Africa. Finally, a concluding chapter offers a number of metatheoretical and normative conclusions.

Eghosa Osaghae evaluates federalism as a strategy to deal with diversity in situations where identity and citizenship is constructed and deconstructed within and across state frontiers – frontiers which in many cases are imposed and artificially devised to create ‘nation-states’. He makes the case that federalism has been far more influential with regard to political developments than the literature suggests. By narrowing federalism to the operation of federal constitutions, the propensities, variety, experience and utility of federalism as a general approach are often disregarded. Osaghae argues that Africa needs more, not less, federalism if it is understood as a heuristic and pragmatic device for managing diversity and holding fragile states together. In contrast to other traditions of federalism, it is largely of a sociological nature in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Identity, Networks and State Formation in Africa
• 2 Mobility, Globalization and the Policing of Citizenship and Belonging in the Twenty-first Century
• 3 Federalism in Africa
• 4 National Identity and State Formation: The Case of the Former UN Trust Territory of the British Southern Cameroons
• 5 The Secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia: A Historical Profile
• 6 National Identity of Sudan and the Emergence of South Sudan
• 7 A New Kind of State for the Nation? Civil Society Mobilization and White Minority Identity Politics in Post-apartheid South Africa
• 8 Reimagining the Sporting Nation: Negotiating Identity and Globalization Amongst ‘Coloured’ Supporters of the New Zealand Rugby Team
• 9 The Persistence of Ethnic Identities in KwaZulu-Natal
• 10 Identity-based Conflict in KwaZulu-Natal: Current State and Future Prospects
• 11 Rethinking Mobility, States, Borders and Identity
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement