Nation-States

Consciousness and Competition

Neil Davidson

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781608465699
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Politik

In his latest collection of essays, Neil Davidson brings his formidable analytical powers to bear on the concept of the capitalist nation-state. Through probing inquiry, Davidson draws out how nationalist ideology and consciousness is used to bind the subordinate classes to "the nation, " while simultaneously using "the state" as a means of conducting geopolitical competition for capital.

Chapter 1

The Trouble with “Ethnicity”*

Introduction

The concept of exploitation is central to the Marxist understanding of history and contemporary society. But not all social conflicts can be immediately reduced to the struggle between exploiters and exploited, and to explain these conflicts we require other concepts. The most important is that of “oppression.” This refers to systematic discrimination by one social group against another on the grounds of characteristics either inherited (skin color, biological sex) or socially acquired (religious belief, language). The experience of oppression cuts across class lines, although that experience is more or less severe depending on where its victims are placed within the class structure. Some forms, like the oppression of women, have persisted throughout the existence of class society, while others, like racism, are specific to capitalism. Sometimes the reasons, or pretexts, for the oppression of a group may change over time. During the feudal era, for example, Jewish people were persecuted for their religious beliefs, but as capitalism developed this persecution increasingly focused on their supposed race. Whatever the reason or pretext, however, ruling classes throughout history have instigated or endorsed the oppression of different groups in order to maintain or create divisions among those over whom they rule. Recently, groups have increasingly been subjected to oppression on the grounds of their ethnicity. The most extreme form of such oppression has become known as “ethnic cleansing.”

The term “ethnic cleansing” is an English translation of the Serbo-Croatian phrase etni´cko ´ciš´cenje. It was first used in Yugoslavia, not in the conflicts that erupted after the end of the Cold War but by the Croatian Ustaše during the Second World War, to describe the policy of killing or expelling Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and Muslims from the Fascist state the Ustaše briefly set up with Nazi support. The first use during the current events was by the Croatian Supreme Council of the Judiciary in 1991, after the Croatian declaration of independence from Yugoslavia, to describe the actions of Serb guerrillas who were attempting to drive Croatians out of areas where Serbs were in the majority: “the aim of this expulsion is obviously the ethnic cleansing of the critical areas . . . [to] be annexed to Serbia.”1 The phrase only began to appear in the British press and thereafter in popular usage during the war that began in Bosnia-Herzegovina the following year, when Bosnian Serb forces, initially backed by the Miloševi´c regime in Belgrade, started expelling Muslims and Croats from those parts of the state territory that the former considered to be Serbian. The first area to be “cleansed” in this way seems to have been the Croat village of Kijevo in the otherwise Serb-dominated province of Krajina, during August 1991.2 Since then the term has been used to describe not just events in former Yugoslavia (where all sides became involved in the practice to some extent) but also similar—and in some cases even worse—occurrences distant in space and time. On the one hand, the term was being extended spatially to events such as the massacres in Rwanda during 1994, which took place in societies geographically distant from Yugoslavia and quite different in terms of their historical development. On the other hand, the term was also extended chronologically back to events such as the expulsion and killing of Armenians by Turks at the end of the First World War, which were historically distant and had not previously been discussed in these terms.3

“Ethnic cleansing” presupposes the existence of different ethnic groups. The majority of people who opposed the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia also opposed the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovar Albanians that NATO used to justify it, arguing that bombing not only intensified the hatreds that made ethnic cleansing possible but also made it easier to carry out, by forcing the removal of the international monitors who had provided some check on the Serb paramilitaries. Nevertheless, opponents tended to share with supporters of the war—and indeed with the people carrying out the “ethnic cleansing”—the view that there were genuine ethnic differences between groups in former Yugoslavia. From this perspective, while ethnic differences such as those between the Serbs and the Kosovar Albanians should occasion mutual respect rather than oppression, the differences themselves cannot and should not be denied. This position is inadequate, and I want to argue instead that we need to go beyond opposition to “ethnic cleansing”—which of course means all “ethnic cleansing,” not only that of the Kosovar Albanians—and question the validity of the term “ethnicity” itself.

Since the argument that follows may be liable to misrepresentation, I should perhaps make one central point clear from the start. Ethnicity is often equated with culture, most frequently with that of minority populations in Western Europe and North America, or with non-Western cultures more generally. (Older readers may remember a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Guatemalan pottery or Afghan textiles were regularly described as “ethnic” when being marketed in Britain, as if “ethnicity” were some special property they possessed.) I am not arguing against cultural diversity, still less suggesting that socialists should abandon their duty to defend people whose culture is under threat or who are suffering from any of the other forms of oppression outlined above. Lenin pointed out the necessity for socialists to be “tribunes of the people” nearly a hundred years ago, in words that still retain their relevance: “Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected—unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic [i.e., revolutionary socialist] point of view and no other.”4 For socialists, therefore, it makes no difference whether particular groups of people are oppressed because of their language, religion, nationhood, or ethnicity; in each case our duty is to defend the oppressed and show solidarity with them, particularly where socialists themselves belong to the dominant linguistic, religious, national, or—assuming for the moment that such a thing exists—ethnic group.

My point is rather that the way in which the notion of “ethnicity” is currently and increasingly being used contains a number of problems for the left. Two stand out in particular. On the one hand, those who approve of ethnicity as the affirmation of a cultural identity, insofar as they emphasize supposedly innate differences between human social groups, are in danger of lending credibility to the current form taken by racist ideology. On the other hand, those who disapprove of ethnicity as a manifestation of (real or imagined) exclusionist tribalism are in danger, insofar as they suggest that “ethnic” nationalisms are particularly prone to oppressive behavior, of obscuring those characteristics that all nationalisms have in common, whether they are oppressor or oppressed or fall into neither of these categories. Our first task is therefore to distinguish among the various ways in which the term “ethnicity” has been used and to assess their respective validity.

Kinship, occupation, and identity

“Ethnicity” has been defined in three ways: first, where members of a group have a common line of descent and consequently a shared kinship; second, where they have a common position within the international division of labor and consequently a shared occupation; and third, where they have one or more cultural attributes in common and consequently a shared identity. The first and second reasons assume that ethnicity can be defined objectively, the third that it can be defined subjectively. As we shall see, it is the subjective definition that is currently dominant.

Kinship

Social groups who share a common line of descent, or groups whose members interbreed exclusively with each other, thus maintaining the same genetic inheritance, are usually referred to in anthropology as endogamous groups. Such groups would have been universal at the origins of human evolution but are, however, virtually impossible to find today. Indeed, recent archaeological and anthropological work suggests that mass human migration—often across entire continents—occurred much earlier in history than was previously believed, and resulted in the erosion of endogamy within the original tribal societies. One writer notes that, as a result of these factors, “the common ancestry of ‘the people’ was always partially fictive” within tribal society.5 But once we move onto the terrain of recorded history, the multiple genetic inheritance of the global population is indisputable—a fact that also makes the existence of different “races” a fiction impossible to sustain. Susan Reynolds has rightly criticized the tendency of medieval historians to describe the barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire as biologically distinct “tribal” entities, based merely on the continued use of their original group names. “This must be wrong,” she points out. “Once barbarians had been converted to orthodox Christianity and prohibitions on intermarriage had been lifted, it must have been hard to distinguish them from ‘Romans’ who were already mixed genetically and were increasingly barbarized culturally.”6

The main constituent nations of Britain are a case in point. Early in the eighteenth century Daniel Defoe mocked the pretensions of his countrymen to ethnic purity in his satirical poem “The True-Born Englishman”:

In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,

Between a painted Briton and a Scot.

Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,

And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:

From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,

With neither name nor nation, speech nor fame.

In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,

Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.

While their rank daughters, to their parents just,

Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.

This nauseous brood directly did contain

The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.

As Linda Colley, who quotes this passage, comments: “Defoe’s uncompromising insistence on the ethnic diversity of England, its early exposure to successive invasions from Continental Europe, and the constant intermingling of its people with the Welsh and Scots, was fully justified in historical terms.”7 Similar intermingling took place in Scotland during the “Dark Ages” between 400 and 1057. “The period has, with justice, been called ‘an age of migrations,’” writes Michael Lynch, “when the different tribal peoples—Picts, Scots, Angles, Britons and Scandinavians—who inhabited the mainland of modern-day Scotland moved, fought, displaced and intermarried with each other.”8 And to these, of course, could be added the Norman English who were invited to settle in Scotland during the reign of David I (1124–53), and who were themselves descended from Viking settlers in part of what is now France.

In an extreme case like that of the native Australians it might be supposed that endogamy was maintained until the arrival of the European colonists, but in fact they too had interbred with Papuan and Polynesian immigrants many centuries before the Dutch or the British set foot on their continent.9 As the late Eric Wolf wrote of the ethnic composition of the world in 1400: “If there were any isolated societies these were but temporary phenomena—a group pushed to the edge of a zone of interaction and left to itself for a brief moment in time.”10 In short, even before capitalism had penetrated all corners of the world in the search for markets and raw materials, the growth of trade, conquest, and migration had already made the existence of endogamous gene pools increasingly rare. Of course, this does not mean that various groups have not claimed, and in some cases perhaps even believed, that they were descended from the pure stock of some ancestral group, but it is important to understand that these claims and beliefs are based on a myth of kinship, not a reality.

Occupation

Like the modern notion of “race,” the origins of the occupational definition of ethnicity lie in the colonial expansion of capitalism outside of its European heartlands. From the origins of systematic racial slavery in the sixteenth century, “race” has been a general term used to override differences among peoples by categorizing them on the basis of physical characteristics, of which skin color was the most important. (As we shall see below, the racisms directed against the Catholic Irish and, by extension, the Highland Scots were exceptions in that they were based on religion and language rather than physical appearance.)11 There were massive differences in social development between the Shona-speaking peoples of southern Africa, who built and lived in the stone city of Great Zimbabwe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the hunter-gatherers who inhabited Australia at the same time. Yet to ideologists of “race” they were both indistinguishably “black.” At first, during the process of primitive accumulation, racism was used to justify the assignment of specific roles within the system (for instance the role of slave), but later on it was used to consign members of “races” who had migrated to the metropolitan centers either to the reserve army of labor or to the group of workers with the worst pay and conditions in the labor force.

“Ethnicity,” on the other hand, was a term designed to distinguish between groups within overall “racial” categories, in those sections of the labor market in which they had established themselves. The capitalist mode of production requires the subordination of labor to capital, but in the European colonies it also required that the labor force be internally divided. As Wolf notes, the allocation of workers to invented ethnic categories is doubly effective in this respect, first “by ordering the groups and categories of laborers hierarchically with respect to one another” and second “by continuously producing and re-creating symbolically marked ‘cultural’ distinctions among them.” On the one hand, groups were allocated specific roles both within the production process and in social life more generally. On the other hand, they were encouraged to identify with these roles and to defend them against other groups. Wolf is therefore right to say that these ethnic identities are not “‘primordial’ social relationships,” but “historical products of labor market segmentation under the capitalist mode [of production].”12 Sometimes the identities built on the existing division of labor in precolonial society; sometimes they were wholly new and based on the division of labor within the new industries that the colonists established.

In Rwanda and Burundi before colonization there were three distinct groups—Hutus, Tutsis, and Twas, with the former two ...