Global Matrix

Nationalism, Globalism and State-Terrorism

Tom Nairn, Paul James

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780745322902
• eBook ISBN: 9781783719099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Globalization has brought with it many difficult and contradictory phenomena: violence, deep national insecurities, religious divisions and individual insecurities. This book takes a critical look at three key areas - globalism, nationalism, and state-terror - to confront common mythologies and identify the root causes of the problems we face. Too many commentators still argue that globalization is predominantly a neo-liberal economic phenomenon; that nation-states are on the way out, and that terror is something that primarily comes from below. Global Matrix exposes the limitations of this argument. Written by two leading scholars, this is a lucid study of what place the nation-state has in a globalizing world that will appeal to students across the political and social sciences.

1

Introduction: Mapping Nationalism and Globalism

Tom Nairn and Paul James

Most commentators, scholars and journalists suggest that the dominance of one age (or epoch, or time, or whatever) ended in the 15 years between the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the present. There are already so many expressions of this that even to list them would be hard; but to help locate the ideas in the present volume, some examples may be useful. Historian John Lukacs’ The End of an Age argues that a 500-year ‘modern’ period is ending, after being originally voiced by the ‘confused excrescences’ of postmodernism, and will be replaced by what some readers must have found even more confusing: an odd mixture of theoretical physics and rekindled Christianity.¹ William H. McNeill and his son J.R. McNeill have followed with a general reinterpretation of history founded upon ‘the notion of the centrality of webs of interaction in human history’. Their title The Human Web voices this contemporary insight, deriving of course from the impact of the communications revolution, the internet and a world in which ‘peasant patterns of life and labor are in full retreat’.² They perceive us as being on ‘the crest of a global breaking wave’ that will either make or demolish the human species. The McNeills replace Lukacs’ preoccupation with physics by an analogous focus upon biology and the biosphere, as if post-1989 globalization may be responding to the pressures of a deeper ‘symbiosis’. The third, still more recent, reinterpretation of the historical process is that of anthropologist Emmanuel Todd: his Après l’Empire is a fiery polemic, founded on a primarily anthropological retrospect.³ Todd denounces US leadership since 2001 as a futile, self-destructive attempt to recover the lost hegemony of pre-1989 – to arrest the reality of globalization in its tracks, and avoid its spreading into the wider delta of an uncontrollable, multipolar diversity where no single state or culture can hope to be in command. Here, physics and biology give way to a speculative anthropology, grounded on Todd’s previous demographic studies. The most important was La Diversité du Monde: Structures Familiales et Modernité, an argument that humankind’s socio-cultural variation is determined by an inherited diversity of familial types and (hence) of intimate relationships and emotive dispositions. These may be ‘memes’ rather than genes, but the point is that such diversity is of the human-social essence, not just a series of contingent accidents. The implication is then that the truly ‘global’ must be the affirmation of such diversity, not its ‘overcoming’ or suppression.

The studies gathered together in the present volume have a different emphasis again, perhaps closer to Todd than to Lukacs or the McNeills, but also unconvinced by the anthropological determinism of his underlying philosophy. It is true that the dominance of one ‘matrix’ of development is receding, and that the events of 2001 to 2004 have dealt it a shattering blow. It also seems apparent that another matrix is in formation, overlaying older developments in contradictory ways – the first comprehensive ‘global’ matrix, as our title suggests. However, our own emphasis is upon a cultural-political theme, which at the same time embraces a variety of other factors – ecological, anthropological, and the condition of being human – and seeks to link them together. This is an ‘ecumenical’ approach: in other words, closer to the overview given by Manfred Steger in his Globalism: The New Market Ideology, and sharing his insistence there is nothing inevitable or ‘irreversible’ about market ascendancy and deregulation.⁴ This counter-view is forced upon us, rather than being just a bland choice. We have also been influenced by cautious distrust of all the single-issue or portmanteau explanations that have crowded the shop-front of theory since the 1990s. There undoubtedly is an emergent global matrix; but it calls for detective work and some house-to-house enquiries, rather than (as British tabloids love to say) a ‘swoop’ upon the presumed guilty party. A case has to be patiently built up, beyond premature rushes to judgement.

One feature of this deeper alteration in course is – and ought to be – a profound and long-running reaction against those shadows from which the globe began to free itself, when the Cold War at last ended. Masterful yet phoney monotheism dominated that shadow-world. We faced a supposed choice between command-economy socialism and liberal-capitalism. The choice of worlds had narrowed down, from the competitive spectrum of former would-be empires to a basic ‘either–or’. Only two of Goya’s ‘Giants’ were left, as it were, capable of devouring (and indeed destroying) everything and everyone else.⁵ These Giants, it went without saying, were capable of explaining everything, in one or other omnivorous, all-encompassing fashion. The ‘-isms’ of such a world were apologies for claimed omnipotence: fantasies extolling a brute authority which (fortunately) no actual modern empire has ever had.

Now, even that claim has foundered: this is part of what globalization is about. However, ideological authoritarianism did not vanish in 1989–90, alongside the ex-Communist imperium. The inherited memes of gigantism persist, and indeed still demand that humankind acknowledge the dominance of the one ‘-ism’ that remains – as if, deprived of Colossi, the species might indeed turn into the scared, fleeing rabble in Goya’s picture. In fact (as Todd shows), this is a Giant with no clothes, dependent upon a mixture of craven self-subjection by inherited satrapies, grossly exaggerated military threats, and an almost equally exaggerated economic credo – the secular religion of neo-liberalism. The truth, or rather our political hope, is that ‘globalization’ must lead in the overall direction of a Giant-less world. It will not lead (naturally) to a globe without large states or nations, or without uneven economic development, or social conflicts, but at least it presumes one where it becomes increasingly difficult to naturalize such inequities and sustain the constant deferral of legal/ideal senses of recognition and human status. Though foreshadowed in the formal structure of the United Nations organization, whose General Assembly ranks Andorra alongside China, this equality stood little real chance in a world of Giant contests. But in a post-Giant world, ought there not to be some possibility of reality growth?

We have assumed that clearing the way towards such a big shift calls for clearing the way for a different theoretical approach. Global Matrix doesn’t offer still another key to the universe. Our assumption is that while ‘keys’ are not helpful, new lines of understanding are crucial, and can only be composed collectively over a period to come, by those who will be ‘natives’ of the globalized world – those who have been born into it and will take its deeper undertow and instincts for granted, as the present authors are unable to. We have been formed by the world of nationalism, and our way of contesting that age was (primarily) via theorizing about these older structures. Of course, such theorizing bears its marks of origin: in this case, the distant edge-lands of Scotland and Australia. Critics will not be slow to point these out, usually ignoring (or simply not perceiving) their own marks of descent as they do so. However, we can take some comfort here from what is actually a minor formative principle of globalism: in human discourse (unlike that of the Gods) the stigmata of contingent origin are universal, and, at a certain level, ineffaceable. Every theorist bears an axe to grind – social theory would not be any use if this were not so.

Two and a half centuries ago, David Hume made the same point in a book that fell stillborn from the press: ‘We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’⁶ As he goes on to explain, ‘passions’ are original existence, the drivers of society’s discourse and of the reason this requires. One crucial task for the latter is the recognition and delineation of its own limits. Rationalism is a systematic evasion of this – the promotion of reason into a religion, or substitute religion, a secular magic capable of making humanity’s crooked timbers all straight, preferably by this time next week. Globalization, by contrast, should encourage greater diffidence and uncertainty. This is why Global Matrix is also a founding member of the ‘crooked timbers’ club. Giants are not admitted, naturally; all ‘-isms’ must be consigned to the cloakroom upon entry; and the only members’ oath commits them to an anti-crusade against ‘fundamentalist’ delusions – religious and secular alike.

THE ‘-ISM’ OF NATIONS

The lineages of nationalism and globalism are messy and cross-cutting. Nationalism begins in the take-off period of modern imperial globalization with its proponents and critics alike looking forward to a new cosmopolitan and humanized world. ‘Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin, in order that a new invention may prevail over the works of God and the interests of mankind’, snarled the good traditionalist Lord Acton in 1862 in his essay ‘On Nationality’.⁷ However, contrary to a later received idea, the celebrated essay was not a denunciation of ‘nationalism’. The term does not appear there. What Acton attacked was ‘the nationality principle’ and ‘the theory of nationality’.

The ‘-ism’ arrived only later, after the War of Secession in America, and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe. Once this Pandora’s Box was opened, however, its contents proved to be all-conquering. By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was ready for it. All tongues adapted the concept from the original French, and it imbued the air we still breathe today. Like the concepts of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘globalization’ a century later, it not only caught on in the words we speak, but was also part of a swift transformation of the way that people think and feel. That transformation involved nothing less than a covenant with the grand narratives and practices of modernity. It was never totalizing, yet by the middle of the twentieth century no one was really outside it, and, despite decades of scholarly attention, even today nobody comfortably understands it.

Just as the power of nationalism remains something of a mystery, a new phenomenon is moving in to change the rules – globalism.⁸ From a term that almost nobody used until the 1980s, everybody has now discovered globalization. As we discuss in the first section of the book, across the turn of the twenty-first century, globalization is treated mythically as the latest thing, the all-encompassing process that itself explains all that happens on this planet. Overstatement remains a condition of our time. Alternatively, moving from the ridiculous to the sublimely stupid, some of its ideologues have just begun proclaiming its ‘true meaning’ as the natural condition of the planet, pushing globalization back to the beginning of time and naturalizing as if it has always been with us. Alan Shipman, the author of The Globalization Myth, begins his defence of globalization thus: ‘Life on planet earth was global from the outset, as one fragile lonely planet huddled for comfort against cold and empty space.’ The parochializing move to set up local boundaries ‘came later’, says our neo-liberal author in his Tower of Babel story – ‘after manners started to fragment over space, and memories over time. Many efforts have since been made to turn back the dispersing tide and restore our cross-border connections’, he says in right-wing cosmopolitan fashion.⁹

Like many other neo-liberal tracts The Globalization Myth treats the role of the nation-state either as part of the problem as it slides back to a parochializing past, or as part of the solution in which nations, like backward children, are called upon to work extra hard to transcend their own history, notably in the realm of the market. By contrast, this book treats nationalism and globalism much more ambiguously and ambivalently. As social phenomena, globalism and nationalism, at least in their modern expressions, are bound up with each other. As Steger points out in Globalism, our era of globalization has resemblances to the period from 1870 through to the First World War, though as yet (fortunately) without a prevailing philosophical narrative like Social Darwinism. New narratives remain to be thought out, in terms of a new dialectic of discontinuity and continuity. In their ethical implications both nationalism and globalism are Janus-faced. Whether they are good or bad, we argue, can only be understood in terms of how they come to be practised in the emergent conditions.

NATIONALISM IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

One layer of the reality is that nation-states and classical modern globalization grew up together across the course of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century – the latter was known as ‘imperialism’ and became the glorious mission of the former. It was the White Man’s Burden. The formation of political entities called ‘nation-states’ was framed by the globalizing industrial and commercial revolutions. There were of course nations before the affirmation of capitalism, but few were self-conscious or self-guided collectivities like those gathered into the modern nation-states of the late nineteenth century. The older terrestrial landscape was characterized by tribalism and clanship, despotic and multicultural empires, missionary faiths and trading city-states. When Isaac Newton formulated the law of gravity, much of the globe was still occupied by hunter-gatherers. Yet in an astonishingly short time, this elaborate magma was overlaid by today’s World Cup contest, consumer capitalism and Bill Gates, a globe of relatively uniform and comparable states, all claiming to be mystically extended families equipped with the same rights and sovereignty. Overlaid, we say, because as one undercurrent of the book maintains, the world is layered in complexity. It is not the one-dimensional liberal-democratic market (albeit one beset by a network of terrorist recalcitrants hiding under every bed) as George Bush, Tony Blair and Francis Fukuyama would have us believe.

Marx’s ‘sorcerer’ of capitalist modernity was partly responsible for the new dominant layer – in particular the unleashed market forces of the nineteenth century, at once hymned and condemned in the Communist Manifesto. In their wake came a vast tidal wave of destruction, combined with societal reordering. The globe warped into wildly uneven development, where survival and identity had to be fought for, economically, and very often militarily as well. The political recasting, now institutionalized as the nation-state, was a necessary part of this. Modernist theorists of nationalism have established that this was not an accident, or the work of loose-cannon intellectuals, or a resurgence of prehistoric unreason. ‘Made by Capitalism’ is on its label, as much as on those of the Invisible Hand, Enron, dot.com lunacy or the British monarchy. Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson and the other modernist theorizers who followed Gellner’s lead in his 1964 ‘Nationalism’ essay, have been able to deconstruct thoroughly the mechanisms that created the world of nations.¹⁰

They rescued us from Lord Acton. However, the escape from fogeydom could not help posing another and much profounder question. For much of the globe, ‘modernization’ has been an accelerated bum’s rush from totem pole to George W. Bush. It can be seen how this happened. We have a far more partial understanding of why it happened. But this is the question that has grown more important, as the age of ‘nation-ism’ gives way to something else. The globe is walking backwards into ‘globalism’: what on earth have we walked through up to this point, especially from 1870 to 1989? Such formative epochs don’t just lapse. They are ‘contributing’ to (that is, partly forming) the initial phase of globalization, in ways we don’t understand (because nationalism remained partly mysterious).

The socially driven inevitability and omnipresence of modern nationalism has been established; but not its deeper sources in the nature of human community – that is, in those long-accumulated cultures which were hurled into the maelstrom from the eighteenth century onwards. Mythologies of ‘blood’ descent and solidarity were stories, but not stories about nothing. They continue to entrance in the age of the information revolution and the human genome. It is now known that genetic constitution had astonishingly little to do with ethnic or national identity. But of course this simply amplifies the problem. It means that socio-cultural differentiation must possess its own social logic, a cultural compulsion so great that the sorcerer’s latest conjuring trick – ‘globalization’ – appears to be awarding it a new lease of life.

As we write, identity politics is back on the international stage, if it ever went away. Suicide-bombers are making their way both into Iraq and Israel, the Israeli army is poised for further atrocities in the West Bank or Gaza; Pakistan and India are mobilizing over the broken nation of Kashmir in what may become the world’s first nuclear war; North Korea is attempting to join the club of war-machines with nuclear capability; China is rejoining the world economy on a tide of rejuvenated chauvinism; and the British Prime Minister has become a latter-day Lord Acton, ceaselessly air-freighting the spent fuel-rods of UK wisdom from one ‘trouble spot’ to the next.

As Perry Anderson commented a decade ago, in A Zone of Engagement, Gellner and the modernizers tell us everything we need to know about nationalism, except what we need to know about nationalism: ‘The overpowering dimension of collective meaning that modern nationalism has always inv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: In Search of a Name
• 1. Introduction: Mapping Nationalism and Globalism
• Part I: Rethinking Globalism and Globalization
• Part II: Debating Civic and Post-Nationalism
• Part III: Reflecting on Old and New Nations
• Part IV: Confronting Terror and Violence
• Notes
• Index