Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism

Bringing Theory Back in

Paul James

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780761955146, 9780761955139
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

`Paul James has written a magnificent account of the world?s current condition, one that highlights the complexities and contradictions with which people, communities, and nations must contend and that does so in a compelling and creative style. Stressing the interaction between global and local forces, his writing style is lively and compelling as well as peppered with a wide range of citations, from Woman?s Day to the Cambodian Daily (on the same page!)? - James N Rosenau, University Professor of International Affairs, The George Washington University

Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism establishes a new basis for understanding the changing nature of polity and community and offers unprecedented attention to these dominant trends. Paul James charts the contradictions and tensions we all encounter in an era of increasing globalization, from genocide and terrorism to television and finance capital.

Globalism is treated as an uneven and layered process of spatial expansion, not simply one of disorder, fragmentation or rupture. Nor is it simply a force of homogenization.

Nationalism is taken seriously as a continuing and important formation of contemporary identity and politics. James rewrites the modernism theories of the nation-state without devolving into the postmodernist assertion that all is invention or surface gloss.

Tribalism is given the attention it has long warranted and is analyzed as a continuing and changing formation of social life, from the villages of Rwanda to the cities of the West.

Theoretically adept and powerfully argued, this is the first comprehensive analysis that brings these crucial themes of contemporary life together.

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ONE Introduction: Global Savage

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A suit-wearing European man sits in the dark talking with three tribal men around a campfire. The night sky behind them is deep purple, and into the colour of the sky is written the words, ‘Talk anyone’s language: Windows 2000’. Advertising images such as this provide windows onto contemporary worlds. They provide us with heavily researched and creatively engineered reflections of our times. They are reflections that perversely re-present the surface reality of contemporary social relations, and which nevertheless take us into the intensities of its promises, fears and dreams. Ironically, this advertising image reflects the tensions and contradictions that Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism is trying to understand. What is happening to the world under present conditions of intensifying contradiction, and how did we get here? What does it mean, for example, when a Vodafone advertisement depicts a satellite picture of the globe with clouds swirling over Africa, shrouding a Europe that is flattened by the parallax of perspective? The inscription on that advertisement reads, ‘Vodafone spoken here’. Like the Microsoft advertisement, Vodafone projects the globalism as transcending difference. However, at the same time, its very accentuation of a ‘possible world’ of open communication makes us aware that place and identity still intensely matter. It gives the impression that globalization is wonderfully inclusive. However, at the same time, we are implicitly reminded that the present world can be characterized as ‘global savage’ in a second sense – that is, globalization as a savagely distancing and mediating; globalization that cares little for those who cannot keep up, and fears those who are its ‘others’.

Microsoft’s Noble Savages are postmodern motifs for everything primitive and modern: their spears speak of many remembered images. Like other postcolonial lads, as I grew up I watched the 1964 film Zulu and read Rider Haggard and Doris Lessing. Now, in the contemporary representations of popular culture it seems that ‘the tribes’ are coming again – and either they are becoming us, or, alternatively, for example in the case of the ethnic nationalists of Eastern Europe, the supposedly more primordial of us have always been them. Look closer into the Microsoft advertisement and you can see that the warriors are wearing tartan, just like the clans in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995). It is ye olde clothe of the medieval ‘Scot’, William Wallace, as he patriotically ran into battle against Edward I of Hollywood’s England. In shops in Scotland, years after Braveheart swept through the land, you can still find depictions of the American-born Australian-claimed actor, Mel Gibson, his nose and cheeks smeared blue with Celtic woad. The Scottish artists who lovingly paint Gibson’s face did not care that the director of a film about this nation’s ‘birth’ was an Australian-in-Hollywood rather than a son of the Highland soil. Nor did the stone mason who set out to capture the spirit of William Wallace through Mel Gibson’s body. The statue is located at the entrance to the National Wallace Monument in Stirling, a spear’s throw from Stirling Bridge where the 1297 battle against the ‘English’ took place. Gibson as an outsider, like the Irish actor Liam Neeson in Rob Roy (1994), is non-English enough to depict a Scot.

Elaborating upon this illustration of the connections between tribalism, neo-traditionalism, and globalism, Gibson’s Braveheart provides significant inspiration for the League of the South, a group that began in 1994. On 4 March 2000 they signed their Declaration of Southern Independence. ‘We, as citizens of the sovereign states of the South, proclaim before Almighty God and before all the nations of the earth, that we are a separate and distinct people, with an honourable heritage and culture worthy of protection and preservation.’ Their Southland is the land of the losers in the American Civil War, currently part of the United States of America. At their annual honouring of Jefferson Davis, last president of the Confederate States of America, a kilted piper plays Scotland the Brave. The League has its own confederate tartan approved by the Scottish tartan authority, as incidentally do the expatriate Scots in Australia, with both tartans commercially available over the internet. The globalizing world is thus an amazing and contradictory place of local allusions and national recursions. It is not simply an open series of invented traditions, advertising slogans and postmodern film narratives, but nor is it a place of simple primordial depth or straightforward continuities from the past.

As I write the first draft of this chapter, sitting in an office built above the medieval city wall of old Edinburgh, the writing is both abstractly connected to everywhere and thoroughly bound in time and place. A ‘moment’ ago, I used Netscape, one of Microsoft’s rivals, to find out the year when Zulu was made. I found myself in a place that I had never been, reading a person I will probably never meet. On the University of Wales, Swansea Student Union website, I was reading Louise Burridge’s response to a posting that said ‘Zulu is quite possibly one of the best films of all time’. Two years after writing that last sentence – note how temporally confusing the abstraction of print can be – I find myself in Leeds (June 2002), reading a brochure for an exhibition called ‘The Mighty Zulu Nation’ at the Royal Armouries Museum. The vice-president of the Anglo-Historical Zulu Society, pictured on the African savannah in safari garb, is advertised as giving a lecture, accompanied by a screening of Zulu and by ‘artefacts from his own collection for visitors to handle’. Six months later again, at a granite monument in Pretoria, two men put their lips to ram’s horns to mark the most sacred moment of the year for the Afrikaners. At precisely noon, a ray of sun shines through a hole in the roof of an empty tomb symbolizing the death of the 470 pioneers who 164 years earlier, with guns and God on their side, defeated 10,000 Zulu warriors in the Battle of Blood River. Later still, on a plane returning from Chicago (September 2004), I read that airlines communicate globally in a single world-standard idiom called ‘Zulu’.

Abstracted language-protocols? Artefacts to handle? An empty tomb symbolizing glorious embodied death in the name of the nation? The globalization of film culture? This world, like all the others before it, is a place of a myriad messy interconnections, immediate and abstracted, embodied and disembodied. Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism attempts to make some sense of these connections, all the while keeping in mind their messy unevenness and the way that they are caught up in vast permutations of power. It ranges from questions of apparently irrelevant detail such as ‘Who is Gillian Stone, the narrator in the Nescafé advertisements?’ and ‘What is the relationship between things of stone, wood and flesh in Maubisse, East Timor?’ to those of more obvious importance and generality. ‘Is it actually resurgent tribalism that is the basis of accentuated global violence today?’, ‘What is the significance of the war on terror?’ and ‘How can we understand the formations of nationalism in an era of globalism?’ The title of the book and of this introduction attempt to express the ambiguities of the present and its normative confusions. On the one hand, globalization has, with the Good War on Terror, become increasingly savage about how ‘others’ are treated. The world is seething in a modern abstract barbarianism that allows the four horsemen of the apocalypse to continue to ride this planet, this time in metal machines – sometimes under the banners of humanitarian intervention, military, economic and political. On the other hand, relations of tribalism and traditionalism that were once derided for their backward primordial ‘savagery’ have not disappeared as proclaimed by the many soothsayers – from the Social Darwinists to the End-of-History ideologues. The chapter title ‘Global Savage’ is thus intended to be at once critical and ironical, discouraged and empathetic to the way that all social relations on this planet are increasingly forced to come to terms with globalization.

Rather than treating ‘globalism’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘tribalism’ as discrete formations – with globalization replacing all that has gone before – the present study takes them as recurrent formations with rough-knotted intertwined histories. It helps to explain how they can be concurrent realities in the present. With the tropes of ‘tribalism’ now increasingly revisited by social theorists with gay abandon,¹ and globalism studies becoming all the rage, nationalism is the one formation of the three that is usually projected as having a dubious future. This is ironic given that for nearly a century the nation-state had been taken for granted as the dominant setting for the intersection of community (as nation) and polity (as state). A revolution in theories of the nation began in the 1980s as the processes of what might be called ‘disembodied globalization’ were taking substantial hold and the intersection of nation and state had begun to come apart. However, almost as soon as the theories gained a reader-ship, the historical future of the nation-state was called into question. A series of debates began and still continues today. They continue to ask whether or not the nation-state is in crisis, and whether old-style community is still possible.

What tends to be missing from these debates is an appreciation of questions of comparative social form, the question at the heart of this study. In one way this is not surprising – investigating such questions tends to give way to an understandable emphasis upon immediate issues and social exigencies, the very issues brought to the fore by the galloping transformations in social form. In another way, however, it is alarming how the debates fail to take cognisance of the substantial and highly-relevant research that has been going on in a number of quite disparate disciplines. Social theorists are exploring the impact of different modes of communication or technology upon social relations.² Critical geographers are doing path-breaking work on the nature and forms of spatial extension lived by different types of communities.³ Anthropologists are writing challenging works on the changing forms of identity in national and postnational settings.⁴ This study is intended to draw synthetically upon these disciplines and others – particularly history and sociology, political theory and international relations – to provide an alternative framework for understanding the current tensions between polity and community, nationalism and globalism. Underlying the entire approach is the presumption that an adequate theory of tribalism, nation formation or globalization requires a generalizing theory of changing social formations. In other words, a phenomenon such as globalization or nationalism cannot be understood in terms of itself.

If the central focus is on changing forms of social relations, it is always with the view to relating the practices of the past to present trajectories. This is the sense in which the research can be described as a history of the present. It involves comparing tribal reciprocity, past and present – oral cultures involved in gift exchange and production by the hand – to the formations of empire, kingdom and sodality characterized by the development of script/print, paper money and new techniques of production. This is in turn related to the developments in communication, exchange and production that lie behind the emergence of the modern nation-state. It involves comparing face-to-face community with the structures and subjectivities of globalism. We trace the reconstitution of the nation-state as it has undergone unprecedented change – change based in part upon the development of mass communications, fiduciary exchange systems and computer-based production. Throughout, the aim is to draw conclusions about the contemporary underpinnings of polity and community in a globalized world.

The volume would at first glance appear to have the same massive historical scope as Ernest Gellner’s Plough, Sword and Book.⁵ However, except for its generalizing methodological pretensions, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism is intended to be much more modest. Rather than sweeping across history, it uses anthropology, comparative historical sociology and political studies in order to understand the structures of the present. Gellner’s book is a history of ideas, rarely talking about ploughs, swords and books. Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism, by contrast, is intended as a genealogy of the underpinning processes of contemporary tribal, national and global practices and institutions. The equivalent motifs to Gellner’s ‘plough, sword and book’ are stone and wood, money and clock, book and computer. This is not to imply that we simply move historically from ‘things of stone and wood’,⁶ to things of book and screen. In contemporary tribal life we find the assimilation of these themes into changing but continuous cosmologies. For example, Elizabeth Traube describes the integrative culture of the Mambai of East Timor as incorporating the layers of the invasion of that country – the Portuguese and the Catholic Church – into the passing on of authority structures. The stone and the book come together in their difference:

Then Father Heaven, the great divider distributes a patrimony between his sons. To the eldest, Ki Sa, he gives the sacred rock and tree, tokens of the original ban and signs of original authority over a silent cosmos. Upon the youngest, Loer Sa, he bestows the book and the pen, which the Mambai regard as emblems of European identity.⁷

As important as the continuities and assimilations within and across communities are, the differences between communities still have to be theorized. In addressing this issue, the discussion will move across different dominant levels of the analysis.⁸ At one level – that is, at the level of analysing conjunctural relations – the focus will be on the following modes of practice: first, the changing forms of communication and information storage from print to electronic communication; second, the changing forms of exchange from gift exchange and barter to abstract money; third, the changing forms of production from manual production to robotics; fourth, the changing forms of enquiry, particularly the rise of techno-science; and fifth, the changing forms of organization, with the increasing predominance in the contemporary period of bureaucratic rationality. At a more abstract level of analysing categories of social ontology the focus will be on the changing way in which we live the categories of time, space, the body and ways of knowing.⁹ Moving across these levels of analysis, the task will be to examine how the changing modes of practice – disembodied communication, abstracted exchange, post-industrial production, techno-science and technical rationality – bear upon the subjectivities and practices of political community in the age of disembodied globalism. The writing will explore the ways in which more abstract forms overlay (rather than replace) earlier modes of practice. In doing so, the book will attempt to draw political conclusions about alternative possibilities for polity and community as they play themselves out in the realms of tribe, nation and globe.

The present study thus enters into debates in social and political theory. One of the dominant avant-garde approaches in social theory continues to be post-structuralism, while the dominant mainstream emphasis in the academic disciplines is on empirically-grounded studies or rational-choice style approaches. Across these diverse, and I think unsatisfactory, ways of approaching social explanation, there is a common tendency to criticize the possibility of generalized analyses and to dismiss approaches which attempt to understand the ‘social whole’. In some circles it is an anathema to talk of structures of social practice or to make broad characterizations about a social formation. There are good reasons for the post-structuralist critique of generalizing approaches, but the methodological problems they point to are not insurmountable. On the contrary, there is a pressing urgency to bring together and rethink the respective strengths of old and new ways of theorizing. Moreover, unless we develop a more synthesizing overview of the trajectories of the present and its historical antecedents, we will be left with only vague renditions of contemporary life as a postmodern condition dissolving into difference, or as a fragmented world of self-interested rational choice. As a contribution to this political-methodological problem, the project is intended as an analytical interpretative history of some of the central institutions of the present, taking the intersection of polity and community as one of its key framing themes. It is an attempt to find a pathway between and beyond the modern confidence in grand theory and the postmodern rejection of other than piece-meal explanations for this and that discursive practice. It does so, not by setting up a grand theory, but by setting up a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Global Savage
• PART I Returning to a Theory of Social Formation
• PART II Rethinking Formations of Practice and Being
• PART III Rewriting the History of the Present
• Glossary
• Select Bibliography
• Index