Nations Matter

Culture, History and the Cosmopolitan Dream

Craig Calhoun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134127573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Craig Calhoun, one of the most respected social scientists in the world, re-examines nationalism in light of post-1989 enthusiasm for globalization and the new anxieties of the twenty-first century. Nations Matter argues that pursuing a purely postnational politics is premature at best and possibly dangerous.

Calhoun argues that, rather than wishing nationalism away, it is important to transform it. One key is to distinguish the ideology of nationalism as fixed and inherited identity from the development of public projects that continually remake the terms of national integration. Standard concepts like 'civic' vs. 'ethnic' nationalism can get in the way unless they are critically re-examined – as an important chapter in this book does.

This book is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students of sociology, history, political theory and all subjects concerned with nationalism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism.

1
Is it time to be postnational?

In the wake of 1989, talk of globalization was often celebratory. It seemed a fulfillment of modernity’s hopes, perhaps even a transcendence of modernity’s flaws. This was true not only among anti-communist ideologues, corporate elites, and followers of Francis Fukuyama’s Hegelian announcement of the end of history. Enthusiasm for globalization was also prominent on the left. Even while an anti-corporate movement gathered strength, many were eager to proclaim the rise of international civil society as a transcendence of the nation-state. Very few listened to reminders that national struggles in much of the world were among the few viable forms of resistance to capitalist globalization.¹

Many embraced an ideal of cosmopolitan democracy. That is, they embraced not just cosmopolitan tastes for cultural diversity (which too often rendered culture an object of external consumption rather than internal meaning); not just the notion of hybridity with its emphasis on porous boundaries and capacious, complex identities; and not just cosmopolitan ethics emphasizing the obligations of each to all around the world. They embraced also the notion that the globe could readily be a polis, and humanity at large organized in democratic citizenship.² This is an attractive but very elusive ideal.

The discourse of globalization is gloomier in the first decade of the twenty-first century than it was in the 1990s. Stock market bubbles burst, and even recovery has felt insecure; reviving equity prices have not been matched by creation of jobs. The world’s one superpower has announced and implemented a doctrine of pre-emptive invasion of those it sees as threatening. Awareness of the global vitality of religion is growing, but intolerant fundamentalists seem to thrive disproportionately. Despite new doctrines of active intervention a host of humanitarian emergencies and local or regional conflicts kill by the tens of thousands and impoverish by the millions. And the dark side of globalization includes diseases from SARS to AIDS and trafficking in women, drugs, and guns.

If 1989 symbolized (but only partly caused) the pro-global enthusiasms of the 1990s, 9/11 symbolizes (and also only partly caused) the reversal in mood. Some ask why we didn’t see it coming. Focusing on 9/11 encourages the sense that simply a new event or malign movement defines the issue – as though, for example, terrorism were the fundamental underlying issue rather than a tactic made newly attractive by a combination of global organization and communications media on the one hand and local grievances and vulnerabilities on the other. We would do better to ask why we didn’t see “it” – the dark side of globalization, or at least its Janus-faced duplicity – already there.

As globalization proceeded after 1989, shocks and enthusiasms alternated. The relative peacefulness of most post-communist transitions – despite the dispossession and disruption they entailed – brought enthusiasm; fighting among national groups in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia was a shock. There was an enthusiasm for global economic integration and the rapid development of Asian “tigers,” and a shock with the currency crisis of 1997. There was an enthusiasm for information technology as the harbinger and vehicle of freer communication and new wealth, and a series of shocks with the extent to which the Internet brought pornography and spam, then the dot.com bust, then a range of new surveillance regimes. There was enthusiasm for European integration, and repeated shocks when wars erupted in Europe and the European Union could not achieve an effective common defense or foreign policy, and when immigration was linked to resurgent racism and nationalism. There was enthusiasm for global democracy, and shock and disillusionment as war came even to highly touted new democracies like Ethiopia and Eritrea and intertwined political and economic meltdown in Argentina. There was enthusiasm for both human rights and humanitarian intervention, and shock when the two came into conflict as the world failed to find an adequate way to address genocide and ethnic war in Central Africa.

Indeed, an explicit attack not only on nationalism but on the state was important to many of the enthusiasts. This was fueled not only by a growing confidence in global civil society (and potential supports for it, like the Internet). It was also driven by the tragic civil wars and ethnic slaughters of the era. Not only did these offer extreme examples of the evils associated with ethnicity and nationalism, they provided spectacles of possibly avertable tragedies in the face of which self-interested governments refused to act, sometimes citing notions of state sovereignty as rationale. So support grew for “humanitarian” interventions into crises, and also the belief that the crises were evidence of failed states and sovereignty only a distraction.³

For most of the 1990s, shocks failed to hold back enthusiasm. This was nowhere more evident than in the proliferation of cosmopolitan visions of globalization. These were (and are) internally heterogeneous. All, however, participated in a common contrast to overly strong politics of identity or claims to group solidarity. They extolled human rights and humanitarian interventions by “global society” into local messes. They praised hybridity and multiple, overlapping political memberships. Mostly produced from the political center and soft left, they shared with neoliberalism from the harder right a contempt for states which they understood mainly as authoritarian and dangerous. In this they reflected the libertarian side of 1960s conflicts, New Left disappointments in the welfare state, and a general anti-authoritarianism.⁴ They focused not only on multilateral institutions but on the possibility that individuals might emancipate themselves from the sectionalism and restrictions of groups. Whether mainly ethical, political, socio-psychological, or cultural in their orientation, advocates of a more cosmopolitan world rejected nationalism, at least fundamentalism if not all religion, and most strong claims on behalf of ethnic groups. And so, the cosmopolitans suffered September 11 as an especially severe shock, and the continuing prominence of national security agendas and both religious and ethnic identities as a gloomy regression from what had seemed a clear progress.

To some extent this continues – in speeded up form – a pattern common to the whole modern era. Enthusiasms for transcending old forms of political power have alternated since the Enlightenment – perhaps since the seventeenth century – with appeals for solidarity in the face of insecurity and state action to build better societies. And with wars. “In a pattern of maniacal relapses and recoveries throughout European history, globalism keeps promising to arrive, always seems, in fact, to be just around the corner if not already here, but which continues to find its reality only in an unfulfilled desire against a backdrop of preparations for future war.”⁵

There is much to feel gloomy about in the contemporary world, including the crisis of multilateral institutions, the prominence of reactionary political groups including but not limited to nationalists, and the assertion of military power as the solution to many of the problems of global inequality and instability. But this chapter is not about the dark side of globalization, nor is it a challenge to the cosmopolitan ideal. Rather, it is an attempt to ask whether nationalism can be left behind so easily as cosmopolitans sometimes imagine. I shall suggest cosmopolitanism and nationalism are mutually constitutive and to oppose them too sharply is misleading.⁶ To conceptualize cosmopolitanism as the opposite to nationalism (and ethnicity and other solidarities) is not only a sociological confusion but an obstacle to achieving both greater democracy and better transnational institutions.⁷ And I shall suggest there are good reasons why nationalism survives – even though nationalist projects are certainly not all good – and good reasons to doubt whether we are entering a postnational era.

Beyond the nation-state?

Advocates for a cosmopolitan global order frequently present this as moving beyond the nation-state. Jürgen Habermas, for example, writes of a “post-national constellation.”⁸ Martin Köhler sees movement from “the national to the cosmopolitan public sphere,” with “a world developing as a single whole thanks to the social activity and the deliberate will of a population sharing common values and interests, such as human rights, democratic participation, the rule of law and the preservation of the world’s ecological heritage.”⁹ Köhler certainly recognizes that adequate structures of authority are not yet in place on a global scale; he is a moderate cosmopolitan who still sees a role for states. Ulrich Beck is more extreme. He describes a “politics of post-nationalism” in which “the cosmopolitan project contradicts and replaces the nation-state project.”¹⁰

Many other writers discuss the end of the Westphalian state system – by which they mean mostly an idea about sovereignty and the mutual recognition of states introduced at the close the Thirty Years War.¹¹ The Treaty of Westphalia is perhaps a convenient marker for the transition to a global order of nation-states, and the development of an international approach to national sovereignty, but the image of Westphalia is usually evoked in a way that exaggerates the extent to which nationstates were already effective and discrete power-containers in 1648, and the basic units of international politics for the next three and a half centuries. In the first place, empires thrived for the next 300 years, though more as European projects abroad than on the continent of Europe itself. Second, the nation-state order was hardly put in place in 1648, even in Europe. It would be more accurate to say that after 1648 nation-state projects increasingly shaped history, both domestically in efforts to bring nation and state into closer relationship and internationally in the organization of conflict and peace-making. Indeed, the very distinction of domestic from international is a product of these projects; it was minimally conceptualized in 1648 and for a very long time the interplay of nationalism and cosmopolitanism was not at all a simple opposition.¹²

The nation-state became relatively clearly formulated and increasingly dominant in Europe and the Americas during the nineteenth century. In much of the rest of the world, nationalism flourished in the twentieth century. In both cases, post-imperial projects were prominent. The project of trying to make states and nations line up remains very active in the twenty-first century, with colonialism receding as the relevant background. Indeed, conflicts in Central Asia, the Balkans, Central Africa, and South Asia reveal the extent to which nationalism and the nation-state project are current and not merely historical concerns. Moreover, these are not conflicts of a radically different sort from those that beset Europe in the era when modern states were first being consolidated there. Religion, culture, language, kin relations, demagogues, and economic opportunists mixed with the pursuit of political power, defensible borders, and state sovereignty in Europe as well. And Europeans complicated the matter further by pursuing overseas empires even while they consolidated national states at home. France – the paradigmatic nation of most theories of nationalism – was not only forged out of local wars and impositions of state power that unified the hexagon, even in its most revolutionary and nationalist moments it was also imperial. The first French republic tried to repress Haitian independence just as the Fourth and Fifth republics tried to repress Algerian independence. The image of a Westphalian order thus marginalizes empire inappropriately, and deflects attention from the disorder and conflict wrought by attempts to make nation-states the dominant organizational units of sovereignty and monopolies of force. It flattens into legal abstraction an era that saw the world’s most destructive wars and the development and recurrence of modern genocide, as well as the creation of a rich range of interstate institutions and agreements. The Peace of Westphalia certainly did not usher in a 350-year reign of peace, though arguably it inaugurated the cycle of philosophical and political declarations of plans for perpetual peace and wars to end all wars.¹³

And so it is unclear just what a “post-Westphalian” order signifies. For some, especially those for whom the European continent is the primary referent, it is more or less synonymous with “post-national constellation.” And here too there are both domestic and international implications. The first is that cultural commonalities organized and mobilized in nationalism underwrote the necessary solidarities of citizens with states through most of the modern era, though now it is in some combination necessary and desirable to move beyond this. What lies beyond may be either solidarities based on the loyalties of citizens to specific political institutions, such as what Habermas has called “constitutional patriotism,” or a move beyond particularistic solidarities altogether to some sort of ethical cosmopolitanism in which obligations to humanity as such supersede citizenship, community, and other more local bonds.¹⁴ Second, internationally, the implication is simply that states cannot organize global politics or even the affairs once ostensibly contained in their own boundaries well enough to be considered the primary units of global order.

One of the problems with this discussion is that its empirical referents are unclear. Assertions are made like “in the second age of modernity the relationship between the state, business, and a society of citizens must be redefined.”¹⁵ Which state (and for that matter what organization of business and society of citizens)? Discussion of whether the state is growing stronger, declining, or merely remaining effective in international relations or for securing domestic welfare is quite frequently carried on without specification as to whether the state in question is, say, the United States of America or Chad. There is also an elision between discussions of a possible global “post-national constellation” or cosmopolitan democracy and debates over the integration of the European Union. The latter may be a model for what a postnational order might look like. Without going into that in any depth, however, it needs to be said (a) that it is not clear how well this is proceeding, and (b) that while European integration might be “post” the specific nation-state projects dominant for the last 300 years, it is not at all clear that it does not involve a new project of much the same kind, rather than fundamentally different.¹⁶

The last is an important point. The European Union is clearly an important innovation in many ways, and it clearly goes beyond anything imagined by the signatories of the Treaty of Westphalia. But one could focus on continuity rather than novelty. One could see the European Union as potentially a further centralization of political power and integration of both state administration and civil society of much the same sort as that which made modern France or Germany out of once less unified and often warring smaller polities. Indeed, Habermas’s idea of “constitutional patriotism” – the loyalty of citizens to their political institutions rather than to any pre-existing ethnic nation – is itself a reworking of the idea of civic nationalism.¹⁷

Many discussions of globalization and cosmopolitan governance proceed as though it were obvious that the specific states that have claimed sovereignty in the language of Westphalia define a determinate scale of social organization, as though “nation” must refer to the cultural solidarities and identities organized at the level of those states. But what we see all over the world is that the scale of national projects varies and is hotly contested – precisely because there are no “natural” nations and there is no naturally best scale for a state. It was an illusion of Romantic nationalism and the “Springtime of Peoples” in the first half of the nineteenth century that there could somehow be an autonomous state for every nation.

A post-Westphalian Europe does not in itself invalidate the projects of sovereignty and self-determination in countries of Asia or Africa. Nor does it necessarily mean in all senses a postnational Europe (though it may mean transcending the limits of existing European nation-states). As David Held says, “globalization is best understood as a spatial phenomenon, lying on a continuum with ‘the local’ at one end and ‘the global’ at the other. It denotes a shift in the spatial form of human organization and activity to transcontinental or interregional patterns of activity, interaction and the exercise of power.”¹⁸ But this “shift” is not neutral. It advantages some and disadvantages others. And that is in fact a crucial reason for the continuing reproduction of nationalism, and a reason why caution is warranted before suggesting that nationalist projects are inherently regressive and cosmopolitan projects progressive. And it is especially problematic to suggest that from a standpoint of apparent academic neutrality that in fact coincides with the centers of current global political and economic power or former colonial power. The liberal state is not neutral. Cosmopolitan civil society is not neutral. Even the English language is not neutral. This doesn’t mean that any of the three is bad, only that they are not equally accessible to everyone and do not equally express the interests of everyone.

Transformations in scale and struggles for equity

Globalization doesn’t just happen. It is to a large extent imposed. This is misrecognized, though, when globalization is presented as simply the course of history, the mandate of necessity to which individuals and states must adapt or perish. Fortunately, as Kymlicka has noted, “globalization, far from encouraging political apathy, is itself one of the things which seems to mobilize otherwise apathetic people.”¹⁹

Capitalism is perhaps the single most important driver of globalization, but hardly the only one. Capitalist globalization itself was never simply a matter of “the economy” separate from states or culture projects. From the East India Company to overseas missions to Hollywood, globalization has revealed the distinctions among economy, polity, and culture to be at most analytical and sometimes ideological but never simply factual.

One of the dominant patterns in modern history is the organization of power and capital on ever larger scales, and with new intensity. This precipitates a race in which popular forces and solidarities are always running behind. It is a race to achieve social integration, to structure the connections among people, and to organize the world. Capital and political power are out in front – sometimes in collusion and sometimes in contention with each other. Workers and ordinary citizens are always in the position of trying to catch up. As they get organized on local levels, capital and power integrate on larger scales.

The formation of modern states was both a matter of expansion, as smaller states gave way in the process of establishing centralized rule over large, contiguous territories, and of intensification, as administrative capacity was increased and intermediate powers weakened. Likewise, the growth of capitalism involved increases in both long distance and local trade, the development of both larger and more effectively administered enterprises, the extension of trade into financial markets and production relations, and the subjection of more and more dimensions of social life to market relations. State formation and capitalism coincided in empires and sometimes imperialism without formal empire. Postcolonies, even where they did constitute more or less integrated nation-states, could seldom achieve the autonomy promised by nationalist ideology precisely because they confronted global capitalist markets and unequal terms of trade.

Certainly there have long been and still are outright rejections of capitalist globalization, including communitarian efforts to defend small islands of self-sufficiency and larger-scale socialist projects of autochthonous development. And there are certainly rejections of governmental power, whether articulately anarchist or simply resistant. But for the most part, popular struggles have demanded neither an end to economic expansion nor the elimination of political power but a much greater fairness in the structure of economy and polity. They have sought, in other words, that integration come with equity and opportunity (the latter commonly problematically identified with growth). This is the primary concern of trade unions in advanced capitalist countries. It is the primary concern of minority groups in multicultural polities (and nearly all polities are multicultural). And it is the primary concern of people in the world’s poorer and less powerful states – if not necessarily of those running the states. Indeed, an important dimension of nationalism is rooted in popular demands ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Nations Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Is it time to be postnational?
• 2: Nationalism matters
• 3: Nationalism and ethnicity
• 4: Nationalism and civil society
• 5: Nationalism, political community, and the representation of society
• 6: Inventing the opposition of ethnic and civic nationalism
• 7: Nationalism and the cultures of democracy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography