Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms

Radhika Desai, Radhika Desai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317968207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Premature announcements of the eclipse of nation states under 'globalization' and 'empire' stand exposed as the 21st century's first economic crisis underlines their continuing importance. A predominantly cultural study of nationalism was unable to resist the 'globalization' thesis. Focusing on selected Asian cases, this book argues that nationalisms have always contained political economies as well as cultural politics. Placing nation-states centrally in our understanding of modern capitalism, it challenges the 'globalization' thesis. Rather than eclipse, nations and nationalisms have undergone changes under the impact of neoliberalism since the 1970s.
Classical 20th century developmental nationalisms emphasised citizenship, economy and future orientations. Later cultural nationalisms - 'Asian values', 'Hindutva', 'Confucianism' or 'Nihonjiron' - stressed identity, culture and past orientations. Amid neoliberalism's flagrantly unequal political economy, not primarily concerned with material production or productivity, they glorified static conceptions of 'original' cultures and identities - whether religious, ethnic or other - and justified inequality as cultural difference. In contrast to the popular mobilizations which powered developmental nationalisms, cultural nationalisms throve on neoliberalism's disengagement and disenfranchisement, albeit partially compensated by the political baptism of newly enriched groups. Extremist wings of cultural nationalism in some countries were a function of this lack of popular support.

This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Introduction: nationalisms and their understandings in historical perspective

RADHIKA DESAI

Forging a national essence is the business of nationalists. That of nationalism's historians and theorists is to identify the historical and social parameters within which such forging (and usually considerable amounts of forgery¹) became at once possible and necessary. How did nations—new types of political communities founding a qualitatively new world order, an ‘international’ order—come to be?² And how did they, and the international order, develop together, each shaping and being shaped by the other?

If we were still grappling with these questions at the close of the 20th century whose last decade saw the generalisation of the nation-state system with the fall of communism, the congenital artifice of nations—always presenting themselves as older, more deeply rooted in the affections of their members, and more homogenous than they really were—was only part of the problem. If the corpus of the historiography and theory of nations and nationalisms which was the result of attempts to answer questions thrown up by their emergence and development was distinctly non-cumulative, full of reversals and dead-ends, this was thanks to a still deeper, structural, problem: the political (and geopolitical) processes which created nations, nationalism and the international order was inextricable from the contemporaneous development of capitalism and civil society—the one particularising, the other universalising, the one mobilising vertically, the other horizontally, the one creating nations, the other, classes. How well one set of phenomena was understood depended not only on how well the other was, but also on whether their relative importance and mutual relationship was correctly judged. This happened rarely. Instead a division of scholarly labour— between a study of nations and nationalisms largely focused on culture and a political economy of national (and international) capitalist development— emerged. This proved fatal to understanding nations. For the entanglement of capitalism and the nation-state, of class and nation, of the universalism of the law of value and the particularity of the various ways in which its inexorable operation has been dammed and channelled by national political economies remains central to understanding both.³ It is, prima facie, surprising, if not astounding, that the literature on nationalism has focused so exclusively on culture, leaving out of account the vast literature on national economic development and the evolution of capitalism on a world scale,⁴ even though a (arguably the) central aspect of nationhood has always been one or another sort of economic development domestically and its deployment and management in international activity abroad.

This volume is an attempt to discover the analytical possibilities that lie in cancelling this division of labour. Minimally it shows, from a variety of disciplinary and political perspectives, how little sense it makes. Sumit Sarkar notes how the earliest text of Indian nationalism was a critique of colonial political economy and not some emotionally charged polemic about the national soul or culture: ‘Deliberately keeping his presentation logical rather than emotional, Naoroji made little or no appeal to any sense of cultural distinctiveness or lost glory. From [his] focus on Indian poverty emerged patterns of thinking, and eventually action, seeking remedies in varied, recognisably “developmental” directions’.⁵ Other papers also note how poverty, inequality and backwardness were major motives of nationalisms, and not only in the colonies. Indeed, many strands in nationalist thought have revealed an appreciation of the intimate relationship between political economy and culture, as Hein emphasises in her discussion of the debates between the Kōza and Rōnō economists about the nature of Japanese modernity in the inter-war period, or as Winichakul does in his contribution about Marxist debates on the Thai social formation in the 1970s. Indeed, the Japanese case is remarkable in that ‘most Japanese regarded economic performance as definitive of national identity to an unusual degree, treating the economy as a cultural marker and assuming that culture functioned as an economic engine. In fact, ideas about the economy (as well as economic thought itself) operated as imaginative bridges that connected the Japanese and their nation to the rest of the modern world even as it constructed Japanese uniqueness.’⁶

Keeping both the cultural politics and political economy of nationalism in view, and exploring the relationship and tension between them, the contributions in this volume approach a recent, particularly interesting and widely misunderstood, phase in the history of nations and nationalisms. In attempting to understand their real fate under neoliberalism and ‘globalisation’ in the last third of the 20th century, we depart from the widely propounded view of the decline of nations, nation-states and nationalisms. We find, rather, a transition from one historically distinct type of nationalism, combining its own cultural politics and political economy, to another: from the ‘developmental nationalisms’ which dominated in the third quarter of the 20th century to the ‘cultural nationalisms’ by the century's close, although there are also important and thought-provoking variations. (This would suggest that it may be possible to discern other historically distinct types of nationalism corresponding to distinct phases in the development of capitalism nationally and internationally, going farther back in the history of nationalism. We do not go into the matter here, however.) We focus on selected countries of Asia, which we know something about, but arguably our diagnosis should be more generally valid: certainly we are not proposing a category of Asian nationalisms, although I note the specificity of the nationalisms of Asia in concluding this introduction.

As the world entered the second half of the 20th century, nation-states could be divided according to whether they attempted to restrain (under social democratic regimes), eliminate (under communist ones) or harness (under developmentalist ones) the power of capital in the interest of wider groups. Japan's ‘miracle’ years, Nehru's, Nasser's and Soekarno's devel-opmentalism, as well as Mao's communism, stood in sharp contrast to the market-driven, capital-friendly regimes that replaced them two or more decades later and to the colonial and fascist ones which had preceded them. Developmental regimes featured distinct developmental nationalisms. In Asia, excepting Japan and Thailand (whose specificities are explored by Hein and Winichakul, respectively), they emerged in anti-imperialist struggles. Popular mobilisations (or minimally, as in Sri Lanka, the requirements of popular legitimacy) required these nationalisms to attempt to construct political economies of development by promoting productivity and relative equality, although accomplishment varied among the resulting capitalist developmental or communist states. While the cultural politics of these nationalisms certainly featured some more or less uncritical celebration of the ‘national culture’, developmental nationalisms typically adopted a critical stance towards important aspects of the inherited culture, as for example, the critical view of caste in Indian nationalism, as Sarkar discusses in this volume, or the criticism of the imperial and Confucian heritage in China which Wu highlights. In the developmental vision, national cultures were to evolve in more scientific, rational and progressive, even internationalist, directions. In short, developmental nationalisms looked forward to brighter national futures as modern egalitarian cultures and polities and as economies of generalised prosperity in a comity of nations: they typically promised a better tomorrow.

Rather than declining in the last quarter of the 20th century, nationalisms seemed to acquire greater force, and not just in reaction to ‘globalisation’. And their nature changed. The cultural nationalisms that displaced the earlier developmental nationalisms had different names in different nations— ‘Asian values’, ‘Hindutva’, ‘Confucianism’ and ‘Nihonjinron’, for example. The cultural politics and political economy they now embodied also underwent changes and the emphasis shifted from the latter to the former. The political economy of cultural nationalisms was typically neoliberal— flagrantly unequal and not primarily concerned with increasing production or productivity so much as with the enrichment of the (expanded but still tiny) dominant middle, propertied and capitalist classes. The new nationalisms’ cultural politics—whether conceived in religious, ethnic or cultural terms— conceivedcultureasstatic,pre-given, andoriginal although,amidthe intensified commercialism and commodification of neoliberal capitalism,itwas lesssothan ever before, and attributed to it almost magical powers of legitimation and pacification over potentially restive forsaken majorities. Thinking of cultural nationalismsasmajoritarian and homogenisingiseasy, but also mistaken: for in the neoliberal context, cultural difference—different levelsofcompetenceinand belonging to the national culture—served to justify the economic inequalities produced by neoliberal, market-driven policies. Cultural nationalisms often took apparently multicultural and ‘tolerant’ forms as markets performed the work of privileging and marginalization more stealthily and more effectively. In contrast to the popular mobilisations on which developmental nationalisms rested, cultural nationalisms throve on the relative political disengagement and disenfranchisementwhichneoliberalinequalities produced. Theextremist wings that cultural nationalisms had in many countries were a function of this lack of popular support. In harking back to more or less distant ‘glorious pasts’, it seemedasthoughwhat cultural nationalisms offered was notabetter tomorrow, but a ‘better yesterday’.

Three of the cases examined in this volume appear to be undergoing crises dire enough to call their continued existence into question: Iraq, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. However, in no case do the causes fit the ‘globalisation’ thesis of decline as a result of the powers of the global market and capitalism. Indeed, as we see it, the transition from developmental to cultural nationalisms is implicated in the shift from developmentalism to neoliberalism. We prefer the term ‘neoliberalism’, because, despite considerable debate over its exact meaning, it is more precise, and of greater historical and geographical scope, than the more popular alternative, ‘globalisation’.⁷ While we mean by neoliberalism the preference for and justification of market-driven policies over state-driven ones across the whole range of policy fields practically the world over in a general sense, we do not define it doctrinally but historically. A world-wide shift in the balance of power in favour of capital underlies this shift in economic policy. It has moved politics radically to the right and recast society in market-driven ways in the last quarter of the 20th century.

In proposing the historical categories of developmental nationalism and cultural nationalism, this volume marks another important departure in the literature on nations and nationalisms. Nationalisms tend to be classified, if at all, in trans-historical ‘ideal-typical’ distinctions, made by Hroch for example, between early and formative phases of nationalisms and later phases.⁸ There were also the Eurocentric ideal-types of civic v ethnic or political v cultural nationalisms which trace their roots to the dichotomy between Gesellschaft and Gemienschaft at the root of sociological theory, in particular, modernisation theory. Of course, they also separate worthy Western nationalisms from unworthy non-Western ones.⁹ In contrast, the categories of developmental and cultural nationalism are historical. They mark particular phases in the evolution of nations and of the international order and embody historically specific forms of political economy and cultural politics. Our attention to changes in the nature of particular nonWestern nationalisms also overturns monolithic conce...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: nationalisms and their understandings in historical perspective
• Explorations
• The Plot Thickens
• Exceptions that Prove the Rule?
• Index