Nationalism and Global Solidarities

James Goodman, Paul James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134173495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Even in the face of neoliberal globalization, nationalism remains a significant political force. The leading contributors to this new volume explore the extent to which nationalism can be a foundation for alternative solidarities. Against the axiom that with globalization 'all that is solid melts into air, ' this anthology debates the extent to which different forms of solidarity remain viable - from the solidarities of local political groups to the solidarities of nationalism, internationalism and alternative globalisms.

Organized into three sections, the book addresses the relationship between the contemporary formations of nationalism, globalism and solidarity movements:

• Part 1 offers a framework for understanding globalization and discusses the effect of globality on nationalism
• Part 2 addresses the logics of nationalisms in globalizing contexts: respectively, liberal nationalism, left nationalism, post-colonial nationalism, and revivals of nationalism
• Part 3 addresses issues of solidarity and integration in a world of nationalism and globalism, asking how differing forms of connectivity may be emerging, disrupting prevailing oppositions and relations, focusing on social movements and solidarity.

Offering the first detailed study of the relationship between globalization and nationalism, Nationalism and Global Solidarities will be of strong interest to students and scholars of politics, sociology and international political economy.

1
Globalisms, nationalisms and solidarities

An argument

James Goodman and Paul James

The institutions and structures of modern globalization and the nation-state were formed through concurrent social processes; and they have changed in relation to each other ever since. This apparently simple statement of a relationship between national and global formation goes directly against those who would treat them as the antithetical outcomes of two succeeding epochs – the ‘age of nation-states’ of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, and the ‘age of globalization’ beginning in the late twentieth century and supposedly reducing nation-states to anachronistic hangovers. In relation to the present, nation-states continue to be relevant. With all the changes, they continue to be the dominant form of community-polity in the world today, making compatriots out of abstract strangers and drawing people into uneven but still powerful frames of ambiguous solidarity. In relation to the past, the period in which nation-states first developed was the very same period that saw the bourgeoning of many of the lines of globalization that underpin contemporary processes of global interconnection – the development of globalizing finance systems that could either be harnessed by states or allowed to cross their territorial boundaries relatively unimpeded; the construction of globalizing communications systems that could either be used to project national cultures or to generate transnational connections and understandings; and the making of globalizing institutions of governance that could either be drawn upon to enhance transnational co-operation or become sites for asserting projections of chauvinistic national interest. The period of the rise of the nation-state and the ideology of modern nationalism – the nineteenth century – saw the simultaneous consolidation of ideologies of modern cosmopolitanism as well as those of the alternative globalizing solidarity movements such as international labourism and socialist and communist internationalism. In short, the nation-state and modern globalization grew up together.

As Robert Holton (1998) has argued, that simple historical description of nation-states and nationalism being formed in the context of the ‘take off’ of modern globalization, challenges those who would narrowly define globalization as that which intrinsically undermines the nation-state. It still, however, leaves much to argue about. Globalization and nation formation are not objectively contradictory or essentially opposed formations, but that does not take away from the tensions that arise over normative and ideological questions and over issues of practice (Nairn and James 2005). Issues of contestation include those over the nature and consequence of social boundaries, including national borders; the politics of attachment to peoples and places, including ethic nationalism and national sovereignty; and the ethics of responsibility to others across the globe, including national cosmopolitanism and transnational solidarities.

Global and national formation, understood in their broadest historical sense, may not be contradictory and they may have grown up together, nevertheless we still confront the problem that the practices and ideologies of globalism and nationalism have come into increasing tension as the globalizing system of states confronts globalizing corporations, on the one hand, and new globalizing solidarity movements on the other (Goodman 2002). All of these terms need some defining, including the meaning of ‘solidarity’. Against the axiom that with globalization ‘all that is solid melts into air’, it is important to note that different forms of solidarity, relations of mutual obligation, continue to range across different spatial extensions and different forms of integration from the face-to-face solidarities of local political groups and communities to the more abstract but no less passionately felt solidarities of nationalism, internationalism and alternative globalisms – ‘another world is possible’. The nation-state, as we define it, is a historically particular social formation bringing together a governing polity (a state) with an abstract community of fate (a nation) within a specifiable territory with defined social and geographical borders. Nationalism is an ideology expressing a subjective attachment to the nation, though not necessarily the nation-state. Globalization, as we define it, is simply the extension of matrices of social practice and meaning across world-space where the notion of ‘world-space’ is itself defined in the historically variable terms that it has been practiced and understood. This definition allows for different forms of globalization across world-history, including during the period of the European empires in the nineteenth century – an important backdrop to understanding the present. As we suggest in Chapter 2, globalization is a layered and uneven process, changing in its form, rather than able to be defined as a totalizing condition or an end-state. In other words, globalization is a process that extends social relations across world-space beyond the kind of borders assumed by local communities or nation-states. This has become one of the key sources of the tension between global and national formation as different actors project and contest the forms of power associated with social extension of both the globalizing and nationalizing kind. In political terms, as James Rosenau writes (2003:3):

The news on the state of the world is both good and bad. Each day brings word of a world inching slowly towards insanity even as it moves towards breakdown. And not only do these integrative and disintegrative events occur simultaneously, but more often than not they are causally related.

Recently, these tensions have become pronounced to the point that many writers from both the Left and the Right proclaim that globalization is effecting a tidal wave of change and leaving the nation-state drowned in its wake (Albrow 1996; Ohmae 2005). The concept of a tidal wave is appropriate, but the process is less homogenizing and much more uneven than suggested. Despite the immensity of the change, it is now obvious that the tsunami of globalization is not drowning everything. It is certainly possible that processes of globalization may eventually undermine modern forms of nation-state sovereignty, but there is no inevitability about such an outcome, neither in logic nor in the day-to-day details of how power operates around the world. It is also becoming apparent that the dominant form taken by the ideology of globalism today – the neoliberal version that promotes a borderless world of unfettered capitalism – projects only one version of globalization among many alternatives (Gills 1999; Rupert 2000). Another version of globalization is being projected by globalizing solidarity movements (Cavanagh and Mander 2004).

What is happening to politics and economies under conditions of intensified globalization, and how should we respond? What is the relationship between nationalism and globalism? This is the first problematic addressed by the book. Most of the writers in this anthology do not assume that globalization or nation formation is either intrinsically good or bad. Rather it depends on what form the processes of globalization or the assertions of national identity take.

Across the turn of the twenty-first century, from ‘below’ we have seen both nationalist revivals and reassertions of postnational movements – from neotribal nationalisms and reconstituted religious nationalisms to anti-neoliberal globalization movements and new kinds of postmodern transnational politics. From ‘above’ we have also seen both reassertions of chauvinistic nationalisms and expressions of postnational sovereignty. The patterns to these changes and ‘revivals’ suggest the need for an approach that gets beyond the claims by some that globalization is simply a force of homogenization or social flattening. When Thomas Friedman (2005:45) writes confidently that the world is flat – ‘everywhere you turn, hierarchies are being challenged from below or transforming themselves from top-down structures into more horizontal and collaborative ones’ – he is (inadvertently) confusing the liberal hope for a better world with the neoliberal confidence that capitalist globalization is a harbinger of all that good (see for example, Norberg 2003; Wolf 2004). More than that, he is simply wrong. Globalization is not flattening everything before it. The layers of localization, nation formation and globalization have, if anything, become intertwined in even more complex ways. At the same time we need to get beyond the unhelpful arguments that globalization brings with it a chaotic world of flows (Urry 2003). A number of otherwise sophisticated writers have found themselves arguing that the postmodern world has become increasingly fragmented without having an account of the level at which fragmentation takes place, and the level at which reintegration is occurring. Globalization cannot be understood simply as processes of disorder, flow, fragmentation or rupture. Globalization is simultaneously a process of integration and differentiation. Even the term ‘network’ has to be treated with some care; including Manuel Castells’ (1996) suggestion that globalization can be characterized as technologically driven networks.

This leads us to the second problematic of the book. The dominant ideologues of neoliberal globalism herald a new era of corporate globalization (Steger 2004), but at the same time broader processes of globalism generate new foundations for identification and mobilization (Mittleman 2000). What does this mean for changing forms of solidarity, national and international? Just as classical imperialism generated anti-imperialist movements and anti-colonial nationalisms, so today’s ‘empire’ generates new frameworks for identification and mobilization (Negri and Hardt 2005; cf. Nairn 2005). While globalizing social forces generate frameworks beyond the national, in the process they also create new foundations for nationalism. In this context the book asks the following questions. Does nationalism re-enter by the back door, renewed and invigorated, whether as a partner of globalism or as its ideological bête noir? What are the contemporary bases for a politics of solidarity in a globalizing world? These questions run through all the chapters.

The book is structured into three sections: ‘Globalisms’, ‘Nationalisms’, and ‘Solidarities’. Here the terms ‘globalism’ and ‘nationalism’ are used in their most generic sense: the term ‘globalism’ is used as a short-hand concept to encompasses processes of globalization, subjectivities of the global and ideologies of globalism; ‘nationalism’ is used as a generic term to encompass processes of nation formation, the institution of the nation-state, the community of the nation, and the subjectivities and ideologies of nationalism. Part I, ‘Globalisms’ opens with a framework for understanding globalization and its social reach (Chapter 2), followed by three chapters centering on economic, political, and cultural dimensions of globality in relation to nationalism (Chapters 3–5). Part II, ‘Nationalisms’, reverses the focus, addressing the logics of nationalisms in globalizing contexts: respectively, liberal nationalism (Chapter 6), left nationalism (Chapter 7), postcolonial nationalism (Chapter 8) and colonial nationalism (Chapter 9). Part III addresses issues of solidarity and integration in a world of nationalism and globalism, asking firstly how differing forms of connectivity may be emerging, disrupting prevailing oppositions and relations, and, second, how might we deal with globalization as an enframing structure for social justice (Chapters 10–12). In short, the arguments in the first part on globalisms are set against the second part which centres on nationalisms – and both are set against the third part which debates the question of ethics and solidarities, national and global.

Globalisms

Issues of nationalism and globalism have come to the foreground of political considerations. This anthology presents a range of intersecting themes and perspectives, organized in the form of a debate. This introduction is intended as an entry-point into these debates, offering a critique of the chapters to follow, and developing a series of common threads. The book begins with a series of chapters discussing how conditions of increasing globality affect nationalism. While the first chapter models an understanding of globalization that embraces the continuing relevance of the national framework, the following three chapters present arguments for qualifying the continuing centrality of the national frame. They offer globalist provocations or counter-points for the following two parts. In summary, Paul James, one of the present editors, suggests that globalization maybe a framing process, however it reproduces nationalism even as it contributes to changing the form of the nation-state. Dick Bryan argues that globalisms effectively dissolve national power and force us to reject economic nationalism; Sergio Fiedler challenges social movement nationalism, asserting the centrality of ‘the multitude’; and Nandita Sharma rejects nationalism completely for its racist and colonialist logic, origins and practices.

We open and close the book in an immediately critical vein, attempting to subvert the national/global divide, but without coming down on one side or the other of the usual debating lines. Refusing to reduce national and global formation to two ‘levels’ of the social in themselves, the opening chapter by Paul James insists instead on discussing the processes and social relations that underpin both phenomena. From this stance, rejecting the nationalism frame, or alternatively rejecting globalism, misses the point. Our opening foray is to attack the spatial determinism of one-dimensional globalization, arguing that the broad configurations of globalism – what can be called ‘global formations’ – are not simply the product of the capacity to dissolve spatial barriers. Globalization carries the capacity to project power by transforming and overlaying more bounded social relations with more abstract relations. It is only as social relations have become more abstract and disembodied such as in the patterns of globalizing finance capital (information capitalism) and media culture (electronic mediatism) that the contemporary dominant form of global extension has emerged.

The focus on how people relate to one another allows for the creation of a typology of globalisms – from ‘traditional’ formations of globalization, through modern formations of globalization to what can be called ‘postmodern’ formations. Although, across history, globalism has always been projected by a degree of disembodied relations, postmodern globalism is carried through the over-powering dominance of disembodied social relations and thus has the greatest capacity to effect generalized change at a distance. The difference between traditional, modern and postmodern globalization in this characterization turns upon how those formations are theoretically distinguished: not as epochs, though there are clearly cultural dominants in different periods, but as differently practiced and understood ways of taking hold of time, space and embodiment.

This model of globalization thus begins with process rather than outcome. It is the capacity to mediate and extend social relations that is crucial. The contemporary process of abstracting and disembodying social relations is driven in part by globalizing capitalism, and currently is legitimized by ideologies of neoliberalism, but is not reducible to them. In the case of disembodied relations it is preeminently electronic technologies and techniques that carry the social beyond the embodied limits of face-to-face relations. The crucial shift explaining the character of today’s ‘global formation’, we argue, is the emergence of these mediating and abstracting technologies and techniques. A number of principal ‘modes of practice’, or sites, where disembodied power is projected can be distinguished: modes of production, exchange, enquiry, organization and communic...

Table of contents

• Routledge/Warwick Studies in Globalisation
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Globalisms, nationalisms and solidarities
• Part I Globalisms
• Part II Nationalisms
• Part III Solidarities
• Index