The Post-Colonial State in the Era of Capitalist Globalization

Tariq Amin-Khan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136461736
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

State formation in post-colonial societies differed greatly from the formation of the Western capitalist state. The latter has been extensively studied, while a coherent grasp of the post-colonial state has remained elusive. Amin-Khan provides a critical historical and contemporary understanding of post-colonial state formations in Asia and Africa, and suggests how this process differed from the formation of states in Latin America. In distinguishing between the post-colonial state and the Western capitalist state, the author argues that the unitary colonial state left a strong legacy on the decolonized states of Asia and Africa, reinscribing their subordination vis-à-vis Western states, transnational corporations and multilateral institutions. The indigenous elites' decision at the time of decolonization to retain colonial state structures meant the readaptation of capitalism-imperialism nexus to suit new post-colonial realities, which enabled the formation of clientelist relationships. This post-colonial reality and exploration of the contemporary context provides the basis of analyzing two post-colonial state forms, the capitalist and proto-capitalist varieties, which are examined using the case studies of India and Pakistan.

1 Context of State Formation

Differentiating European Nation-States from Colonial and Post-Colonial States

The rise of capitalism, the spread of colonialism, and the creation of the European nation-state stand in stark contrast to the formation of the postcolonial state. Latin American states, which are similar to, yet different from, post-colonial states, are not part of this study, although I refer to these states in this volume.¹ Nonetheless, from the colonial to the postcolonial era, Africa, Asia, and Latin America have taken diametrically dissimilar trajectories of national identity, state, and societal formation compared with Europe and North America. In this chapter, I analyze these differential contexts and related issues in four interrelated sections. First, I provide a historical context for state formation in Europe by foregrounding the capitalism–nation-state nexus—that is, the integral link between the rise of capitalism and the emergence of nationalism and the nation-state in Europe and its transformative drive for Europe’s capitalist development. The capitalism–nation-state nexus was critical, once ethnic groups became politically conscious about nation and nationalism, in breaking up the dynastic realms of the Habsburg, the Romanov, and others and in redrawing the borders of European nation-states. This European developmental path contrasts with the establishment of the colonial state in Africa and Asia at the behest of European colonial rulers. In the second section of this chapter, I show how the link between the rise of industrial capitalism and the emergence of European nation-states changed to the capitalism–imperialism nexus during the period of colonialism beginning in the late 1700s. Since the 1750s, however, the expansion of imperialist Western nation-states, beyond the Americas to Asia and Africa, was in pursuit of captive sources of wealth and raw materials to fuel European capitalist development and expansionism. Pursuing this economic drive, the metropolitan nation-state laid the foundation for colonial expansion and domination through the establishment of the colonial state, which stifled resistance and divided the colonized by manipulating conflicts among them around issues of identity based on religion, language, culture, and/or region. As these mechanisms of control, conflict-creation, and domination became more entrenched, culture became the terrain for the colonized to settle claims of inequity, injustice, and subordination through the assertion of caste, class, ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities. The emergence of these antagonistic conflicts among the colonized replaced the pre-colonial system of shared distribution of the society’s surplus (albeit among privileged levels of right-holders) with a pattern of feudal domination in which the colonial state had absolute control over tribute extraction. As a result of this economic change and in this environment of conflict, various groups of colonized peoples began to perceive their oppositional group as the ‘other’. In turn, these changes and the colonial state’s manipulative social strategy laid the basis for the colonized to develop the ideas of ethno-culturalism, nation, and nationalism and led to another series of identity conflicts. In the third section of this chapter, I will examine the concepts of nation and nationalism, assess critically the tendency among major theorists to universalize the European experience of nationalism and nation-state formation, and clarify how identity formation among the colonized has a very different specificity. To do this, I draw on Benedict Anderson’s most celebrated publication, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism,² which is useful here both for its distinct status and because his work is critical of Eurocentrism, yet universalizes the European experience to the ‘non-European world’, a tendency common to theorists of nationalism. In contrast to Anderson’s thesis, I briefly examine the period of colonial rule in India to show its impact on national identity assertion in post-colonial societies and how it differs greatly from the European experience. I also show how identities that emerged in conflict under colonial rule tend to have a long afterlife and shape the formation of state and society in the post-colonial era. Before I have analyzed national identity assertions in colonial India, I also distinguish my analysis from Partha Chatterjee’s approach to nationalism. In the final section of this chapter, I analyze the influence of capitalism–imperialism nexus on the social construction of the colonized peoples’ identity, which plays out as antagonistic conflicts in the post-colonial era. These contradictions, along with the role of clientelism, have enabled the re-invocation of the capitalism–imperialism nexus in the post-colonial era—an argument that is addressed in Chapter 2, this volume. What ties the analytical frame of these very different ideas and concepts together is the treatment of nationalism and identity formation by most theorists as largely an internally driven impulse leading to a common underlying separation of the internal from the external. Regrettably, this almost exclusive focus on the internal has shaped not only the analysis of nation and nationalism but also theorization about the state. This separation of the internal needs to be remedied by examining the dialectical interplay of internal and external moments.

By addressing this separation and the separation of the political from the economic in Chapter 3, this volume, I support my central claim that the post-colonial state has been the key mechanism of its society’s subordination (a role also shared by Latin American states)—both internally by fracturing and undermining civil society and externally by enabling the imperialist domination of the US and its Western allies. Faced with subordination in the era of capitalist globalism, the populace in post-colonial societies has become fragmented and rendered largely powerless in the face of an impositional unified front of powerful Western states, multilateral institutions, and corporate interests of mobile metropolitan capital that is able to move freely across territorial borders. Throughout this book, I aim to connect internal and external moments and to bridge the political and the economic within state theory. This approach differs from the dominant narrative that promotes such separations in social sciences more generally, especially in relation to state theory. The absence of an integrated analysis in state theory has hindered our understanding of the post-colonial state because the broad contours of Western capitalist nation-state theory have served as sketchy outlines for a theory of the post-colonial state. It is therefore necessary to examine the post-colonial state in its own specificity, especially in relation to the enormous legacy of the unitary colonial state.

In developing a theory of the post-colonial state, it is important not to simply advocate for the integration of internal and external dimensions without also being aware of the huge effect that the external, in the form of the capitalism–imperialism nexus, has had in shaping the broad structure of the post-colonial state. The dialectical interplay of these two moments is rooted in colonial history, as well as in relevant aspects of the colonial interlude (e.g., the historical trajectory of enclave production, export orientation, the determinate path of conflict among the colonized, and the inferiorization of the non-European world). The latter are recurring backdrops within even the integrated internal and external realities of the present post-colonial state. These historical threads need to be woven into postcolonial state theory, which I do beginning with this chapter, to clarify the historical antecedents to its character and propensities.

I Capitalism—Nation-State Nexus and the European Context

The capitalism–nation-state nexus has been central to the development of capitalism in Europe and to the emergence of the capitalist nation-state with its demarcated borders. However, some have claimed that capital, by its very nature, tolerates no geographical limits to its expansion.³ This is not to suggest, however, that capitalists do not need nation-state borders in order to protect their own ‘national’ capital. National borders first appeared, in the contemporary sense, when nation-states started to emerge in Europe during the late 1700s. For example, Eric Hobsbawm periodized the emergence of nation-states as beginning around 1780, situating this process as a result of capitalism’s historical rise, which superseded the old regional boundaries; the map of Europe only began to be redrawn on the basis of nationalism after 1918.⁴ Under feudalism, regional boundaries had been fluid because the parcellized sovereignty of feudal lords was based on a network of local and personal social relations, which gave way to the impersonal state of Absolutism that was largely under the control of centralized monarchies.⁵ As industrial capitalism emerged, clear outlines of the modern nation-state also became discernible. The composition and role of the nation-state has changed over the course of the last two centuries, given the very nature of capitalist development: its unevenness, innovative ability, tendency towards accumulation and monopoly control, and its stranglehold over weaker states by means of colonization and imperialist domination. However, throughout this process, the nation-state has been indispensable, especially for the support of hegemonic capitalist states such as Britain and France during colonialism and the US in the post-colonial imperialist phase. The imperialist domination of past and present is a direct outcome of capital’s expansionist trajectory. This relationship between capitalist expansion and imperialist domination is better understood by examining the capitalism–imperialism nexus, but before this link was forged, the capitalism–nation-state nexus facilitated the early drive for capitalist expansion outside the nation-state’s borders. This expansionist thrust and the drive for domination is the formative specificity of the nation-state which, as will be shown later, is radically different from the post-colonial state. However, the capitalism–nation-state nexus has varied from the time of slavery and colonialism to the current phase of ‘new imperialism’ or capitalist globalism; it has changed depending on the mode of subordination used by the imperialist metropolitan state in support of ‘national’ capital.

The categorical link that I have drawn here between the nation-state and the drive for capitalist accumulation on the basis of colonial expansion is not a link made by most theorists of nationalism or of the state. Many theorists see a link between the rise of capitalism and the emergence of nationalism but do not seem concerned that European capitalist development was not a wholly internal matter; rather, the nation-state facilitated the external impulse of capital to move outside the borders of its state. Similarly, these theorists have offered very little in the way of explanation or background about the formation of colonial and post-colonial states.⁶ Instead, analyses tend to universalize the European experience of nation and nationalism, as well as the European idea of the nation-state.⁷ For much of mainstream social theory, the idea of the nation-state is equated with modernity and universalized beyond Western nation-states to be equally applicable for post-colonial and Latin American states in the South. Embedded in this outlook is the universalization of methodological nationalism—the notion that nation, state or society is the “natural, social, political form of the modern world.”⁸ Even those who explicitly reject methodological nationalism and wish to also respond to “post-modern relativism,” end up universalizing the idea of the nation-state as well as the European basis of modernity.⁹

The problem of universalizing the European experience of nation and nationalism is an issue that also plagues much of the theorization on this subject. I will return to address this problem later, but here I will discuss how many scholars of nationalism do see the link between the rise of capitalism and the emergence of nationalism/nation-state. Well-known theorists of nation and nationalism (such as Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Elie Kouderie, and Benedict Anderson) as well as lesser known but perceptive theorists (such as Cornelia Navari¹⁰) all link, in one way or another, the rise of nation-states in Europe to the disintegration of dynastic realms and empires, such as the Austro-Hungarian or the Romanov dynasties. Within these formerly territorially bound empires lived diverse ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups who increasingly began to assert their identities on the political stage after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, from 1760 onwards. The idea of nation began to emerge, in other words, as ethnic groups in Europe began to affirm themselves politically on the terrain of nationalism. This was done through (often violent) ideological expressions of a group’s identity as a nation, imagined or real, which may have harkened back to primordial roots or to a more contemporary beginning, such as displacement or migration of that group from a territory or a state. When coupled with claims of rights to a territory or a state, nationalism began to construct a people as a nation. In other words, linking the expression of nationalism, the political and/or ideological assertion of a nation’s identity, with a particular territory of the nation (the state) or claim to a territory, produced the idea of a nation.¹¹

However, it is important to emphasize that the acquisition of consciousness as a nation (national identity), and indeed the very manifestation of nationalism, was played out in fundamentally different ways in Europe, North America, and some of the settler colonies of Europeans, as compared with the formerly colonized peoples who now constitute the so-called Third World. I am making this distinction at the outset, because I will argue here and in following chapters of this volume that the formation of national identity and state formation in post-colonial societies have very different political goals (not to mention the very different experience)—different from the economic drive of emerging industrial capitalism in Europe to nurture the ideology of nationalism and national identity formation. Therefore, Western capitalist states have tended, in varying degrees, to protect the interest of their respective ‘national’ capital and indigenous capitalists and have steadfastly promoted the general interest of capital and the world capitalist system (WCS) beyond their borders, especially in penetrating the territory of former colonies and post-colonial states. In contrast, states of Asia and Africa that were decolonized after the end of the Second World War (identified hereafter as post-colonial states) alongside Latin American states, which are together known as Third World states, overcame colonization only to be locked into varying degrees of subordination by, and dependency on, the US and metropolitan states of Europe.

In establishing the relationship between the rise of capitalism and emergence of nationalism in Europe, I have relied on a number of scholars who have either established or implied such a link. For example, Ernest Gellner’s work, Nations and Nationalism usefully establishes this relationship. However, Gellner’s theorization has some problematic aspects: aside from his attempt to universalize the European experience, Gellner includes glimpses of neo-Malthusianism on the issue of population growth, and his attempt to show that industrial development in Eastern Europe within the category of ‘industrialism’ minimizes the social basis for the rise of capitalism. Nonetheless, he is one of the few theorists of nationalism to devote considerable effort to link the rise of capitalism (‘industrialism’) with the emergence of nationalism. Gellner’s antithetical position to Marxism, as well an aversion to post-World War II developments in Eastern Europe under the control of the former Soviet Union, may explain his use of the term ‘industrialism’ instead of ‘capitalism’. Gellner attributes to ‘industrialism’ many of the features of capitalism without distinguishing between how the centralized bureaucracies of the former Eastern bloc states were transformed compared to Western Europe, the transformation of which was directly related to the rise of capitalism.¹² His otherwise complex analysis of nationalism is simplistic with regard to his notion of ‘industrialism’, which includes some of the elemental features of capitalism, such as the complex division of labour, an entrenched bureaucracy, and a new rationality based on means-ends efficiency.¹³ Application of this idea raises more questions than answers, but it is beyond the scope of this volume to address these questions.

In contrast, Cornelia Navari sees the emergence of ‘modern nation-states’ in Europe not simply “a tale of the withering away of old institutions.”¹⁴ The social changes described previously were introduced by capitalism and resulted in the destruction of the Old Order. Navari describes the “new creations—new institutions and new types of social relations—that knit society together in new ways”¹⁵ as follows:

Rationalism created the idea of the ‘citizen’—the individual who recognized the state as his legal home. It created the idea of legal equality, where all citizens have the same status before that system of law. It created the idea of the state that exists to serve those citizens [ . . . ] Capitalism created the ‘mass’—the masterless men who are free to sell their labour—and hence the material conditions for modern citizenship. It created the conditions for mass communication among them. It created classes and [ . . . ] tied those classes together by an intricate division of labour. It cast that division over vast territories, bringing hitherto distant regions into immediate functional relationships [ . . . ] The state created common languages and common education systems, and enforced common legal systems existing within clearly def...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Context of State Formation: Differentiating European Nation-States from Colonial and Post-Colonial States
• 2. The Post-Colonial State: Historical Antecedents and Contemporary Impositions
• 3. Theoretical Understanding of the Post-Colonial State
• 4. India: The Capitalist Variant
• 5. Pakistan: The Proto-Capitalist State
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index