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The Nation-State

  
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:10 / 10.05.02
Mentioned elsewhere that the Nation-State was a very suspicious concept, which got me thinking....

How do you see the nation-state? How can its borders be defined, and how defended? Is it becoming an artificial and unwieldy institution, and if so what should replace it? Do you feel any loyalty to your nation-state, and does that vary with the policies of its rulers?

General thoughts welcomed...
 
 
Shortfatdyke
15:06 / 10.05.02
as far as i'm concerned, borders are just lines on a map. with usually a lot of blood shed to form them. i am utterly in love with cornwall, not because it's part of 'my country' but because it's beautiful and i feel an immensely strong spiritual pull to the place. but i also love the swiss alps, san francisco, white rock in british columbia and freiberg in germany.

i feel no loyalty to the country i happen to have been born in. i cannot see any reason to do so. i have a mixture of cultures in my family (irish, jewish, possibly gypsy) and while i find it interesting, that's all there is. although i must say that under margaret thatcher, i felt distinctly ashamed to be english.

i do often find that those who strut around saying how england is the greatest country in the world (or, more often, how their little town is the greatest in the country) have little experience of other places. perhaps i am just a 'one world' hippy.

in the course of my job i get to read stories from people who worked in the colonies decades ago - old empire tales of how we brought civilisation to the darkies in india and africa and how, underneath it all, they were grateful really. i don't know how many people still look back on the empire as the good old days. i would hope they are a dying breed and that people are more aware of, and respect, different cultures.
 
 
cusm
15:48 / 10.05.02
I think the current reality of democracy is far from the original ideal. Using the US as a fine example, we've all but forgotten the idea that the federal government is a federation of states, each of which has their own government and local laws. Within these states, counties separate further to local sub-states. Within these, cities and townships apply local law. Within cities even, there are districts which can subdivide further. A government forms to suit the needs of the people, formed by direct democracy at the community level, and then works its way up to deal with broader and broader issues as needed.

The problem is, it doesn't work because the different levels don't respect their bounds. The federal government attempts to reach as far down to the community level as it can, violating the local government's right to control its own local laws. Ideally, the nation state should work to meet the needs of the local people by including smaller states as needed, states created by the people for the needs of the people. But in reality, its just the big nation that has the sway, so it doesn't work anymore.
 
 
SMS
16:32 / 10.05.02
The federal government attempts to reach as far down to the community level as it can, violating the local government's right to control its own local laws.

Abraham Lincoln is a perfect example of this.

In fact, I do feel a loyalty to my country, or at least I feel I should be loyal to my country. This may mean fighting for the country; it may mean protesting against it; it may even mean fighting against it. I don't think Viet Nam protestors were disloyal. They felt that it only did harm to fight in Viet Nam. It wasn't good for the U.S. to be there.

Our nation should be as our friend. We must help her avoid mistakes, and guide her when she will be guided, but we cannot turn our backs on our nation. If, at some point, the nation is ruled by a new form of Adolf Hitler, then we must do whatever we can to save her from his evil clutches.

We should be loyal to the country, but not necessarily the power behind it.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
13:00 / 11.05.02
I disagree, in very strong terms.

The whole idea of being 'loyal to one's country', even if it doesn't involve the more obvious forms of nationalism, tends to rely upon prioritising the welfare and security of the people legally defined as part of your own nation state (or the controlling elites in that state...), above all others.

And that's just one of the many reasons why the world is so fucked, reader.

(Wish I had more time to post... argh.)
 
 
BioDynamo
17:13 / 11.05.02

For about a hundred and fifty years the nation-state has been the prime enemy of anarchists, since it has been the sovereign power ruling over people, using its supposed legitimacy to control, in a variety of ways, the population within its borders and often also outside those borders.

Now, the state is no longer the supreme power, instead it is increasingly subjugated under both formal institutions (EU, WTO, IMF) and a logic of behaviour which limits its sovereignity. These together can be claimed to be a new level of power that subjugates both the nation-state and the subjects of the nation-states. The new level of sovereignity has been called Empire. (I feel stupid repeating this, makes it seem like one book explains everything for me, which is not true...).

Anyway, the nation-state was the prime enemy, and also the prime target for anarchists, what defined the anarchist movement, in a way. The same way the basis for the communist movement was the existence of a working class.

Now both these movements have lost their focus or their basis for operation, the nation-state is losing its relevance, and the working class has disappeared in a cloud of consumer goods and luxuries.

The disappearance of the nation-state is a great opportunity to form something new, a new basis for an interesting radical movement combining the best of the earlier ones.

So I see the nation-state as an enemy, an old one that is dying, and in the dying gives birth to a new, bigger enemy, of which I myself a part.
 
 
SMS
21:09 / 12.05.02
The whole idea of being 'loyal to one's country', even if it doesn't involve the more obvious forms of nationalism, tends to rely upon prioritising the welfare and security of the people legally defined as part of your own nation state (or the controlling elites in that state...), above all others.

I will agree that this requires prioritising, as is reflected in the analogy between friend and country. I don't think either of these means not acknowledging the "rights" of people not in the nation.

That the nation-state is an enemy to the anarchists, I will also agree. As you may have guessed, I am not an anarchist.
 
 
Gibreel
15:44 / 17.05.02
I'd actually like to resusitate this thread but I think we need some working definitions of a what a nation state is before we proceed. Anyone care to do the honours.

Haus - I know you were deliberately asking open-ended questions to get the thoughts flowing but would you care to essay a brief deinition of what you were refering to - and why you viewed it as beoming unsustainable. I think we're thrashing about here a bit.
 
 
SMS
20:24 / 17.05.02
Webster.com gives the following:

a form of political organization under which a relatively homogeneous people inhabits a sovereign state; especially : a state containing one as opposed to several nationalities

My previous posts had put no consideration into the especially part of this definition.
 
 
Gibreel
08:59 / 18.05.02
I think the Webster definition gets a bit wonky towards the end (er, isn't a nationality defined as the subject/citizen of a state) but the key thing here is the legitimacy of the nation state resting upon a common racial identity (and racial future?).

Now I think this link is coming under increasing attack - but is still deeply ingrained in many states. E.g. the current furore in France regarding Le Pen. Most European states do not explicitly identify themselves as monoracial but these ideas underpin a lot of their culture and policies. One major challenge to this is immigration.

The other major challenge is to this hegemony/autonomy come from subnational (either regional and/or racial separatists) and supranational forces (e.g. the EU, the WTO, IMF).

In the developed world, it's no longer acceptable to bloodily crush separatist movements but their success has been limited (e.g. the Scottish and Welsh assemblies in the UK). Regarding the supranational forces - how much power do these actually have? The EU is probably the most ambitious non-military project to redirect European affairs ever. But it's a particularly European phenomenom. NAFTA, ASEAN, Mercusor - no where near as ambitious. The WTO is currently being torn apart by the USA and the EU. The IMF is basically an instrument of control for the developed world over developing states (for better or worse - often but not always worse). This has been going on for at least 250 years - it's just a bit less blatant now. I would argue the nation state is actually surprisingly resilient.

Flyboy> I admire the heat of your rhetoric but: human nature is to form tribal groups based on similarity and difference. Nation states are simply the biggest macro-level example of this (altho some would argue that Civilizations fulfil this role). People naturally form groups - the question becomes how do you get these groups to co-operate rather than fight (move out of the the zero sum game). I would agree with you that much of the mythology surrounding racial / national identity is particularly harmful.

I find this question interesting because I come from a distinctly offbeat national state - the UK is actually a collection of 4 little national identities bound together by the most powerful (England). And I have been spending time in two countries (India and Singapore) that are quite recent in terms of their creation and that consist of a variety of races/religions and/or regions. Their creation myths are very different to classical nation states like Germany or Italy.

shortfatdyke> That's fine. You've constructed a 'one world hippy' identity for yourself but how does that affect your actions? What does it mean?

cusm> Yeah. But. Should the US States have complete autonomy from Federal government? What are we sayin here about their political organisation?

biodynamo> I think you're overstating the case. But what is your vision for the replacement for the nation state?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:56 / 20.05.02
Gib: I guess by the nation-state I was thinking of something in opposition to city-state..

So, the city-state is a situation where a particular civic centre exerts control over a geographical area and other smaller civilisation centres within that are, as in Ancient Greece or pre-Rissorgimento Italy. The borders controlled by the city-state depend to a very great extent on the power of the centrsl city to assert control over them, and are probably pretty porous near the edges.

The nation-state I guess is more about the creation of a) a larger administrative unit, with lines of administration running out from a central location to various different administrative or governmental sub-centres. So, Italy had a capital (Rome), but also various "regional capitals", where the administration of that area is handled according to orders from the capital. Perhaps the ideal of the nation-state is that, where you to stop anywhere within its borders, you could receive the answer "I am an Italian", say, in a way that not everybody in territory controlled by Mantua could say "I am a Mantuan".

As a result of this, nation-states tend to exist along ethnic or linguistic lines - when the map of Europe was redrawn after WW1, there was a conscious if politically compromised effort to try to group peoples according to language and culture. The idea being that having a single nation full of people who speak the same language makes shared cultural values and administration easier to maintain.

The other thing about nbation states is that, within their borders, the unity of their political organisation is unbroken - that is, that everybody int he country is subject to laws established by the central authority, or approved of by the central authority - so, for example, everyone in England and Wales is subject to the strictures of British law, and Scotland's differences are as a result of an agreement with the central authority. Likewise, the United States allows legal punishmnents, drinking ages etc. to be set by state legislators, but if a state were to attempt to withdraw the franchise from all women within its borders, the upper levels of the administration would intervene.

One idea of how the nation state now might be under threat is the idea of corporatised areas. On a basic level this is just an evolution of the idea that the local police go easy on employees of the town's major employer...or, on the next level, maybe you give a major corporation an undertaking not to adhere strictly to clean air or working hours legislation in order to entice them to set up a large factory in your country and bring capital, jobs and so on. The next stage might be if a company decides that, since it generates a lot of money for a region, it should have a say in how that region is administrated, be that a town, a region or whatever. Which is interesting because it means that sovereignty is no longer absolute within the nation-state's borders - that is to say, you would not be able to say of anybody encountered within the national boundaries "that person is subject to the same set of laws as (x)". You know, like Detroit in Robocop. Hem hem.
 
 
Fist Fun
17:25 / 20.05.02
the idea of corporatised areas.

Isn't disneyland an example of this? A new entity, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, was created specifically for the development with certain rights. They can decide zoning laws and lobby the state assembly. The only people eligible to vote are directors of Disney.
Multinationals can obviously see the advantage to be gained by imitating nations, but at the same time playing them off against each other to get the best deal. I used to work for a multinational and I remember walking to work one day looking at the company flag flying high. It had it all a flag, a logo, an anthem, a health policy, a split between permanent workers with benefits and contract workers without (basically, gastarbeiter), a demand for loyalty.
Obviously they will do whatever is in their interest, but do multinationals erode or entrench the power of the nation state?
 
 
grant
19:21 / 20.05.02
Note: Reedy Creek also has its own police force, and has run into a few problems with the state for exceeding bounds chasing/apprehending criminals, and, most notoriously, clubbing vultures to death who dared land near Cinderella's Castle.
By "a few problems" it's difficult to say what exactly I mean; there were fines, and maybe a couple people got fired, but I don't think anyone served time for breaking any of the laws that got (and still get) broken.
 
 
Gibreel
14:06 / 21.05.02
Buk> Good points - I think you've answered your own question - they do which ever is in their own interests.

I don't think these questions are new. States and companies have always been in bed with in each other (e.g. The British East India COmpany being a case in point). It's just that it's now more obvious that this is happening. What is unusual is the extent to which companies no longer identify with a particular nation - although often their cultures remain structured around the culture of their origin country. States everywhere are moving away from post-WWII model of overall control to a downsized and outsourced future. Whether this is good or bad depends on the accountability and transparency that gets built into the system.

May be what is required is a far more complex map of global politics than we're used to. Governments are actors - in fact a government may be several actors as its different agencies have different agendas. So are corportations. So are NGOs. So are terrorists. Politics is simnply about who has power and how they can and do exercise it.

Again at the local level this kind of thing has always gone on (Cadburys created its own model town called Bournville in the 19 century). The question becomes: what do we want to do about it and do we have the power to make it happen?

Haus> Will we return to the city state? Maybe. When you look at global rates of urbanisation, populations everywhere are shifting to the cities - and these cities are demanding more power to regulate their own affairs. And businesses are catching themselves up in the weft and weave of all this.
 
  
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