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State against Nation

by Cliff DuRand
Center for Global Justice, Mexico

INTRODUCTION*

The hyphenated term ‘nation-state’ reflects a linking of two historically related but separable social phenomena. The term ‘nation’ refers to an interconnected population that has a sense of their common unity. A nation exists both objectively in its compatriots’ interdependence and subjectively in the consciousness they share. The term ‘state’, on the other hand, refers to the political institutions that rule over the population of a certain territory or country where the members of one (or more) nation might live. The people are the nation; the political institutions are the state.

Historically, the rise of bourgeois society saw the linking of nation and state to the extent that in many minds the nation-state came to be thought of as a single (although complex) entity. To be a Canadian, for example, was thought of at once as being a citizen of a state and a member of a people. The resulting identification with such a nation-state as a single entity became an important source of identity. Who one was came in no small measure from the people with whom one shared a culture and a history. And in so far as the nation became linked to a state, subjection to its rule also became a part of one’s identity. Thus, one’s identity as a Canadian meant at one and the same time to be in a nation and under a state. Thus did the nation-state become an essential element in modern personal identities.

Nevertheless, a nation has its own interests and a state also has its own, often different, interests. It was the convergence of these two sets of interests that lent credibility to their conflation into a single entity called the nation-state. What I want to suggest is that in the present historical stage of capitalism known as globalization, the interests of nations and those of states are diverging and thus the two parts of this hyphenated term are becoming detached. Not only are they moving in different directions, but also globalized states are often pitted against the nations over which they rule. We will want to explore the possible implications of this for the social struggles of this era. But first, we need to look more closely at how a nation is constituted and its relation to the state that rules over it.

NATION BUILDING

Objectively the members of a nation are economically and socially interdependent. Often complex institutions that they may not even be fully aware of link them to one another. While these institutions may have evolved for a variety of other reasons, sometimes they are deliberately constructed so as to build a nation. The construction of the United States is a case in point.

Originating as a confederation of thirteen relatively independent states, the central government created by their federation constructed a web of interconnections through the 19 th century. The federal state saw to the construction of roads and canals and eventually railroads to link the people within its territory. The state also fostered means of communication: a postal system, telegraph, telephone, etc. put people in touch with one another across an increasingly vast area. This transportation and communication infrastructure facilitated the development of an economic integration. Commerce (utilizing a common currency and standard weights and measures provided by the state as well as a supporting legal structure) expanded from a local base to a regional and eventually national scope, as distant people became more and more interdependent. For example, at the beginning of the 19 th century the population of the city of Baltimore was fed by the wheat grown in rural Maryland. By century’s end the grain that supplied this and other cities came from the farms of the Midwest, transported by rail to milling centers in Minneapolis and Chicago, and the flour was distributed from there to bakeries and kitchens throughout the country. In exchange, the steel industry in the East supplied the plows and other farm implements used to grow the wheat as well as the rails on which this trade road. And it was the state that promoted the development of this nationally integrated market; it was the state that fostered the objective interconnections necessary to build a nation.

However, nations exist not only objectively but also subjectively: objectively in the economic and social interdependence of a multiplicity of people, and subjectively in the conscious identification of those in that multitude with one another. Subjectively a nation is what Benedict Anderson called “an imagined community.” But unlike the real community of a village or small town, which is based on face-to-face personal knowledge, a nation is a community that exists in the imaginations of millions of people who are perfect strangers to one another.

How does such an image get in the minds of so many? Most often this comes about through war. It is when men and women go forth along with others to defend their home and community that they come to identify with others with whom they are objectively interdependent. It is then that they come to imagine themselves as all part of that single community called “nation.” That is why so many national anthems are about war (defending against the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1812, in the case of our nation) rather than about the land that a people call their country (as in “America the Beautiful” or “This Land is Our Land”). It is out of armed civic virtue that nations are born.

It is important to understand the essential role of leadership in the creation of a nation. Nations don’t just evolve by some natural process; they are created. The imagined community of a nation is born when a leadership succeeds in mobilizing an otherwise diverse multitude behind a common project. (It doesn’t always have to be war. It can be putting a man on the moon.) But such national leadership always represents the interests of a class or group and is able to link that to the interests of other classes or groups so as to win their support of the common project. As Marx pointed out some time ago, a rising class always presents itself as representing a wider, more general sector of society. It is then through the experience of participating in such common projects that a multitude comes to imagine themselves as a nation and a people.

Modern nation-states are creations of the bourgeoisie and the political elites that serve their interests. These political elites, acting through the instruments of power that states provided, create the conditions needed for capitalist production and exchange. The function of the state is to maintain a social order. It does this not only by providing for the common defense, but also by its laws and social and economic policies. A crucial function of the bourgeois state is the protection of private property and enforcement of contracts. But capitalist society is divided by classes with different and even conflicting interests. Within it the interests of the capitalist class are dominant in so far as other classes are dependent on it. For example, the interests of wage labor within such a society lie in the wages and benefits they receive and the conditions under which they work. But their very employment depends on capital being able to realize a profit from its use of wage labor. Thus in maintaining the social order, the state invariably promotes the interests of capital because it is only if capital can profit that labor will be employed at all. In capitalism, as in all divided societies, the function of the state leads it to promote the interests of the dominant class within civil society. It is thus that the political elite serves the economically dominant class of capitalists.

We should always bear in mind that when we speak of the state as acting, when we say the state does this or that, we are using a shorthand expression. Strictly speaking it is the political elite that is acting through the structure of power of the institutions of the state. If we forget that, it is easy to reify the state. In reality, agency lies in the political elite; the state is its instrument.

However, in order to be able to govern effectively a state has to have some degree of legitimacy, i.e. its rule has to be accepted as right and good by the subject population. This means that the political elite that controls the instrumentality of the state has to have legitimacy. One way this is often achieved is through elections. By being able to elect which members of the elite will govern them, the state and its government is likely to be accepted as legitimate, even if elections are the whole of popular political participation. Polyarchy can be a very effective political system for maintaining class domination. However, as we will see shortly, this should not be confused with a genuine democracy.

Beyond the mere formality of elections, in order to maintain legitimacy the state also has to be able to respond in some degree to the demands of the popular classes, even though that may mean limiting the benefits to the dominant class. That is, the state must adopt the form of justice in order to ensure governability. From time to time the state may have to shift the benefits and losses of the economic system toward the favor of the popular classes in the name of justice. This official justice is not likely to go as far as the radical justice demanded by the popular classes. How far it will go depends on the level of political activity of those classes. When they are organized and active, they can sometimes win significant concessions to their interests. Those are the democratic moments in a nation’s history. The state can be turned to serve popular interests, although within limits. But when the popular classes are inactive, the state reverts to its default position that favors the economically dominant class and the gains previously won are gradually taken away.

That is the pattern we can plainly see in the polyarchic political system of the United States over the last 75 years. The 1930s and the 1960s were two democratic moments in that nation’s history. The social movements of those decades forced the state to adopt far-reaching measures in the interests of the popular classes, even when they were strongly opposed by the dominant class. But once popular forces were demobilized, as in the 1970s, the political elite could begin whittling away at those concessions. We have now seen three decades of class struggle by the dominant capitalist class, with little effective resistance from the popular classes. And so today, what remain of the welfare liberal gains of the New Deal are in danger.

Perhaps we can see more clearly the relation between nation and state if we contrast the U.S. and Cuba. The U.S. struggle for independence late in the 18th century was led by a propertied class that projected its interests as those of the whole society. They succeeded in defining the nation in terms of their class project. The Cuban nation, by contrast, has been defined by a different class project. It was born in the 19 th century in struggles for independence from Spain. However, the efforts of the Cuban nation to create its own state were thwarted by the intervention of the U.S. Under the resulting conditions of neo-colonialism the interests of the Cuban bourgeoisie were not identical to the interests of the nation as a whole and so any attempt to promote social justice was compromised. Official justice always fell far short of the more radical demands of the popular classes. Through the struggles of the 1950's and 60's the revolutionary leadership that captured the state was able to project a socialist vision that was embraced by most of the Cuban people. Thus the socialist project came to define the Cuban nation. Through this project popular struggles for social justice found their realization. The state was restructured so that it could more closely reflect the interests of the popular classes. Social justice is ensured through collective means with the agency of the state. As a socialist society the well-being of each is a public affair within the concern of all. In fact, the scope of public affairs is far broader than in the U.S. The state thus becomes the legitimate institutional structure for participation in collective decisions that are far reaching. Official justice is informed by radical justice. It is for this reason that Cuba is more democratic than the U.S.

In the U.S., on the other hand, the nation accepted the capitalist project as its own. In the years after World War II, a capital-labor accord was fashioned. In exchange for labor peace, capital shared with labor the gains from rising productivity and U.S. economic dominance in a war-ravaged world. In an accord mediated by the state, labor struggles accepted the rule of capital, seeking only to increase its gains within the existing relations of production. For its part, capital accepted the right of workers to bargain collectively, particularly since their own union then became the enforcer of the contract over its members.

To a large extent the popular classes came to identify their interests with the interests of capital. As a result, few questioned the assertion of former General Motors C.E.O. Charles Wilson (later Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower administration) that “What’s good for GM is good for the U.S.” Such an ideological obfuscation resulted in a trade unionism that saw itself as a partner with corporate capital and a working class that was rabidly anti-communist, defining patriotism as opposition to the enemy of capitalism. Such was the unity of nation and state through the years of the Cold War; it was a unity under the leadership of a political elite that served the interests of national capital.

GLOBALIZATION

In the closing decades of the 20 th century, the development of capitalism reached a new stage. In one sense of the term, globalization is not a new phenomenon. Capital has been globalizing for the past 500 years. But in spite of its extension into new areas of the earth, it remained rooted in nation-states that were its sponsor. There was British capital, and French capital, and German capital, and U.S. capital. No matter how far it may roam, it remained national capital. Thus even popular classes who identified the nation with the interests of “their capitalists” could be tricked into supporting imperialist projects that were not in their own interests. Working class youth would fight and die for flag and country, even though it was their own exploiters who benefited from their sacrifice.

Even though corporations had long entered into international trade and some had even set up production in other countries, capital remained national in the sense that it operated within a national economy that was externally linked to other national economies. Commodities were produced within the nation primarily for the domestic market and only secondarily for export. Each capitalist state fostered and protected the national circuits of accumulation within its territory.

What is new now is that capital is becoming not just international, but transnational. As William I. Robinson has argued, capital is becoming globalized in the sense that what were previously national circuits are being broken down and functionally integrated into new global circuits of accumulation. This is reflected in the emergence of global production chains linking the production and assembly of components in various parts of the world under the centralized command and control of transnational corporations. This decentralized and fragmented production is a feature of the new regime of flexible accumulation. Capital is no longer bound by the vertically integrated mass production model of the Fordist regime of accumulation. Capital is no longer confined to a national economy where better wages for workers means better consumers, thereby enabling it to realize profit. With what David Harvey has called “space-time compression” due to low cost transportation and global communications, goods and services can be produced across borders. Now capital has been set free to roam the globe in search of cheap and compliant labor, lax environmental regulations, low taxes, a business-friendly legal system and states that will protect its interests, while still able to sell commodities in segmented markets where there is effective consumer demand.

In effect, transnational capital is now able to take advantage in new ways of the combined and unequal development that the era of colonialism has left us. The countries of the North were enriched by the industrialization made possible through the exploitation of the South. At the same time, this impoverished the countries of the South (many of which had been far wealthier than Europe prior to their colonization) and underdeveloped their societies into dependent appendages of the North. When England arrived in India it was an obscure poor island off the western coast of Asia and India was a land of great wealth. When England was finally forced to leave, it was wealthy and India was poor. Now transnational capital is undertaking to complete the proletarianization of the South, taping its low wage labor force to produce goods for high-income consumers in the North as well as privileged enclaves in the South. The conquest continues to dismantle remaining non-capitalist social relations, uprooting populations from their traditional communities, thereby swelling the multitudes of low wage surplus laborers, while at the same time appropriating their resources and traditional knowledge. This renewed accumulation by dispossession enables transnational capital to realize immense profits.

William I. Robinson has argued that this process of globalization is creating a single economic system, global in reach, comparable to the national economies that national capital constructed in the 19 th century. The neo-liberal policies of the “Washington Consensus” promote a world-wide market liberalization and “the internal restructuring and global integration of each national economy. The combination of the two is intended to create … an open global economy and a global policy regime that breaks down all national barriers to the free movement of transnational capital between borders and the free operation of capital within borders…. This process parallels the nation-building stage of early capitalism in which an integrated national market was constructed with a single set of laws, taxes, currency, and political consolidation around a common state. Globalization is repeating this process, but on a world scale.”

Just as nation-building took place under the leadership of a class and the political elite that represented it, so too with the building of a global capitalist economic system. Hypermobil capital has become detached from the particular nations that once nourished it. As a result, the captains of global industry and finance are emerging as a transnational capitalist class. These owners and managers of transnational corporations, along with the bureaucratic staffs of transnational agencies like the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO, and in concert with the political elites of core states of the G-8, comprise a global ruling bloc that has been fashioning this new global order. In the meetings of the World Economic Forum and other such conclaves, this global ruling bloc has operated largely out of public view and without the democratic participation of the nations of the world whose peoples are being profoundly transformed. It is only through the militant opposition of an evolving global justice movement that this globalist conspiracy has become visible. More on that shortly.

THE GLOBALIZED STATE

Just as capital is becoming detached from nations, so too are the states that once nurtured capital within those nations. National political elites that have long served the interests of capitalism as a system, have become globalist political elites in service to transnational capital. In so doing, they have bent states away from purely national interests (although the rhetoric of “national interest” is still commonly used as camouflage) in favor of transnational capital and the emerging globalized system. Consequently they become less nation-states and more globalized states. Many observers have claimed that states are becoming obsolete. To the contrary, we want to argue that in their globalized form, states are still essential to capitalism. It is only in their ability to serve their nation that they are being weakened. How has this come about?

As a result of the last terminal crisis of capitalism -- the worldwide depression of the 1930s -- core states had adopted welfare liberal policies. Responding to the popular demands of their nations and the need to save capitalism from itself, they had sought to protect their people from the negative effects of the market and promote human development measures through support of education and culture; they had undertaken to regulate markets to ensure they would not break down; and they had adopted Keynesian policies to promote corporate profitability and effective consumer demand through deficit spending and taxation.

Similarly, many states in the periphery, responding to popular pressures from their people, had adopted similar welfare liberal policies. Employing an import substitution strategy, they sought to escape underdevelopment by promoting domestic industry, just as core countries had done earlier in their history. Such developmentalist states were responding to the interests of their nations, often against the opposition of core states that hoped to continue to benefit from the uneven development they had long maintained.

The process of globalization has involved the transformation of nation-states into globalized states. States are becoming globalized not in the sense that their rule is becoming global in scope (with the single exception of the United States), but in the sense that they serve the interests of global transnational capital more than the nation over which they rule. This transformation of states can be seen in the shift away from developmentalist, welfare policies to neo-liberal policies over the last few decades. This shift has taken place in the global South and the North alike.

In the countries of the South the shift was facilitated by the external debt crisis of the early 1980’s. Then as a condition for refinancing debt, the IMF imposed structural readjustment policies that involved dismantling social welfare programs, privatizing the economy and opening it up to foreign, i.e. transnational, investment. Reorienting the economy toward exports was designed to earn the hard currency needed to service the debt, but it also meant production was less for domestic consumption. It was the population of the nation that suffered.

In order to be able to impose these harsh conditions on the people, the state had to be insulated from popular pressures. This is one of the fundamental political requirements for an effective globalized state. The political elite has to be able to serve the interests of transnational capital even at the expense of the people it rules over and whom it nominally serves. This is to be done by what the World Bank has called “macroeconomic management by an insulated technocratic elite” willing to carry out unpopular reforms and able to withstand the resulting “IMF riots” (as former WB chief economist Joseph Stiglitz has called them).

An example of how this can be done is found in the case of Mexico. As a result of NAFTA, Mexico is now one of the national economies most thoroughly integrated into the global system. This was accomplished in spite of the revolutionary heritage from the early 20 th century that had produced a strong developmentalist state legitimated through extensive social welfare programs. A kind of nationalist patrimonial state had been consolidated in the 1930s during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas and continued under the political organization that evolved into Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI. As an official party, PRI, in the words of Mexican historian Elisa Servin, “functioned as a state apparatus, utilizing a powerful corporate structure and a thickly woven network of interests and relationships to operate as a privileged space for mediation and negotiation between state and society.” PRI political dominance continued unchecked until the end of the century through a combination of cooptation of popular forces (campesinos, workers, and the middle classes), patronage, election rigging, and, when all else failed, assassination and violent repression. For seven decades Mexico experienced political stability under the rule of an insulated elite –just the political conditions needed to achieve a state-directed integration into the globalizing capitalist system.

The drive to use this political power to globalize the state came from within the state-party bureaucracy. Under the external impetus of the debt crisis, Harvard trained technocrats succeeded in capturing PRI and through it the presidency. Neo-liberal reforms were pushed through, beginning under President Miguel de la Madrid (1982-88) and then consolidated under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-94), culminating in the incorporation of Mexico into a North American Free Trade zone, NAFTA. Salinas built a political base independent of those PRI leaders still committed to the Revolution’s heritage by co-opting local campesino groups and neutralizing or co-opting PRI unions -- all this in order to make way for the neo-liberalization of the Mexican state that De la Madrid had begun. As the head of Ford Motor Company in Mexico, Nicholas Scheele, observed, “is there any other country in the world where the working class…took a hit in their purchasing power in excess of 50% over an eight-year period and you didn’t have a social revolution?” It was quite a political feat, comparable to the undoing of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the U.S., begun during the Reagan presidency and now being completed under President Bush.

The methods Salinas used in the campo through PRONASOL or Programa Nacional de Solidaridad, co-opted previously autonomous, oppositional civil society groups, even linking with local Maoist leaders by promoting programs based on the “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” bringing them into his camp politically so he could carry through national policies (NAFTA) that were contrary to their interests. The strategy Salinas used in the campo is well summed up in the slogan that LaBotz suggests for him: “where civil society is – there the state shall be.”

This tying of civil society to state elites whose hegemony is then accepted is the essence of what political scientists call polyarchy. As a political system of elite rule based on competitive elections that masquerades as democracy, the U.S. has promoted polyarchy throughout the global South, as William I. Robinson points out in his book Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention and Hegemony. Salinas’s rule is a textbook case of such elite rule and it succeeded in transforming the Mexican state from a nation-state into a globalized state. However, this transformation and its effects undermined PRI’s legitimacy and weakened the system of presidentialismo, the twin pillars of the political system that President Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) was unable to repair. Although PRI lost the presidency in 2000, the Partido Acción Nacional or PAN government of Vicente Fox enthusiastically continues the neo-liberal policies of his PRI predecessors. The Mexican state seems to have been successfully locked in to serving the interests of transnational capital above those of the nation. It is doubtful that even a Lopes Obrador presidency (the populist PRD candidate in 2006) could detach the economy from transnational capital any more than Lulu could in Brazil.

The same can be said of the core state of the United States. The U.S. is the hegemonic globalized state. Since the end of World War II it has used its dominance to construct a globalized capitalist system. And initially it was able to do this while also maintaining welfare liberal policies. That was possible because at that time capital was still national, and amidst the devastation of the other core industrial countries, U.S. capital had no competitors. However, by the 1970s, that was to change.

The two world wars were a consequence of interimperialist rivalries among European and Japanese capital acting through their respective nation-states. By 1945 the victorious states resolved to avoid another such war by creating international institutions to keep peace between states (the United Nations system) and build an international economic order conducive to capitalism (the Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF and World Bank and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs or GATT –later to become the World Trade Organization). The lead in these efforts was undertaken by the only state with an industrial base still intact, the United States. The U.S. undertook this challenge, however, not solely on its own behalf, but also on behalf of the European colonial powers now weakened by war. It was understood that to avoid a return to fratricidal interimperialist rivalries, this leadership must represent the interests of capitalist countries as a whole –a general rather than a particular interest. It was this that made recognition of U. S. leadership possible. It was this that made U. S. hegemony possible. I use the term ‘hegemony’ in the Gramscian sense of ‘consensual domination.’ Other core capitalist states accepted U. S. dominance in the post-war alliance in a kind of ‘collective imperialism’ over the South – Europe’s soon-to-be former colonies. The U. S. became the ‘indispensable nation,’ the first among equals, in the words of Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.

What has been constructed step by step over the ensuing historical era was a global system at once economic, political, cultural and military, designed to give capital unrestricted mobility as it seeks ever greater accumulation. Institutions have been built to regulate trade and remove barriers to capital penetration, overt and covert interventions have sought to secure dominance of local elites favorable to capital, and capital itself has been consolidated and concentrated into ever larger transnational corporations. While the U. S. state led these efforts, the system that evolved was no longer rooted in any national territory; it was global. It answered to the description of what Hardt and Negri called an Empire, as distinct from imperialism.

“Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries….Empire…is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers….[S]overeignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supernational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.”

This evolving global structure of economic and political rule made possible the gradual detachment of capital from its historical roots in nation-states. As we have seen above, capital has expanded beyond the confines of the national economies that had once nurtured and protected it, taking the organizational form of the transnational corporation. And as capital has become globalized, so too has its chief state sponsor. The United States has become the hegemonic globalized state.

Just as in its nation-state stage of adolescence, capital had needed the protection of the state, so too the transnational corporations require protection that comes from the new transnational institutions of governance. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization have been crucial in opening new markets, destroying older competing economic structures, establishing rule-based trade, adjudicating disputes, etc. –all necessary functions for the orderly global expansion of capital. Perhaps in the future these might even become elements in a transnational state serving global capital, as Robinson suggests. But for now transnational capital requires the service of the globalized states that have morphed from nation-states. As we can clearly see in the WTO, the rules are being written by transnational corporations, advocated by core states, adjudicated by transnational technocrats and then legitimized enforcement is carried out by globalized states against each other and their own national populations.

And when all else fails, there is still the U. S. military ready to do the job. As New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman has so candidly observed:

“[T]he hidden hand of the market will not work without a hidden fist…. The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

As the global hegemon, the United States claims a kind of imperial sovereignty, enforcing the requirements of transnational capital on disobedient states, a.k.a. rogue states, whose sovereignty is to be limited. This is a marked departure from traditional concepts of sovereignty. Since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 proclaimed the inviolability of national borders, states were not to intervene in each other’s internal affairs. While this principle was often violated in fact, it was accepted as the norm for inter state affairs. But that concept of sovereignty has now been significantly altered. The US is now proclaiming a new norm: imperial sovereignty for itself and limited sovereignty for all others. Regime change is asserted to be a legitimate right of imperial sovereignty.

Imperial sovereignty means that a state can act unilaterally (not having to justify itself to others; being able to keep secret its reasons for action; being able to coerce others to accept those actions) and with impunity (being a superpower means never having to say “I’m sorry”; being unaccountable to international law, exempt from World Court and International Court of Criminal Justice; US troops never to be under foreign command). Fundamentally modifying the Westphalian state system, there is an asymmetric relation between a state with imperial sovereignty and those with limited sovereignty. In the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, an imperial state is asserting the right to initiate war to prevent any other state from becoming a possible future challenger to its dominance. As Henry Kissinger has pointed out, preemption “cannot be a universal principle available to every nation [sic.].” It is reserved for a state with imperial sovereignty, not subordinate states.

Since the early post WWII period, the U.S. has come to increasingly function as an imperial state. Often its “leadership of the community of nations,” a.k.a. “the free world” was exercised with the consent of other states, or at least core states (since they are the ones that really count). In recent years, often times this consent was manipulated or even coerced. With the Bush administration, the consent required for genuine hegemony has been all but dispensed with. This has led many to assume that the U.S. is turning away from a half century of building transnational governance institutions and toward a nationalistic projection of power in its own interests. The Bush administration has certainly been very successful in stirring up nationalistic forces within the American nation and harnessing them in support of such policies. However, the interests it seeks to serve are no longer just national in scope. The U.S. state has itself become a globalized state. The political elite has long served the interests of capital and continues to do so now. Only now that capital has become increasingly transnationalized. And so it has come to see itself as the unique state agent capable of promoting the on-going globalization of capital. In the absence of a single global federation of states to promote and maintain capitalism, the political elite of the U.S. has volunteered for that role, using its state as the instrument –an imperial state claiming to represent the whole. While many in the foreign policy establishment have been critical of the unilateralist and militaristic methods of the Bush administration’s neo-cons and worry that the other transnational institutions of governance are being weakened, they have long shared the same imperial aim. The debate is only a difference as to the most effective methods: global order through military dominance or under hegemonic consent.

Even prior to the Bush administration, in the 1990s, sovereignty underwent serious erosion. So-called “humanitarian interventions” went far in gaining recognition that a government was accountable to other states for the way it treated its own people; the exercise of sovereignty was limited by certain universal principles of human rights. This was the driving wedge for acceptance of a kind of limited sovereignty. The U.S. was quick to assert this for others, but never for itself. It was the U.S. that claimed the “responsibility” to lead “the community of nations” in holding rogue states to the new standards –rogue states being those still outside the orbit of global capitalism. It was thus that it claimed an imperial sovereignty for itself. But, we should remind ourselves, that was the way the 19 th century European imperialist powers had always acted towards nonWestphalian peoples elsewhere in the world. In fact, the ‘new imperialism’ may be nothing but the wine of the old imperialism in the new bottle of globalization.

But that new bottle has arguably changed the wine. Far from spelling the end of states, Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued that the globalization of capitalism requires a system of multiple states under the hegemony of an imperial state that maintains “a delicate and contradictory balance between supressing competition and maintaining conditions in competing economies that generate markets and profit.” Such a system of multiple states requires a global policeman with sufficient military force to prevent the emergence of competing forces globally or regionally that could lead to interimperialist rivalries. In the words of the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy of 2002, it requires “full spectrum dominance.” The implication of this view of the so-called neo-conservatives then is that military dominance by the U.S. is not just an expression of unilateralist nationalism, it is also functional for the system of globalized states that global capital requires. Thus is the logic of capital confounded with the logic of state power (at least for the hegemonic imperial state).

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the globalization of capital, so far it has not been able to dispense with states. Indeed the existence of multiple states has been functional in many ways. So far Wood is right to assert that “the more universal [i.e. global] capitalism has become, the more it has needed an equally universal system of reliable local states” as it has also needed a dominant imperial state. But that does not mean, as she claims, that “the ‘globalized’ world is more than ever a world of nation states.” Rather, it means it is a world of globalized states, i.e. states serving the interests of global capital rather than their nations.

STATE AGAINST NATION

“The governments of the U.S. and Mexico have declared war on the Mexican people, and I don’t know why.” “The politicians are all paddling in the same boat together.”

--- words from a Mexican popular song, August 2005

As we have seen, there has long been a link between class interests within civil society that enabled the state to represent the nation while actually serving the interests of a part of civil society. However, with the globalization of capital, it has become detached from the nation. Transnational capital now roams the planet in search of accumulation. Yet, the state still functions to serve the interests of the transnational corporations, even when that is against the nation in which it is based. Thus the globalized state finds itself against the nation. With neo-liberalism, the state (in both core and peripheral countries) has abandoned the people for transnational capital.

We are seeing globalized states emerging in both the core and the periphery; states that can no longer represent the collective interests of their peoples because of a commitment to neo-liberal trade and investment policies. With respect to their nations, they have become disarmed, whether by complicity or threat. The political elite turns a deaf ear to the people, claiming that international competitiveness prevents them from responding to their pleas for social justice. But with respect to capital, especially the transnational corporations, they remain powerful and active. Thus the state becomes ever more transparently the instrument of capital than ever before. And with that the liberal alliance between the popular classes and the national elite that had once made welfare developmentalist national projects possible unravels.

This presents a legitimation problem. As neo-liberal globalization has transnationalized capital and globalized states, it pits those states against their nations. More and more as the state is globalized, it is no longer able to promote the common welfare but acts to prevent it. Wages must be kept low in the name of competitiveness; workers must be kept disorganized (capital has long dreamed of a union-free workplace); health, safety and environmental regulations must be loosened (“get government off our backs,” intoned Ronald Reagan); the tax burden must be lifted from capital as an incentive to invest (thereby starving social programs); corporations are encouraged to move “off shore”, taking jobs with them, and on and on. When the people cry out in protest, the state responds, “The market made me do it” –feigning impotence in the face of the very market that it created.

How is the political elite able to get away with this con game? How are they able to maintain the compliance of the subject population, cooling them out so they will accept their loss? In the case of the United States, the culture of individualism and the seductions of consumerism have played vital roles. Both have fostered a privatization of life that has depoliticized society. That has left the state and the political elite relatively free from demands of the popular classes. And as Frederick Douglass observed long ago, “power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and never will.”

Mass consumerism has been especially effective in placating the American people. Even in the face of declining incomes over the last quarter century, the flood of cheap goods from the sweatshops of the global South has fed the insatiable, media stimulated appetites of consumers. Although this has been sustained by growing personal and national debt (which itself is not sustainable in the long run), it has so far been an effective prophylactic against popular challenges to the neo-liberal corporate globalization. WalMart has made a significant contribution to the political quiescence of the American people.

If we look to the South we can see a different process contributing to the political stability of globalized states. Mexico again is a particularly instructive case. The U. S.-Mexico border is the only place where a First World country and a Third World country border each other. The dialectical relation between these two is revealing. We noted above how the Mexican political elite was able to impose neo-liberal globalist policies on a reluctant population, privatizing key sectors of the economy and downsizing social supports. It has also sought to dismantle the traditional small scale farming that had succeeded in feeding the growing population, replacing it with large scale commercial agriculture for export. This has freed up more labor power from agriculture so as to supply industry with low wage workers. As a result, Mexican agriculture now supplies the U.S. market with vast quantities of fresh vegetables while Mexico imports more and more of the food needed to feed its population. Displaced campesinos work in prison-like conditions in maquila industries or flock across the border to seek work. At the same time, that industry is part of a global assembly line supplied with components from abroad and consequently does not generate local suppliers. In order to be competitive in the global “free market” the system depends on low wage labor and as a result the standard of living of most of the population remains low or has even declined.

Meanwhile, north of the border, the U.S. consumer economy depends on low wage migrant labor from Mexico and Central America as well as cheap, labor intensive goods imported from those low wage areas. What keeps the wages of immigrants low is not only the large supply of workers desperate for work, but also the fact that many of them are illegal and thus highly vulnerable and unable to make demands on their employers. This brings into focus one of the important functions of a territorial border such as that between the U.S. and Mexico: by limiting the mobility of labor at the same time that capital enjoys high mobility, wage levels are kept low on both sides of the divide that the two states enforce. The territories controlled by states might thus be thought of as “population containment zones”, to use an apt phrase of sociologist Philip McMichael. Robinson comments, “the nation-state system boxes in and controls populations within fixed physical (territorial) boundaries so that their labor can be more efficiently exploited and their resistance contained.” Here again we can see how a system of multiple territorial states can serve to maintain the inequalities between nations that is essential to the continued combined and unequal development of global capitalism.

The migration, both legal and illegal, from Mexico to the U. S. is massive. For example, in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato (a traditional “sending state”) there are whole villages where no able-bodied men can be seen, only women, children and the elderly. And many of the young women have also left for work in the maquiladoras. The families left behind are sustained by remittances sent home from El Norte. For the whole of Mexico remittances totaled $20 billion in 2005, up from an estimated $16.6 billion in the previous year.

One might well wonder what would happen if the safety valve of migration were not available to the Mexican campesinos? Early in the 20 th century similar dire conditions in the campo gave rise to a major peasant revolution. Now migration and the dollars that come home from it have given campesinos another option, another way to survive. Without it, the countryside could explode once again. Migration has been a major factor in political stability, insulating the Mexican elite from the consequences of their service to transnational capital. And how about other, more distant regions of the global South where the migration option is not so readily available? As those societies are more closely drawn into the global net of capital, their national economies are undermined, and their states globalized, might their elites be confronted by new revolutionary forces? Those nativists in the U. S. who want to end migration should be careful –they might get what they wish … and along with it some unexpected consequences.

What we can see in all of this is globalized states in both core and peripheral countries acting in the service of transnational capital even at the expense of their own national populations. The state’s historical function of preserving the social order is increasingly accomplished with no more than a passing glance at the form of justice that had once ensured governability. The governance exercised by globalized states amounts to providing macroeconomic and political stability while enforcing on its population norms established at the transnational level.

This last point is well illustrated by Chapter 11 of NAFTA, negotiated by technocrats for the three major states of the North American continent. It gives corporations the right to sue governments to recover lost future profits resulting from state action, even if that action was undertaken to promote the common good of its nation, e.g. protect health, the environment, working conditions, income levels, etc. Further, such suits are adjudicated not in national courts, but by a transnational body of experts operating in secret. States are expected to enforce its decisions on its own nation’s taxpayers. This privileging of investor rights (i. e. the interests of transnational capital) over the democratic rights of a nation, agreed to by its own state, shows the extent to which that state is no longer a nation-state but a globalized state.

The effort in 1998 by core states to globalize the principle of investor rights in a Multilateral Agreement on Investment or MAI shows the direction transnational capital seeks to take the global economy. Although this effort, undertaken by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or OECD (a club of the richest countries) was aborted due to worldwide popular opposition, it remains on the agenda of the transnational capitalist class. The successful (for the time being) resistance to capital points to the fundamental contradiction of corporate-led globalization: the contradiction between transnational capital and the globalized states that serve it and, on the other hand, the nations with which popular classes identify. And it points to the centrality of the struggle for democracy in resistance to corporate globalization.

States, even globalized states, require some measure of legitimacy in order to be able to govern. That means that political elites have to respond to concerted popular pressures, even those that oppose the agenda of transnational capital. The opposition to MAI was moved by the realization that its adoption would deny them the opportunity to protect their own interests against foreign capital. It was born of a nationalistic concern to preserve sovereignty in hopes that democratic pressure would be able to make the state an instrument of the popular will. They were unwilling to surrender to transnational capital the last, best means for protecting the national interest –the nation-state.

This suggests a multi-pronged strategy in opposition to transnational capital: 1) a popular struggle for the democratic retrieval of the state by the nation, and 2) resistance at every turn to the efforts of transnational capital to consolidate its global rule. To date, the anti-corporate global justice movement has focused primarily on the second of these strategies. But it should not forgo the powerful appeal of an enlightened nationalism to the popular classes to “take back the state” from the globalizing elite who have betrayed the nation. The nation-state remains an important terrain of political struggle even in a globalizing world.

As we have seen, a state may serve either the interests of a dominant class or popular classes. Which it is, depends on the political activity of the various classes and the leadership they throw up. Globalized states are led by political elites beholden to transnational capital. They have put forth a neo-liberal project that identifies the interest of the nation with that of capital, and especially transnational capital. But this identification has worn increasingly thin as economic inequalities have widened within nations and between them as well. In response, radical social movements have emerged. Some, as the piquetero movement in Argentina and the popular and indigenous movement in Bolivia, have even been able to topple neo-liberal governments. The social movements of Latin America are putting forth alternative projects for nations and even redefining what the nation is. Some have been anti-state while others have recognized that to the extent the state can be captured by popular forces, it can be a powerful instrument against transnational capital. Witness Chavismo in Venezuela, which has given rise to participatory leadership and power in poor communities in a kind of “nationwide social movement-cum-political party.” This kind of extension of a revolutionary state into civil society and extension of civil society into the state is similar to the early development of Committees for the Defense of the Revolution or CDRs in revolutionary Cuba. In other cases social movements remain outside the state, thereby avoiding cooptation by entrenched political elites and preserve the ability to act independently through civil society to affect state policy, as for example Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST in Brazil.

Often social movements are better able to represent the general interest of a nation than political elites, tied as the latter are to the particular interests of dominant classes. This is because in order to grow to the scale of a mass social movement, they must universalize their agenda in order to attract broad support and build alliances. It is even possible for a social movement to build a kind of parallel power to the state and the dominant class. This can be done by creating alternative economic institutions (e.g. cooperatives as in Mexico’s Yucatan or occupied factories in Argentina) and autonomous participatory structures of governance (e.g. the Zapatista’s Juntas de Buen Gobierno and their Caracoles), that strengthen civil society as an alternative to a globalized state. In this way, popular forces can literally reshape the nation out from under the control of the state. Which of these various relations between social movements and the state is optimal depends on conjunctural factors such as the country’s political leadership, the correlation of class forces within civil society, pressures from outside by transnational capital, etc. Pragmatics, not ideology, must shape strategy.

It is important to recognize that such popular struggles are not solely motivated by material self-interest. As we said earlier, a nation is an imagined community. As such, the image of what that community is, is crucial. How do the members of a nation understand themselves? What are the core values they share? What kind of life do they aspire to for all members of the nation? The answers to these questions define what a particular nation is. People will be motivated to struggle in defense of that image as much as, or sometimes even more than, their self interest. That is because the nation they belong to is a part of their own identity. “I am an American” or “I am a Mexican” or “I am a Cuban” defines more than one’s place of origin, it defines one’s being. Thus a threat to what the nation represents in ones imagination is a threat to ones very self, to ones identity. In defending it, one is standing up for what one is; one is defending one’s dignity.

This national self-image can play a vital role in the struggle for the democratic retrieval of the state. For example, Americans see themselves as a kind, generous, well meaning nation. The aggressiveness of the Bush administration’s foreign policy violates this national self-image. Thus many Americans find it profoundly unsettling. Invading other countries or bullying small nations is not what America is about in their mind. The political elite has to justify it in terms of “national security” or “defending freedom” or “promoting democracy.” But if these rationales can be exposed and they are able to learn that their political leadership has been carrying out such actions for many years, they feel violated, betrayed. When the skeletons are brought out of the closet, discovering reality can be a radicalizing experience.

As globalized states lose legitimacy with their own national populations, there arises the possibility of a politics of national unity. While led by the popular classes, this unity can include the petty bourgeoisie and, in the periphery at least, even those sectors of national capital threatened by transnational corporations. This is similar to the politics of national unity advocated by Jose Marti in order to win independence from Spain for the Cuban nation. And it is the same politics of national unity being followed today by the leadership of the Cuban Revolution.

The Cuban Revolution was unique among the many revolutions in the 20 th century: it was the one that occurred in the most highly neo-colonized society. For the first half of the century Cuba was a dependent satellite of the U. S. The Cuban state represented U. S. interests more than those of the nation. The resulting loss of legitimacy contributed to its demise.

Today in the era of globalization, globalized states are in a similar position, only now they are beholden not so much to a foreign country, as to transnational capital. Nations find their interests betrayed, their established social relations disrupted, their livelihood threatened, their people impoverished –and their own political elite is complicit in this. Such are the conditions that may give rise to the national revolutions of the 21 st century. The contradictions of globalization are giving rise to its supercession. History may yet record that the Cuban Revolution was not so much an exception as a precursor of what was to come. It was just ahead of its time -- it was the first revolution of the 21 st century.

* I am indebted to Olga Fernandez Rios and Miguel Limia David for discussions that helped to sharpen the ideas developed in this essay. I also want to thank Mike McGuire, Bob Stone, Steve Martinot, and Jerry Harris for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of the essay.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 1991.

This point is succinctly made by the title of Chris Hedges’ book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Public Affairs, 2002. Indeed, it is what makes us, us.

Cf. William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention and Hegemony, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Cf. Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique, Little Brown, 1967.

I thank Milton Fisk for the theory of justice and the distinction between the form and function of the state used here. Cf. The State and Justice: An Essay in Political Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Cf. Cliff DuRand, “Cuban National Identity and Socialism“ at http://www.CubaConference.org

William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, p. 11.

David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford University Press, 2003.

As Noam Chomsky has aptly put it in the title to his book Year 501: The Conquest Continues, South End Press, 1993.

Robinson, op. cit., p. 78.

Samir Amin has suggested the term ‘market states’ in “Capitalismo, Imperialismo, Mundializacion”, Marx Ahora, Nro.4-5, 1997-1998. But this fails to focus on what is new in the present stage of globalization. The function of the state has always been to serve capital. Today’s globalized state undertakes to serve global capital.

Cf. Cliff DuRand, “Neo-liberalism and Globalization” at http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/papers/durand2.htm

World Bank, World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 152.

Elisa Servin “Another Turn of the Screw: Toward A New Political Order”, Cycles of Conflict, Centuries of Change: Crisis, Reform and Revolution in Mexico, Duke University Press, forthcoming.

Quoted by Charles Bowden, “While You Were Sleeping: In Juarez, Mexico, Photographers Expose the Violent Realities of Free Trade,” Harper’s, December 1996, pp. 44-52.

Dan La Botz, “Carlos Salinas and the Technocratic Counter-Revolution” chapter 6 from Democracy in Mexico: Peasant Rebellion and Political Reform, South End Press, 1999.

Cf. also Cliff DuRand, “Democracy and Struggles for Social Justice” at http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/papers/durand1.htm

The term ‘collective imperialism’ comes from Samir Amin, “The Alternative to the Neoliberal System of Globalization and Militarism Imperialism Today and the Hegemonic Offensive of the United States” February 25, 2003.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000, p. xii.

Thomas Friedman, “Manifesto for a Fast World,” New York Times Magazine, March 1999.

Quoted by Noam Chomsky, Z Magazine, 18,2 (2005), p. 40.

Cf. Jerry Harris, “To Be or Not To Be: The Nation-Centric World Order Under Globalization,” Science and Society, 69,3 (July 2005)

Edward D. Marks, “From Post-Cold War to Post-Westphalia,” American Diplomacyhttp://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD-Issues/marks-westph.html

Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital, Verso, 2003, p. 157.

Cf. David Harvey, op. cit. and Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times, Verso, 1994.

Even William I. Robinson, who is otherwise a critic of state-centric theories in this era of globalization, admits that “National boundaries … are mechanisms functional for the supply of labor on a global scale and for the reproduction of the system. Here we see how the continued existence of the nation-state serves numerous interests of a transnational capitalist class.” Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization, Verso, 2003, p. 274.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, op. cit. p. 152.

Ibid. p. 154.

29. David Barkin, “The End of Food Self-sufficiency”, Distorted Development: Mexico in the World Economy, Westview Press, 1990, pp.11-40.

Quoted by Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism, op. cit., p. 106.

Fred Rosen, “From Mexico to New York Labor Joins the Struggle”, NACLA Report on the Americas May/June 2005, pp. 8-11. Cliff DuRand, “Mexican Immigration and Globalization,” http://www.globaljusticecenter.org

A recent Gallup International poll of 50,000 people in 68 countries found that 65% do not think their country is governed by the will of the people, even though 47% thought their elections were free and fair, according to a BBC World Edition report, http://news.bbc.co.uk, accessed September 14, 2005.

Components of a multi-pronged strategy include:

a. expose and disrupt the emerging transnational governance structure

b. democratic retrieval of the state by the nation

c. build a global civil society as a future global nation with popular democracy (cross-border solidarity leading toward transnational power of popular classes no longer mediated by nation-states)

d. alterglobalization from below: a global Lilliputian strategy of cooperative localism

While these strategies may point in quite different directions, together they can go far in arresting corporate neo-liberal globalization.

Jonah Gindin, “Chavistas in the Halls of Power, Chavistas on the Street”, NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol. 38, No. 5 (March-April 2005), pp. 27-29.

The same BBC poll, op. cit., found that a third of those surveyed used nationality to define themselves. Latin Americans had the strongest identification (54%) with their nation.

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