Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 19:27:21 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Jeux sans frontieres? 


        
The Pope/Castro reapproachment takes place against a backdrop of an even
wider,  and seemingly improbable story;  the worldwide decline of the nation
state in the face of economic globalization and political sub-nationalism.
Much of the world has witnessed since 1945-- and at increasingly short
intervals since the 1980s-- simultaneous processes of supranational
integration and subnational differentiation.     National sovereignty was
ceasing everywhere to be meaningful in economic terms.     Would
transnational political integration (of the sort once suggested by NATO and
the Warsaw Pact) follow naturally?    The nation-state as a viable economic
(and therefore political) entity had ceased to be so by 1950.    What would
come next?     A vast miasma of superstitions policed at the behest of
corporate capital acting more or less in criminal concert with religous
fundamentalists of varying pedigrees?     Would the eclipse of Marxian
strategies vis a vis the National Question precipitate new orthodoxies,  or
merely re-serve old wine in new bottles?

Meanwhile,  thinking about nationalism and the nation-state has itself
undergone a kind of revolution.    Broadly speaking,  we can divide
non-Marxist theories of nationalism into two camps; "primordialists" and
"modernists": those who view nations as relics of ancient ideologies,  and
those who believe they are quite modern creations.    Most people in the
West would fall unremarkably into the former category; ask a French or
Polish nationalist and you are likely to discover a species who thinks of
oneself as belonging to something with a very long continuous existence,
and which is in some sense a natural entity.   Indeed,  the present visceral
political appeal of the Eurosceptics-- vis a vis Maastricht and an expanded
European Union-- evidently depends on such beliefs.  

Yet in recent years many historians and sociologists have argued
convincingly that what are now called nations are,  almost everywhere in the
world,  creations of the past two centuries.    They are,  to employ two
ubiquitous shibboleths of modern historiography,  "imagined communities"
built on "invented traditions".     Benedict Anderson,  the most influential
modern theorist of nationalism,  sees the spread of printing and mass
literacy as the great catalyst for its emergence (*The Emerging
Nation-State: Its rise and decline* [New York,  1997: St Martins Press,
forthcoming].    His theories have helped to midwife views of the modern
nation-state system that are determinedly modernist,  and equally
pessimistic about its future.   It is being inexorably replaced by a "high
modern mix of tribalism,  regionalism,  and globalism.    The state,  far
>from "withering away" under the aegis of a dictatorship of workers,  seems
in danger of succumbing to new,  more nefariously striking forms of monopoly
capital symbiotically employing the talismans of the past-- tribalism and
relilgious superstition-- to consolidate a new era of rule (Mathew Horsman
and Andrew Marshall, *After the Nation State: Citizens,  tribalism and the
new world disorder [New York,  1995: Harper Collins]).     

If,  as Marx claimed,  the workers have no country,  then what is one to
make of the Golden Arches co-existing ubiquitously with the ancient *jihad*?
And if the Pope has indeed seen Castro (or was it the other way around?),
what *is* the future for national revolution?

Louis Godena 



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