alansmithee

I started this thread to see what other people feel is the purpose of a nation, and if they believe it is good/bad, and also if they see this unit coming to an end (and if so, what will rise in it's place.

In another thread http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...9&page=1&pp=40 roachboy said the following, which I found interesting and wish to respond to in it's own thread.

If it's true that the nation-state becomes a thing of the past, I don't see it being because everyone decided to live in some communist utopia (and I mean no insult by this, so don't take it as one. I personally could think of little that would be better than living in a true communist utopia, but I don't see that as viable until the notion that one person can be better than another is eliminated.). The processes are being accelerated by businesses, who are finding profit margins greater by finding countries where laws are more lax in what they allow. There are some multilateral movements being made that are beneficial, but again unless all abide by them they only put those who follow them at a disadvantage (unless they are constructed so that certain places automatically benefit more in relation to others). The Kyoto protocals come to mind here.

Aggressive nationalism is something that is generally harmful. But nationalism can also give unity and defense against outside forces, and help mobilize people more efficiently. It's people's tendency to group with others they identify as similar in some way, and if they see an advantage they will often exploit it. You can see this even in places like schools, where there are found cliques that all identify the same. And I see nationalism as helping global nerds not get constantly wedgied by global jocks.

I will say that at best, nationalism as a byproduct of the nation is at best a wash.

I don't see the different level of organization forming. I see businesses consolidating their power and resources more and more in places where they don't face the difficulties that they have in many western nations.

And in a way, it has always been this way, it's just with the "shrinking" of the globe these effects are being magnified. The great trading companies of Europe (the Dutch East India company comes immediately to mind) were doing much the same thing before, only currency and resources weren't anywhere near as fluid as they are now, so the effects weren't as easily seen.

The problem I see with this view is that transnational capitalism is in the best interests of a very influencial, powerful group of Republican supporters-namely, big business. I don't see the UN as any sort of viable alternate, or even serious threat. Daimler-Chrysler holds more power than the UN does, unless the UN is supported by some powerful nation or bloc of nations.

If the UN were to truly work as the next level of organization, it would work similar to Congress, or some other parlimentary body. The UN has this setup, but where it fails is that the individual members have no real identity as a greater unit-they are there representing their countries. There might be some of this in Congress with reps trying to gain advantages for their states, but it's nowhere to the extent of the UN. And also congressmen often look at issues from a national perspective, where it's rare (if ever) that the UN members have looked at any issue from a Earth perspective (and actually enforced the decision). And at this time, the nation seems the largest unit that people are able to come together for any sort of greater good.

I don't see it as a big loss, if a loss at all. But that's irrelevant to my points here, imo. I was accused of selectively quoting another poster, so instead of deleting the statement or combining it with another section, I figured it would be best to separate it.

I think here's a good place to say what I hope i've been building to, and how I see nations as necessary. You see nations as a support/correlary to older captialist organization. I see it as the only viable check on unbridled capitalism, as the nation is the largest unit with enough power to counteract large capitalist units (big business). If not for the "nation", I think it's quite possible at this point that I would be typing this on my IBM computer, using my AT&T connection, before leaving to drive my GM car fueled by Standard oil to the local Walmart where I could get a nice selection of Conagra produce and Kraft premade foodstuffs. Just like everyone else in my vicinity of say, 500 miles or so. That's if the omnicorps were nice enough to allow me to make enough to afford all that (and obviously also assuming I wasn't a member of said omnicorps).

Do nations always work in this function? Obviously not. I would say that especially in the past, they facilitated the growth of megacorps at the expense of parts of the world where they didn't hold power. And this partly goes on today. But the very fact that corporations have ot shop around to find profitable labor pools shows that the nation is functioning somewhat in this capacity.

I will add more later, but I'd like to see what response I get to this first.

roachboy

ok--i am a bit pressed for time today so will only respond with bulletpoint like things.

a. the outcome of the processes that folk group together as globalization will not lead to anything approaching socialism (a stand-in for the problematic notion of "communist utopia on the one hand and a confusing terminology blur on the other) because there simply is at this point no coherent left opposition at the level of politics/ideology. revolution do not simply happen--they are shaped by ideology/politics/a revolutionary line--at this point, the mobilized radical forces out there are mostly from the extreme/neofascist right. this for historical reasons, mostly to do with the collapse of marxism as a mobilizing tool (as over against the slower devolution of nationalist ideologies in a radical form). in a way this is intuitive (1989 anyone?)....

b. the question of nationalism as a pattern for identity formation and nationalism as mobilizer are different--they lean on each other but are not idenitical to each other for all that. one argument is that movements like the american conservatives in their contemporary form are reactions against the erosion of the nation as a stable frame for elaborating a sense of connectedness to wider communities--this a function of the creeping sense that, for example, there is little the nation-state can or will do to deal with the implications of the transformation in how production is organized.

c. i do not see the contemporary right as being a direct instrument of corporate power. it is much more a curious populist movement that espouses an ideology that in certain areas is of a piece with corporate interests. in most areas, though, i think it is as much geared around the interests of conservative politicians themselves.
in general, one place where the two converge is across the process of privatization--which you can also see as a process of depoliticization. the main effect of privatizing sectors is not higher efficiency but the removal of that sector from political conflict because it is a withdrawing of the state. the underlying argument here is that what the state does, what it intervenes in, is necessarily political. in a situation of heightened uncertainty, the state can reduce its risk by privatization. and globalizing capitalism is nothing if not a generator of heightened uncertainty for the state.

the last point you make is, i think, one of the central points of conflict within this whole scenario. maybe it would make sense ot have a look through the website of one of the more interesting (yet peculiar) anti-globalization movements--attac

www.attac.fr

there is an english language version.
there should still be a number of position papers generated by attac that explain the problems facing not only the nation-state but even more political mobilizations that try to address the dynamics of globalizing capitalism from within nation-states....the other problem they (and mnay others) have run into is that if you cannot simply organize at the national level to pressure changes in policy/direction, and find yourself trying to mobilize against these bigger processes, who do you go after? how do you do that? this is the most basic problem facing these movements in general at the moment.

at this point, i have to stop.
one thing i am not sure of: the analytic backdrop for most of what i am talking about comes from books, often really fat books. i dont know about whether it makes sense to talk directly about them in this context. maybe refer to them? because a problem may end up being that we are simply not working from the same frame of reference, and that modulating a discussion might require modulating the frame. in which case, the thread could involve generation of reading lists or something. what would you think of reading stuff along the way?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

martinguerre

i think it may be useful to note that the nation state, in a form that we would recognize it, is a pretty late player on world stage. i'd credit it's arrivial with the 30 Year's war, and the shattering of the multi-national ideal of Christendom in the reformations.

if this entity hasn't always been here, it deserves a critical analysis...and i think some of that has begun to come up.

__________________
For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

Pacifier

But that is also a great danger, this feeling of an "outside danger" can turn an whole nation into a mindless mass (see that famous Goering quote)

Nationalism is just a form of primitive tribalism, the tribe just got bigger. The principle is still the same, we are bound together because of $obsurce_reason and the others are inferior because of $other_obsurce_reason. nationalism always has the tendency to go into a "we are better" kind of thinking, without any logical reason.

Nationalism is emotional and thus too often clouds rational und reasonable thoughts and solutions.

I hope that we will be able to make the next step, and realise that the only "tribe" that matters is the human tribe. We shouldn't need this religion like nationalism, we should work together because it makes sense. This will be hard to achieve, but I think it is worth the effort. Thats why I think the UN is good, not because it is perfect, it is far from that, but because it is an first step in the right direction.

__________________
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death
— Albert Einstein

roachboy

i dont think you can seperate the development of the modern ideology of nation from the formation of the bureaucratic state....which is not to say that the ideology does not have an internal history (like everything else, it comes from somewhere) but this would be a kind of backwriting of features of the ideology into the past rather than something that worked the other way around.

one of the main features that distinguishes the modern state from its predecessaors is the development of budgeting, which relies statistical models for mapping the past onto the future and thereby introducing a level of predictability into the operations of the state--louis 16, for example, did not use budgets--sometimes i wonder if the french revolution would have happened if the finances of the french state of the late 18th century were organized differently. the whole chain of events got started as a function of the crown defaulting on bonds that they floated to pay for the american adventure against the british.

the use of budgets as a way of stabilizing the states relationship to the context it administers is crucial for its development and is also a factor in the type of crisis that you see it sliding gradually into--predictablilty presupposes that the economy is organized within the frame of the nation-state and that policy making can inflect economic activity--which is one mechanism in the more general process of social reproduction/control. once stock began trading internationally and once financial flows developed real-time transnational networks for their movement, and once the organization of production moved outside the frame of nation-states, they began to loose control over the features that had previously enabled them to make their contexts predictable---the outcome of this is a radical increase in uncertainty--which is processed as increased political risk for the state. the whole drive to privatization fits into this pattern, as a response aimed primarily at reducing risk for the state--and by so doing to maintaining themselves (and nationally oriented political organizations more generally) as viable.

if something screws up and the state is involved, the consequences are political.
if something screws up and the private sector is involved, the consequences are not necessarily political.
efficiency, service delivery--not relevant. this is about political self-preservation. the right knows that it will be the first to loose if things head south for nation-states and that heading-south is understood as political. they also know that if the position of the nation-state starts to really change, they will find themselves without an ideological basis for operating at all. and the moderate "left" is in the same boat, just a bit further on in the deterioration process. but the writing is on the wall and the right knows it. whether the folk who subscribe to conservative politics see this as a motive or not seems to me secondary.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

alansmithee

I can't really disagree with anthing here, but would like a clarification on what you mean by "left" and "right". If it's what I believe it is (which I won't say now, because I'm not sure how exactly I would articulate it), I don't see how there can be "left" opposition, simply because the very process of organization will take the principles more toward a "rightist" ideology because:

1. Rightist ideology relies heavily upon rigid hierarchy and control structures.

2. Human nature would assert itself, and in the absence of any centralized power structure someone would work to take advange of the power vacuum and seize control (as happened in soviet Russia, where Marxism became Leninism and evolved further into Stalinism)

I think here it would help to see how the democratic/liberal movement in America fits into the picture. It might better give a stable platform of reference.

For instance, it seems that the democrats are doing more to counteract the growing loss of power of nations' ability to control production.

I think most ideologies espoused by politicians are in some way or another geared around the interests of said politicians.

I think personally that in a situation were the state to feel threatened, it would try to assume as much control as possible, as opposed to trying to reduce risks. Because even if they abandon ship in economic affairs, that very act doesn't leave the state as a whole unit, it becomes much like a shadow and loses much of the functionality/control that is inherent.

What do you think of Attac and their goals? I read some of their opinions and their charter, and it seemed interesting at least. And I also recommend anyone with interest to at least skim the site. It also seems that they've given up on America and the English speaking world in general-the English site I found hadn't been updated in around a year, while the French and German versions I noticed were very recently updated.

I think that one of the problems that these organizations have is that their approach is wrong. They cannot work well in most gov't systems because they end up simultaneously argue for less "freedom" economically but more "freedom" in political/social issues. I don't see this as being possible-if you want the state to have the power to regulate trade, it must also inherently have the power to regulate in the other areas.

References and reading lists/reccomendations are welcome by me at least. Much of my views come from reading, but more fiction than non-fiction. My non-fiction reading is limited to mostly history or things dealing with the natural sciences (outside of textbooks and the like, of which i've read quite a few). I believe that much fiction can give just as valid viewpoints into social commentary.

Much of what you say is true, and I agree with in theory. But it breaks down in practice. As I said initially, until people move away from the belief in supremacy over each other (supremacy of any sort) it is impossible to truly come together, in the absence of some outside threat.

A nation is tribalism on one hand, but also it's a previously unknown unit of coming together. If you want to eliminate tribalism alltogether, you must work at the roots-the family. The concept of family goes hand-in-hand with tribalism and often the belief in superiority. It is also formed in response to outside threat (the basic needs for survival). And a family is nothing but a "tribe" that you feel the need to protect over other non-family individuals (who are de facto superior, due to sharing your genes). If they weren't superior, they wouldn't be protected over other individuals who aren't related. But that concept would almost be impossible to sell, so it's necessary to create ever-bigger tribes to protect the groups judged to be superior.

You mention the UN, but as I said before the UN is nothing but a forum for countries to protect their personal interests and form coalitions without need to go door-to-door to every nation.

You want to see the world come together? It would take some greater outside force threatening the world as a whole (and I've read many stories where this scenario is explored, by means of faking some outside force)

roachboy

best book i know of so far on globalization is manuel castell's "rise of the network society"--it is huge (3 vol.) but really fine stuff almost throughout.
worth it though.

besides, you might be able to read it laying about on a chaise lounge if you ignore the footnotes. or if you were wearing a huge hat. or if you are sitting under an umbrella, just before the nice man brings you your mai tai.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Locobot

I was just thinking of the Watchmen by Alan Moore myself...

Pacifier

Sure, but still we have to try.

It not only an unknown unit, it is an artificial unit. Families have biological ties, what ties do nations have, a coloured piece of paper called Passport? What makes the dutch different from the german? language? We also call the bavarians "german" and they only make some stragne noises

Sure, nations have some "historical" background, but even that has changed a lot. Look at Alsace-Lorraine between germany and france, that area has chanced its "nation" so many times that many people still speak both languages. What nation is that area?

I don't want to eliminate tribalism, I want the next step. Family is the smallest tribt and from that the tribes have become bigger and bigger when people realised that the differences aren't that big after all. Time to get bigger again, Tribe Mankind.

People always care for those close to them. I care for my family, but I also care for my City, for my nation, for my continent (EU). Why stop at some man-made border?

Sadly that correct, G8 and the UN and most other "western solutions" to the 3rd worlds problems exist only to secure economical interests, not to help the people.

Yes, but the sad thing is that there already are enough "outside" threats. If you look at mankind as a whole there is a big threat called "famine" and "poverty".

I know all that is very idealistic, but as I said I belive we need idealistic goals.
The journey is the reward.

__________________
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death
— Albert Einstein

alansmithee

I'll start on world unity as soon as my perpetual motion device is finished.

Here is part of what I talk about-sure, there are biological ties, but if we really want to save humanity, why should those matter? It's no more valid than proximity for a way of grouping up.


Again, this sounds good in theory but breaks down in practice. Why stop at a man-made border? Because those borders allow for certain people to be better off than others. There's no mass incentive to. More on this later.

Sadly that correct, G8 and the UN and most other "western solutions" to the 3rd worlds problems exist only to secure economical interests, not to help the people.



Yes, but the sad thing is that there already are enough "outside" threats. If you look at mankind as a whole there is a big threat called "famine" and "poverty".

I know all that is very idealistic, but as I said I belive we need idealistic goals.
The journey is the reward. [/QUOTE]

We need idealistic goals, but we need realistic methods of reaching them. I was saying above that people need an incentive to form units. You mention above that there is outside threats to humanity in the form of "poverty" and "famine". I just got back from paying what many people around the world would make in a month for one meal. There were six in our group, one child who got a pizza that was too big (it was suprisingly big for kids food). He couldn't finish, we ate some, there was still half left. It went into the trash, didn't even bother taking it home. I was also the only one there without a cell phone old enough to have one (although one person there had 2, so there was an average of one per person). All of us have running cars of some sort, ranging from a 92 roadmaster to 03 regal in value. At the restaraunt we ate, in a outdoor mall, I passed a convertible Mercedes, about 5 Lexus, one late-model Corvette, and about 1,000,000 various SUV's. What is my point in all this? Obviously in at least one country, poverty (true poverty) and famine aren't rampant, therefore the outside pressure isn't being felt by everyone.

Until everyone feels the threat in some way or another, there will be no incentive for cooperation. It's sad, but true.

roachboy

going back to the opening post for a minute--in the above, alansmithee, where you use the term nation i think that you mean state.

the nation, a set of signifiers that articulate a sense of "horizontal solidarity" between people/communities by situating each element in a relation of part to whole (individual to community, community to other communities, extending through a kind of level-crossing repetition to entail the set of all imagined communities grouped as nation)--this is an ideological form. this ideological form serves quite complex functions--it links people together horizontally (in the present) and provides a way to add density to these linkages by opening onto a way of reading/fabricating history or tradition. since the whole of the snigifer nation operates in a kind of mythological register, it hardly matters, when you think about it, if the elements that orient this history or tradition are "real" or not--since the history/tradition are basically articulated across images and rules of interacting with them, it does not really matter if any particular element is or was what folk think it was in the past--it stands in for the past, modifies the past and does what almost all history does anyway, which is to adjust the sesne of the past to fit the needs of the present.

the idea of nation is important in education/social reproduction in that it forms the basis for the imposition of an assumption that the existing order is legitimate and that children become what they are and will be within a given political framework to whcih they owe allegiance (a repressive operation if you think about it)---insofar as it is a co-ordinating mechanism that makes aspects of social reproduction (the reproduction of labor pools) also political reproduction (in that education imposes the assumption that the existing order is legitimate because it exists--a correlation that folk, no matter theuir politics as adults, have to work through) you can say that it is linked to the state because it (nation) is a political expression of the interests of the state.
but it (nation) is not identical to the state for all that.

what limits unbridled capitalism is the state because states generate the legal structures within which capitalism operates...states provide the material infrastructures on the basis of which capitalism can function at all...states assure a minimal level of social and political stability, which capitalism needs (despite the effects of its own operation), and insofar as states enframe education legally and institutionally, it also provides a continuous supply of labor for capitalist organizations.

so the principle mechansism through which capitalism is shaped, reproduced and limited is law--even within the history of the left, the social democrats understood revolution as a distant possibility and so turned their attention to working within the legal order as a pressure group the goals of which were to influence the character of the law that shapes how capitalism unfolds in a particular space. so what provides a check on unbridled capitalism is the state, not the nation.

it is curious that the american right has worked so hard to stand this perfectly obvious empirical situation on its head. for the right, the state is an adversary, a principle of arbitrariness that stands over against the nation, which they like to pretend is a space of unanimity. the right imputes power to the nation and sees the state as an obstacle. that view is entirely insane--historically false and conceptually incoherent as a description of conditions that acutally obtain in the world. what this reversal is about, it seems to me, is wholesale self-disempowerment.

right ideology these days is predicated on generating a priori suspicion of the state--it opposes the redistribution of wealth, it opposes public education, it opposes the generation of laws that restrict what the right argues is a god given right to unlimited profit through unlimited exploitation of resources they like tp pretend are themselves unlimited. the right therefore presents ideological obstacles that obscure the actual role of teh state, and by doing that manage somehow to convince folk that acting against the state is a way of increasing the political power of the nation.

what this is really about is depoliticization of the consequences of mutations in the organization of capitalism that individual nation-states cannot control.

it is not in any way about giving power to the people--it is about giving the illusion of power to people across a politics that would result in isolation, fragmentation and impotence, and which would also create any number of diversionary strategies for redressing problems because the ideology operates on the basis of an whiolly irrational understanding of the state.

the nation--groups of people who understand themseves to be linked together within a general community and its history---outside the purivew of the state is an incoherent fantasy. the nation as such has no political power on its own. unless the signifier of nation can be used to mobilize folk politically to act upon the state--which has happened, and is happening in a kind of inverted and self-immolating way thanks to the contemporary right---but disconnected from the state, that is from the modes of democratic accountability theat have developed within the state and which the state in fact relies upon to adjust its activities--the nation has no effective power. because by insisting on a separation of nation from state, it separates itself from the instruments for the exercize of power, and sinks into a kind of self-congratulatory impotence....

the funny thing is that in fact the right as organization does not believe the ideology that structures much of the support for these organizations--the right is in fact and up of a range of interest groups that jockey for position amongst themselves and for influence on the state. organizationally, the right knows full well that political power is expressed under capitalism across the medium of law, and that control of the state apparatus is a fundamental political goal.


caveat: in this post i have been making a particular argument about the terms nation and state and have framed the whole thing without reference to the problems that globalizing capitalism raise for the state...but the post is already too long.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Joan of Arc

__________________
"Insanity and Genius are on the same side of the street"

alansmithee

I was using both interchangibly, because I don't believe one can exist without the other. In essence, the nation gives people reason to submit to the state. The nation provides the framework that the state can opperate in. Otherwise, I agree with most of the above.

I agree with this again for the most part, and is also why I am usually at odds with most on the "right" in terms of economics. Although, were it seems that the left favors state over nation, and the right favors nation over state, I think that both are essential. With the "left" extreme, you get dictatorships in the form of the USSR, where the state takes and maintains power and control by force, without any real regard for the people. And on the other end would probably be something similar to Nazi Germany with less checks on business (a situation where people feel nationalistic urges and give up massive powers to the nation, only business didn't become totally unchecked during the Nazi regime. Although it could be theorized that post-war Nazi Germany might have gone further in that direction)

I could see this as true, but this doesn't address how the state gains/maintains its power outside of the framework of the nation, without resorting to autocracy. Not that autocracy is necessarily bad, but whereas the nationalism espoused by the right in your view gives the illusion of power, the state without the nation doesn't even give the illusion.

In this, I don't see much difference from the left/democrats. But I would like to see how the current American democratic party or various left leaning organizations fit into this view.


At least to me, it's interesting to see the underlying beliefs of a way of thought. Debate is also easier if you can see the reasoning behind thinking, instead of just the results.

Ustwo

Perhaps if the third world had more free market capitalism they could be well fed and well off too

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

martinguerre

edited b/c i'm not sure if i can read sarcasm

__________________
For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

loganmule

Tribe Mankind is an interesting notion, Pacifier, but I think alansmithee is right. It's never going to happen without a massive redistribution of political power and wealth, and those holding it will never voluntarily relinquish it. The other problem is with our very nature. Sadly, we mostly don't embody our higher traits, but rather seek power and wealth, in an evident effort to perpetuate our particular brand of DNA. Tribe Mankind, if it could ever be achieved, would be just a bigger version of "tribe USA" (or any other countries), with all of its inherent political and economic problems. Human behavior may someday evolve to accomodate a true world view, but we don't seem to me to be far enough out of the cave yet to get there now, or anytime soon.

Pacifier

Yes, I know that

Yes, I also know that. The consequence would be to make them relinquish
The Problem is, that, on a longer view, I don't see much alternatives to "Tribe Mankind".
Otherwise we will fight forever and that can't be the goal.

__________________
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death
— Albert Einstein

alansmithee

Why can't fighting forever be the goal? Conflict is one of the surest ways to ensure that the strongest of any group survive, and that weaker/less efficient things/ideas are weeded out.

I have always believed that when mankind comes together (in the absence of outside threat) is the end of humanity growing. Its an endpoint.

zen_tom

There is such a thing as conflict without violence, and that's how society progresses, creating ever more interesting and rich structures such as music, technology and space exploration.

Or we could be bashing one another's heads in with tree-stumps - it's up to you.