Nationalism and Contemporanity

Nationalism and Contemporaneity: Political Economy of a Discourse

Alok Yadav

Cultural Critique, No. 26. (Winter, 1993-1994), pp. 191-229.

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Nationalism and Contemporaneity: Political Economy of a Discourse

Alok Yadav

While nationalism has always constituted a crucial political discourse in the countries of the Third World, it has recently

been widely discussed in the West as well, in the daily newspapers, in weekly magazines like The New Yorker and The Nation, and in monthlies like Le Monde Diplomatique and Tikkun.' It has also been the subject of extensive academic discussion in the last decade, especially in the disciplines of history, sociology, and cultural stud- i e ~ . ~There has, however, remained a gap in the West between the more "public" discourses on nationalism, with their attention to issues of international relations, and the academic literature, with its focus on "kinds" of nationalisms, on the domestic sociohistorical preconditions for their emergence, and, increasingly, on the cultural factors central to nationalist phenomena. As I will show, this "gap" is more apparent than real, since both academic and public discourses in the West tend, fundamentally, to obscure political considerations with regard to different nationalisms. For now, however, it is useful to note regarding the Western academic litera-

Q 1994 by Cultu~alCnttque. Winter 199s94. 0882-43711941$5.00

191

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ture in particular that, while it has concerned itself with the inter- secting dimensions of cultural and political nationalism, it has generally paid little attention to how these dimensions intersect with issues of economic nationalism and self-determination. (There is, of course, an academic literature on economic nationalism, but it tends to be written by economists, political economists, or economic historians and remains distinct from the more general academic writing on nati~nalism.)~ My framing contention in this essay is that this disregard for economic and geopolitical issues, this marginalization of the central fact of neocolonialism in the present epoch, has left much of the general Western academic literature on nationalism curiously blind to its own function in relation to the contemporary politics of nationalism.

Much of this Western academic work is written from a position of alienation or critical distance from the phenomenon of nationalism. It thinks of itself as anything but a literature of advocacy. Nevertheless, this literature has hardly been neutral in its function in relation to some of the major political issues of our time-in part due to a persistent ethnocentrism that at times approximates a kind of "Western" nationalism in confronting the Third World, but more crucially due to the failure to consider the broader politics of the public arena within which these academic discourses have been elaborated. In particular, the academic characterizations of Third World nationalisms as factitious, fraudulent, or danger- ous have converged with the political demonization of Third World economic nationalism within the changing structures of the contemporary world economic system.

The most important of these changing structures has been the secular tendency for the increasingly thorough incorporation of all parts of the world into the international capitalist economy, and the political issue this raises is the prospect "that the ever- greater integration of capitalism on a world scale has made radical change in a single country impossible" (Miliband 229). This is the context-economic, political, ideological-in relation to which I discuss the politics of nationalism and of academic discourses on nationalism. My argument is that Western academic discourses, quite inadvertently perhaps, have fulfilled an important function of legitimation or confirmation of hegemonic policies and positions advanced by their governments in relation to the "dependent"

Nationalism and Contemporaneity 193

world. In turning from the history and "nature" of nationalism to its uses in contemporary contexts, I seek to elaborate a con-junctural analysis of nationalism, one that takes into account the positioning of a given nationalism in relation to the international system of transnational capital and nation-states, and that does not rest content with a "state and civil society" analysis on the terrain of a single country or with an attempt to evaluate the virtues or vices of nationalism per se, abstracted from the historical uses to which particular nationalisms are put.4 The stakes of contemporary nationalism-the issues and political projects it brings into focus-I suggest, become clearest in confrontation with global capitalism and the possibilities for radical change.

1. Disavowals and Continuities

Contemporary scholars of nationalism, in a conventionalized but telling gesture, often feel a compulsion to distance themselves from any nationalist investments, to emphasize their alienation from a politics of nationalism. This initial gesture deserves more attention than it regularly elicits, for it stands as an index and symptom of the perspective from which these studies are undertaken. The passages cited below from Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1780 and Peter Alter's Nationalism are fairly typical of this gesture:

Finally, I cannot but add that no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist. . . . Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. As Renan said: "Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation." . . . [Being a committed nationalist is incompatible with writing a serious history of nationalism] unless the historian leaves his or her convictions behind when entering the library or the study. Some nationalist historians have been unable to do so. Fortunately, in setting out to write the present book I have not needed to leave my non-historical convictions behind. (Hobsbawm 12-13)

Though we might justifiably abhor its extreme forms, which were especially rampant in the years directly before and after

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the First World War, we cannot conveniently forget [nationalism] as a pathological manifestation in the History of modern societies, nor dismiss treatment of its historical impact as irrelevant. It would be naive and thoroughly irresponsible to ignore the dangers that nationalism and nationalist thinking un- deniably pose for societies in the age of industrialism, and indeed for global peace. This alone makes it more necessary than ever to arrive at a clear understanding of nationalism, its roots and the political and social problems related to it. (Alter 2)

For both Hobsbawm and Alter, nationalism figures as an obstacle or a problem. Hobsbawm notes, implicitly, the presence of too many "nationalist" histories, while Alter warns against a (presum- ably common) assumption that we no longer need to be concerned about nationalism. Both writers, however, instruct us in a necessary self-consciousness about our relation to nationalism, but only as a way of defending ourselves against the workings of nationalist investments. Both recognize nationalism as an ideology (held by others)-a political project of legitimation-and seek a historical stance (in agreement with the consensus among "serious historians") that is objective by virtue of the critical distance it maintains with regard to the phenomenon under study.

Neither author seems to consider the critique of nationalism, and the initial gesture of alienation and oppositional self-identification, as also a project of political delegitimation and, hence, "ideological" despite its "objectivity." Hobsbawm's observa- tion that any nationalism "requires too much belief in what is patently not so" is uncontroversial and implies that, as a scholar, one will most likely need to maintain a critical relation to some of the claims of any polemical nationalist discourse. However, it does not immediately follow that one must renounce every nationalist project as inherently mystified and falsely manipulative, as a false value. Given this, and in a world of nation-states and political projects differentially identified with explicitly nationalist self- understandings, the unargued choice of a stance regarding the cat- egorical legitimacy or illegitimacy of nationalism will be an ideological position, however "accurate" its historical account.

Hobsbawm and Alter, a Marxist and a liberal, respectively, speak for a Western academic consensus regarding nationalism


that has resulted, in effect, in a sustained project of delegitimation since the Second World War, although the precise object of critique has been continually refined.5 I will examine a prominent early exemplar of this tradition in order to specify some of its assumptions and consequences, and then will compare this manifestly "ideological" work with more recent academic work on nationalism in order to indicate how this ideological inheritance continues to operate in the later critiques.

Hans Kohn, during his lifetime perhaps the central figure in the academic study of nationalism in the West and the author of over 30 books (he died in 1971), formulated a dichotomy between "Western" nationalism and other, non-Western, varieties in his development of an analytical and historical typology of kinds of nationalism, what Louis Snyder in his Encyclopedia of Nationalism calls the "Kohn dichotomy":

[Kohn] pointed to two socio-political environments in which modern nationalism made its appearance. One was the West- ern world, including England, the British [settler] colonies, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The second was the non-Western world, which included Central and Eastern Europe and Asia. . . . In the West, the emergence of nationalism was primarily a political occurrence; it was . . . a product of indige- nous forces that came to fruition in the eighteenth century. (174)

In the non-Western world, on the other hand, nationalism was a factitious overlay on "a more backward stage of socio-political development" (Snyder 174): "Kohn thus revealed a cleavage between the experiences of the Western and the non-Western areas" (Sny- der 175). In Kohn's hands, then, and up through Snyder's review and endorsement of Kohn's work, the phenomena of nationalism serve to mark a temporal division-between Western nationalism as an aspect of Western "modernity," on the one hand, and, on the other hand, non-Western nationalism, though itself a modern phenomenon, as testimony of the "archaic" character of those societies.6 What begins as a typology of different kinds of nationalisms thus quickly becomes a prescriptive division between a genuine "liberal" nationalism (which Kohn endorses) and its later perver- sion into a reprehensible "integral" nationalism (which he rejects):

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"Kohn saw nationalism as an originally humane, libertarian, and creative force that eventually was transformed into an oppressive, aggressive, and expansionist ism" (Snyder 176). Kohn's project to construct a differentiated typology of varieties of nationalism supports a tendentious reading of history, and he hypostatizes this reading into a systematic and irreducible dichotomy between two "worlds," which Snyder summarizes (Appendix).

Clearly, nationalism has here become a discourse of value and evaluation; an ostensibly objective discourse about nationalism has itself become a nationalistic mode of distinguishing between societies like "our own," which value liberty, equality, tolerance, and democracy, and those other deformed and mutilated societies, which live on myths and dreams, irrational and precivilized concepts, imagination and emotion, and a fundamental aggressive- defensive complex. Discussion of nationalism has degenerated (so to speak) into a rather highly glossed dichotomy between sickness and health, pathology and civility.

Kohn's dichotomy is not an isolated instance; indeed, its very influence has guaranteed a steady crop of comparable distinctions. In his most recent (and otherwise quite useful) book on nationalism, Anthony Smith, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics and perhaps at present the foremost writer in En- glish in this field, self-consciously redeploys Kohn's typology in his own distinction between "Western" civic-territorial and "Eastern" ethnic-genealogical varieties of nationalism (Smith 8I).'

Smith elaborates his version of the EastWest distinction as follows:

Historic territory, legal-political community, legal-political equality of members, and common civic culture and ideology[:] these are the components of the standard, Western model of the nation. (11)

Genealogy and presumed descent ties, popular mobilization, vernacular languages, customs and traditions: these are the elements of an alternative, ethnic conception of the nation, one that mirrored the very different route of "nation-formation" travelled by many communities in Eastern Europe and Asia. (1 2-1 3)


What becomes apparent in Smith's further discussion of this distinction between the two kinds of nationalism, however, is that his use of the characterizing adjectives "Western" and "Eastern" is en- tirely gratuitous. After having made these historical and sociocultural distinctions, Smith goes on to argue that "[iln fact every nationalism contains civic and ethnic elements in varying degrees and different forms" (13); "[c]onceptually, the nation has come to blend two sets of dimensions, the one civic and territorial, the other ethnic and genealogical, in varying proportions in particular cases" (15). It is clear enough from this that, far from distinguishing between two fundamental types of nationalism, the civic-territorial and the ethnic-genealogical models isolate, respectively, the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of any nationalism. In other words, the distinction these models point out is, in the first instance, conceptual, not historical or geopolitical.

The gratuitousness of the separation and identification of these dimensions as "Western" and "Eastern" becomes even clearer when Smith contrasts the different trajectories by which nation- states have emerged in the "old nations" and in the "new nations":

Though most latter-day nations are, in fact, polyethnic, or rather most nation-states are polyethnic, many have been formed in the first place around a dominant ethnie, which an- nexed or attracted other ethnies or ethnic fragments into the state to which it gave a name and a cultural charter. . . . On the other side of the picture we should note the possibility of forming nations without immediate antecedent ethnie. . . . Here the colonial state [or, the post-colonial state, whether in North America, Latin America, Africa, or Asia] had to foster a purely territorial patriotism, a sense of political loyalty to the newly created states and their embryonic political communities. . . . [Hlistorically, the first nations were . . . formed on the basis of pre-modern ethnic cores; and, being powerful and culturally influential, they provided models for subsequent cases of the formation of nations in many parts of the globe. (39-41)

Smith's acknowledgment that most nation-states (somewhere in the order of ninety percent [15]) are polyethnic or multicultural in their constitution is important and a point to which I shall return. But for now, I want to emphasize that for Smith it is the "first na-

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tionsV-Britain, France, Spain, and Sweden, to use his most consis- tent examples (39,55,59)-that are built on the basis of an "ethnic core" that provides a "cultural charter" for the state. The nationalisms of these Western states, much more so than the "purely territorial" nationalisms of the postcolonial states of the "East," deserve (one would think) characterization as "ethnic-genealogical," especially as Smith suggests that they served as the basis for the mono- cultural ideology of the nation-state as the political embodiment of a single ethnie. There are, of course, problems with Smith's implication that postcolonial states were simply the adventitious fabrica- tions of colonial administrators with no underlying or historical regional unities and the correlative implication that the "first nations" were, by contrast, the product of some sort of "natural" historical process. But what is most remarkable is how Smith subverts the logic of his own discussion to bestow the label "Eastern" on ethnic-genealogical nationalism and "Western" on civic-territorial nationalism. Here, the use of value terminology (claiming "good" nationalism for the West and projecting "bad" nationalism onto the "East") is not only gratuitous but even falsifying by the terms of its own a r g ~ m e n t . ~

What the examples of Kohn and Smith show is the near reflex by which many Western academics associate the pernicious quali- ties or consequences of nationalism with the non-Western world. They may be insistent on the dual-faced, "Janus-like" character of all nationalisms, but there is a pervasive tendency to resolve this doubleness in self-valorizing ways. This reflex would seem to call into doubt the often repeated gestures of distance from nationalist, ethnocentric investments and suggests that, if we are to understand this compulsion, we need to examine the wider contexts within which the contemporary production of such academic discourses on nationalism occurs.

The connection between academic and explicitly political discourses is linked to the dual nature of nationalism in our time as both a discourse of political legitimacy and a model of political modernity. Within contemporary academic discourses, issues of legitimation or political evaluation are, to some extent, submerged and displaced by issues of the "timeliness" of a given nationalism, that is, its status as an index of the archaic, modern, or postmodern status of a given society. But even these latter issues of "timeliness,"


embedded as they are in narratives of development or modernization, return us ultimately to the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a given nationalism.

In the recent work of both Ernest Gellner and Hobsbawm, for e ~ a m p l e , ~ the modern history of nationalism is mapped onto a time line that corresponds to the continuing process of internal societal modernization as well as the transformation of the international system itself. The rise of a nationalism and the form it takes are seen to indicate the position of the community in question in relation to the process of modernization-the "place" it has reached or is willing to embrace in this process. Hobsbawm writes that nationalisms in the later twentieth century tend to embody

rejections of modern modes of political organization, both national and supranational. Time and again they seem to be re- actions of weakness and fear, attempts to erect barricades to keep at bay the forces of the modern world. (164)

If one divests this statement of its contestable evaluative terms ("weakness and fear"), what remains, as Hobsbawm notes later, is the fact that contemporary nationalisms are "retreating before, resisting, adapting to, being absorbed or dislocated by, the new supranational restructuring of the globe" (182). In the passage cited above, Hobsbawm seems to view such conflicts resulting from and resisting "the new supranational restructuring of the globe" as somehow misguided and optional. But other statements of his provide a more convincing picture: "National economies, however un- dermined by the transnational economy, coexist and intertwine with it" (175). In other words, in the present epoch conflicts between transnational and national institutions would seem to be "structural," and nationalistic investments would likely be mobi- lized by any groups wishing to resist the current restructuring of the global economic system. What seems curious about Hobs- bawm's discussion is the way in which he describes what would seem to be an avenue of resistance against multinational capital as though it were, instead, the result of a failure or unwillingness to confront the forces of the modern world.

In more explicitly political discourses of nationalism, such issues of timeliness are directly linked to the issues of legitimacy

200 Alok Yadau

they already imply. In both academic and nonacademic dis-courses, "modernity" (or "postmodernity") becomes a slogan of legitimacy and value, supplanting more traditional associations of nationalism with popular sovereignty and democratic polity. Keeping up with the times becomes a political imperative in its own right, substituting a kind of adjustment and submission to present realities in place of a more contestatory understanding of popular sovereignty, delegitimating certain kinds of nationalism as hankering after a world gone by. Such "recognition" of present realities is posited as a kind of superior insight, self- consciousness, and political maturity that typically serves to distinguish "us" from other parts of the world and underwrites "the hope that, at least in the advanced Western democracies, awareness of nationalism's roots will obviate its more extreme varieties" (Alter 3).

Western academic writing on nationalism has quite con-sciously set itself the task of a certain distantiation from and mod- eration of the claims of nationalism. It offers not only the criterion of timeliness but also the culturalist typologies of "Eastern" and "Western" nationalism as alternatives to more directly political evaluations of specific nationalisms. Both of these discursive strategies serve to obscure, and indeed to negate, a more pressing distinction between "official" nationalisms (enforced from the top down, through the state apparatuses, repressive and ideological) and "insurgent" nationalisms (directed against structures of domination, both intranational and international). To characterize a nationalism as "Eastern" or "Western" tells us very little and serves merely to mobilize a familiar set of stereotypes. To describe a nationalism as "official" or "insurgent," by contrast, is to make an analytical claim about the social location and politics of the given nationalist project. Such descriptions are, of course, always open to dispute, but they serve crucially to focus debate on important political issues. The continuity between academic and more public Western discourses on nationalism rests, as the next section will show more fully, on this common tendency to marginalize political considerations, even (or especially) as the marginalizing discourse is itself closely allied to identifiable political projects.


2. Public SceneslPublic Spaces

Nationalism is archaic. It began in the late Middle Ages and it died with the advent of CNN. The world is no longer divided into different colored squares; it's divided into corporations and geographical blocks of poverty. . . . Haven't the patriots been reading the news? The age of nations is past. (Margot Kidder qtd. in The Nation 103-04)

In the special 125th anniversary issue of The Nation on "patriotism," there are a variety of opinions expressed on the timeliness of nationalism and patriotic sentiment-opinions written in the wake of the United States-led Gulf War and the immense mobilization of nationalism that it involved but opening, ironically, onto a larger reading of the sociopolitical configuration of the modern world in which nationalism seems primarily a relic of the past, a relic of the nineteenth-century world in which this magazine first took its name.1° This modern world of transnational corporate capitalism implies a series of structured, asymmetrical relations that define the place of each nation-state and region within the global system. It goes without saying that the position of any given constit- uency within the system will fundamentally affect its perspective on the global system. But, as in Margot Kidder's comments cited above, there is a commonplace tendency to make statements about nationalism in a universalist cast even though they rely exclusively on Western terms of reference, on a perspective specific to a given position within the global system. Thus, Sandy Close, for ex-ample, writes:

[I]n an era of worldwide migrations and travel, with lives in flux, borders coming down, multiple homelands and cultures, a world economy, international plagues and global popular culture, that sense of fierce attachment to one's patria is dying . . . patriotism is an anachronism. (TheNation 81)"

The demise of nationalism is here continuous with and is virtually the equivalent of the elimination of varying, specifically located perspectives; instead, "everyone" participates in a "worldwide" mix of "multiple homelands and cultures."

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This claim of the outdatedness of "patriotismw-its rooted-ness in an older world of rootedness-is linked with a distaste for what nationalism/patriotism "means," as in these remarks by Ed- ward Said:

Which country? I've never felt that I belonged exclusively to one country. . . . Nearly everything normally associated with [patriotism]-wars, rituals of nationalistic loyalty, sentimental- ized (or invented) traditions, parades, flags, etc.-is quite dreadful and full of appalling claims of superiority and preem- inence. (The Nation 116)

Thus, not only is nationalism anachronistic, it is "full of" regressive political content. It is significant, however, that Said situates his comments in relation to the patriotic modes of "countries," that is, of states and governments, and not in relation to specifically non- state, popular modes of patriotism. Indeed, elsewhere in his writings, he readily takes recourse to nationalistic narratives in elabo- rating a progressive political project.12

The contributors to The Nation overwhelmingly suggest, further, that nationalism is particularly ill suited to the United States-and to other non-European "nation-states":

The United States is a palimpsest; it is always being "written over," as it becomes something else over time from what it was. Being an aggregation of every race and people under heaven, it lacks the assured cultural definition of national identity that one finds in European nation-states. (The Nation 79 [Walter Dean Burnham])13

[Nationalism] was parochially European. Africans were di-vided into tribes and Middle Easterners into sects, and the Eu- ropean attempt to fit them instead into countries has left them troubled and troubling. (The Nation 89 [David Fromkin])

In addition to being anachronistic and regressive, then, nationalism and the idea of the nation-state are also "parochial," of limited value in describing more than three-quarters of the globe. In the United States this seems to be due to the "post-national" character of American society (it is continually being revolutionized and so


can have no fixed "national identity"), while in non-Western countries, the issue seems to be more that they are "pre-national," still caught in a division into "tribes" or "sects." If nationalism is identified with European modernity, it can then also be used to distinguish, by contrast, American postmodernity and non-Western ar- chaism.

I cite these comments, variously deserving of qualification though they may be, as markers of a dominant consensus in "public" Western discussions of the phenomena of nationalism, a consensus that, in economic, political, and cultural terms, nationalism and the nation-state are rapidly becoming obsolete as descriptive and analytical categories, especially for progressive politics. And yet, nationalist sentiment retains an undeniable vitality in contemporary social and political life, in the United States as elsewhere. James Weinstein states the challenge that this fact poses quite clearly:

In fact, most Americans are patriots. . . . [Elvery successful revolution has been made by movements that have successfully represented themselves as acting in the best interests of their country-or as the true patriots. For the left to have a chance of success in America, it, too, must learn first to see itself this way, and then to convince the majority of people that its vision is accurate. (The Nation 13 1 )

Weinstein's claim-that nationalism is today too central a term to be given up without a contest over its meanings and uses-defines one aspect of my interest in examining nationalism in this essay. As recent analyses of identity formation and political practice have made abundantly clear, political motivations and projects are defined not merely in the contest among different, competing political discourses and counterdiscourses (some dominant and others subaltern, some hegemonic and others marginal) but are con- structed crucially within the space defined by a hegemonic discourse and the contests over its meanings and uses.I4 Too often, an antipa- thy for certain versions of nationalism serves as an excuse to ignore the pervasiveness of nationalist investments or as a reason to locate Leftist politics simply in opposition to nationalism. But nationalism is a hegemonic articulation of identity in our present world; it is

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too powerful a terrain to be abandoned simply to conservatives and reactionaries.I5 We may, in fact, appreciate more fully the work of nationalism as a form of political mobilization if we put aside our distaste for, or disillusionment with, nationalism and focus instead on some of the uses to which the discourses of nationalism and antinationalism have been put in the contemporary context, and some of their roles and functions, in particular their deploy- ment to demarcate geopolitical divisions.

Against the various arguments by other contributors to The Nation that nationalism should be irrelevant (because it is anachronistic, because it is repellent, because it does not make sense for multicultural states), Weinstein simply asserts what seems incontrovertible: that, in fact, nationalism is alive and well, in the United States as elsewhere. In the last section of this essay I will show how the "arguments" for the contemporary irrelevance of nationalism are mistaken, but first I want to present a case that confirms that they are mistaken.

Shortly after the start of the recent Gulf War and, in the midst of an extensive and otherwise admirable series of weekly comments on the U.S. government's maneuverings, The New Yorker published a more general, "reflective" article, "Islam and the West," by William Pfaff. Unlike the majority of the contributors to The Nation's special issue, Pfaff does not argue about the timeliness (that is, the supposedly anachronistic nature) of nationalism; rather, he argues that only some states have "the social and historical credentials of nationhood": "The instability of the Middle East occurs at a fault line dividing two histories, two pasts . . . where real nations abut a zone of historical non-nationhood" (83). Al-though this initial comment distinguishes such "real nations" as "Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Yemen, and Iraq" from "the zone of non-nationhood," including "nearly the entire Ara- bian peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, and other Gulf states), Syria, and Jordan" (83), the rest of the essay makes clear (as the title already indicates) that the most significant "fault line" between "real nations" and non-nations distinguishes "the West" from the Islamic world and, more generally, from the non-Western world. Pfaff contrasts "Western ideas of the secular democratic state" with the "Islamic political tradition," which he describes as "a tradition of nomad empire" (84-85). "Empires," however, Pfaff


continues, "are not nations. They incorporate nations, and have expanding (or shrinking) frontiers. Unlike nations, they include rather than exclude" (84). While no one would argue that empire and nation are interchangeable terms, Pfaff's implication that the "logic" of empire is incompatible with the "logic" of nationhood carries little historical relevance, however attractive it might be as a formal or theoretical distinction. Like most Western commenta- tors, Pfaff simply ignores the fact that the high tide of European nationalism (from the eighteenth century to the Second World War) coincides rather strikingly with the epoch of European imperialism.l6

While most academic scholars of nationalism agree that there are no necessary or incontrovertible "objective" criteria of nationhood," Pfaff believes there are specific "social and historical credentials of nationhood" (83), though he does not particularize them. While most scholars now follow Renan's position that "nationhood" is crucially a matter of consensus or consciousness on the part of the group con~erned, '~ Pfaff positions himself as an adjudicator of claims to nationhood: "Iraq has a serious claim to a national identity and national autonomy" (84); "[other] states, however, are not nations; they lack historical roots, national integ- rity" (83). In Pfaff's hands, "true nationhood" (83) becomes a de- sirable status that Western states automatically possess but that non-Western states can only sometimes lay claim to and, even with it, can only sometimes or semilegitimately lay claim to "a national identity and national autonomy"! The implicit logic of Pfaff's argument is that, because these non-Western states are arbitrary constructs of the period of Western imperialism and lack long- standing historical roots as independent political units, they do not possess the same legitimacy as autonomous states that Western nation-states can claim. Pfaff's article is more plainspoken and direct than most academic discourses in drawing the implications of its differential description of types of nationalism, but it shares with them and casts in a starker light the political project of delegitimation that stands behind such differentiating strategies.

It is not difficult to find extensive evidence of the long- standing vitality of this mode of using a certain understanding of nationalist phenomena in order to construct Third World societies as factitious and arbitrary, assembled together through European

interventions, and thus not really "real" in the same way as Western societies, that is, not entitled to the same claims of political sovereignty and internal autonomy as Western societies. This particular use of the discourse of nationalism usually depends (as with Pfaff) on an assumption that non-Western "nation-states" in their multi- ethnicity and facticity are somehow pecu1ia.l: It is this assumption that I want to examine now, recalling that about ninety percent of "nation-states" are in fact multiethnic.

In Notes Towards the Dejnition of Culture, T. S. Eliot invoked this very distinction to contrast "England" with the non-European world and especially "the peculiar case of India." The conditions that make possible "the conception of a national culture" in En- gland "are those of a homogeneous general culture, associated with the traditions of one religion," in contrast to "those considerable areas of the globe" failing this test of homogeneity: "For such areas it is probable that a very different type of political philosophy should inspire political action, from that in terms of which we are accustomed to think and act in this part of the world" (66,64). But "England" is not, of course, a "nation-state" at all. And the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is, like France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, etc., a multicultural and "factitious" unit.lg If we are willing to discard their revisionist ideological self-reconstruction through nationalist discourses in the eighteenth century and since, the sociological features that are often taken to be characteristic of the "new nations" are, upon ex- amination, characteristic also of the "historic nations." What were taken to be examples of archaic social development (the colonial states in the non-Western world) turn out to be representative of all modern societies and, indeed, point the way to the most salient characteristic of fully elaborated modern (or postcolonial) development: that is, the need to re-vision community on the basis of a problematic of fundamental heterogeneities.

What are taken to be the problems of new nations, then, can be seen more usefully as dilemmas of (post)modernity in general. The integration of diverse ethnic and cultural groups, the consolidation within one political framework of radically different and even incompatible understandings of social and personal realities, the weakness of the state in the face of transnational concentrations of capital, the alienation of a national security state from public


accountability, the crises of orientation and direction as the society and its members undergo in an uneven manner fundamental sociocultural transformations-all of these and other "problems" come to define the terrain of political activity around the world. What this means for the theory and study of nationalism is that a fundamental inversion of its most central paradigms is needed so that what has been seen as normative and what has been seen as eccentric are reversed. Now the task will be to understand the history of nationalism in Europe and around the world, while recog- nizing that its "normal" context is not a homogeneous nation-state or "people" but rather a multicultural terrain of uneven sociological development and transformation. A politics of nationalism based on this new understanding would involve a relational political analysis-that is, a political analysis for which "difference," rather than "homogeneity" or unitary "community," is the en- abling foundation. Such a politics of nationalism must describe a trajectory that begins and ends with differences and, in the process, negotiates the fact of historical inequalities.

Such a massive task is beyond the scope of this essay, but recent studies of nationalism do provide some indication of the direction in which one would need to proceed. As Gellner, especially, has made clear, modern nationalism is linked both to the existence of a centralized structure of state power and social reproduction (the national educational system, national media, a single division of labor) and to the relative absence of public political institutions between the level of the individual and that of the state (see Gellner 1981 and 1983; also Worsley 255-58).20 Any political project that seeks not merely to mobilize nationalist sentiments in their readily available forms but to transform nationalist investments so that they are centered not on the unitary state but on a notion of popular self-determination, on a notion that acknowledges the heterogeneity of social groups, will need to foster alternative, decentral- ized public institutional sites and more participatory forms of political activity beyond the centralized state structure. A progres-sive nationalist politics, in other words, would need to be linked to the notion of a citizens' democracy and the elaboration of "counter institutions," to a notion of political community that challenges the "national" structures of capitalist democracies. Nationalism needs to be incorporated, thus, into a political project that does not take

208 Alok Yaduu

nationalist investments as its sole or determining horizon but that capitalizes on the issue of popular self-determination that nationalism brings into focus. The discourse of nationalism can serve as an opening, a demarcated space, through which a more public politics can be articulated.

This alternative politics of nationalism remains submerged, it is true, within the discourses of nationalism as they have been dominantly appropriated and institutionalized, but it communi- cates readily with the emphasis on "community" (in the strong sense of koinonia) in writings on participatory democracy and with aspects of Gramsci's discussion of the "national-popular."*l Eric Hobsbawm has written that, "whatever else a nation was, the element of citizenship and mass participation or choice was never absent from it" and the "combination of social and national demands" has been the most potent as well as the most pervasive form of political struggle "in modern states" (Nations 19, 125 [emphasis added], 145).

Forms of participatory politics hold open the possibility of rec- onciling heterogeneity with community, since in them "community" is not given as a predefined and delimited fact but is created through common work and common interaction. But participatory theory also recognizes that "loyalty" or investment in the collectivity through which political decisions are to be made is a pre- requisite for the democratic functioning and viability of such a collectivity. In other words, one's "identity" must be significantly related to participation in the group and its collective decision- making if there is to be any sustained pressure toward increasing the scope of democratization and one's "say" in the functioning of the Nationalism is significant here as one way of defining such investments of identity since it is a form of "identity politics" that does not need to found the claims of community on a specific homogeneity. Membership in a national community depends only on conventional criteria (especially "citizenship") and is theoreti- cally open to various differences and heterogeneities rather than exclusively delimited on the basis of specific differences. In internally heterogeneous and complex nation-states or, more precisely, in nation-states that actually understand themselves as such, these features of nationality have regularly been foregrounded in exer- cises of "nation-building." Thus, in India and Canada, for ex-


ample, secular nationhood has been predicated on nationality as one commonality across what are otherwise multiple differences.

But the pressure for a popular, participatory form of nationalist politics emerges not only from the internally heterogeneous character of societies. Especially in the Third World, it emerges crucially also in response to the progressive restructuring of the international economic system in the interests of transnational capital. Indeed, much of the motive to crush Third World nationalisms stems from the ambiguous possibility that the contexts of nationalism in the Third World hold for the articulation of a politics that moves in this direction of radical social transformation and, even well short of this, from the obstacle many of them pose to the unhindered workings of transnational capital.

3. The Nation-State and Third World Nationalisms

Where does the nation-state cease and Sony, Xerox, I.B.M. or Siemens begin? And can the planetary integrated economy coexist with the revolt of the ethnics and the return of the religions? Progress, and thus the concept of the nation-state and nationalism, have ceased to become linear conceptions. The new and the old, the living and what we thought dead, are suddenly meeting on the same ground. Our mental and political habits must change accordingly. (The Nation 90 [Car-los Fuentes])

In this section, I want to examine the contexts that might help us to understand what is generally at stake in competing interpre- tations of nationalism, especially Third World nationalisms. My contention has been that one needs to examine more directly the investments of the paradigms of academic discourses about nationalism if one hopes to avoid simply reinforcing deeply held "Euro- centric" biases. The issue is only in part one of scholarly accuracy or perspicuity; it is equally about the political function of the demonization of Third World nationalisms in the geopolitics of the twentieth century, especially in the wake of the demise of the Cold war paradigm.23

Noam Chomsky, in agreement with others such as Gabriel Kolko and Ralph Miliband, has argued that since the Second

210 Alok Yadav

World War the hegemonic role of the United States in the global system has pitted it against "independent nationalisms," that is, desires on the part of Third World societies for self-determined or independent development:

The role of the Third World within the Grand Area structure was to serve the needs of the industrial societies. In Latin American, as elsewhere, "the protection of our resources" must be a major concern, George Keenan explained. . . .The major threat to U.S. interests is posed by "nationalistic re- gimes" that are responsive to popular pressures for "immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses" and diversification of the economies. This tendency conflicts not only with the need to "protect our resources," but also with our concern to encourage "a climate conducive to private investment" and "in the case of foreign capital to repatriate a reasonable return." . . . The conflict between U.S. policy and independent Third World development was deeply rooted in the structure of the world system. The persistent resort to violence to bar nationalist threats is a natural concomitant of these commitments. (49, 57)24

While nationalism is eminently a discourse of geopolitics, even where its aims are "domestic" in orientation, the larger context of issues of domination and exploitation within a global system of nation-states is, as we have seen, often elided in academic discussions of nationalism that focus, instead, on the intellectual or historical "content" of nationalisms and the specific dangers they pose. Such elision and the overwhelming focus on the dangers of nationalism (often drawn from European experience, but applied to the non-European world) participate, knowingly or not, in the massive political efforts to discredit any route of Third World development other than subordinate incorporation into the system of global capitalism-insofar as resistance to such incorporation depends on a nationalist practice, at once political, economic, and cultural. In this final section, I want to specify some of the structural features of contemporary transnational capitalism, as they define the status and roles of nation-states and as they produce geopolitical relations that would tend to mitigate or intensify na-

Nationalism and Contemporaneity 21 1

tionalist politics, in order to situate more concretely the stakes of nationalism in the contemporary world.

The rise of the modern transnational corporations since the late 1960s is often taken as the central development that makes nationalistic issues irrelevant. Peter Worsley, writing in 1984, has described vividly the new international situation produced through the actions of these firms:

Political influence apart, the sheer scale of their operations means that the decisions they take are often more important to the economy of a country than those taken by its government, and not only in the case of the smaller countries. Even large, developed countries are losing the capacity to control their own economic future. Today, General Motors spends more than the Japanese government (and Japan is the world's fourth largest industrial Power); Ford spends more than the French government's defence expenditure; and Im- perial Chemical Industries has a budget larger than that of Norway. In the Third World, in 1970, only three Latin American countries-Brazil, Mexico and Argentina-had a GNP superior to the annual sales of General Motors, Stan- dard Oil, Ford and Royal Dutch Shell. The capacity of governments in societies with a GNP of less than US $450 per capita per annum to exercise sovereign choice is thus ex- tremely limited. (317)

Worsley, however, also argues that the "nation-state is still a significant unit in international politics" (316). In any case, the full impact of the development of transnational corporations has been the result of a number of concomitant and supporting changes. Thus, there has developed an increasingly integrated global net- work for movement of goods, information, technology, and capital. Not only are there transnational corporations in the manufactur- ing and commodity industries, but national and international banking systems have become increasingly integrated through the interbank system and various kinds of syndicates of banks for international loans; business services are being marketed increasingly on a global scale; and stocks, bonds, and securities are for practical purposes no longer tied to specific national or regional

212 Alok Yadav

exchanges, and can be purchased and sold anywhere in the world. Some of the consequences of this process of integration have been the increasing synchronization of the business cycles in the industrial nations; the new, decisive importance of exchange rates; an '6 .Intensive national competition for capital"; the dismantling or modification of national antitrust and other regulations "in order to make national industries large enough to be more competitive in the world market"; as well as the diminishment in the economic decision-making significance of some states.25

The increasing mobility of capital and technology has raised the stakes of national competition to attract and retain international capital and has consequently sharpened the contest among nation-states for advantage in this pursuit. It has also, however, sharply constrained the range of policy options available to states if they hope to limit "capital flight." The results have placed greater stress on states, by increasing both the costs of failure and the (at least temporary) gains of success, and have given them less room in which to maneuver:

Societies have never been closer and more integrated than they are today. This near universality and integration of the world economy exists in dialectical interaction with the fundamental contradiction of national capitalism. . . . The objective integration of the world economy creates limits to national ex-ceptionalism. What is more, whole realms of action that were once part of the state's domain-national finance, money sup- ply, economic policy, trade, even the measurement of these activities-are in large part now beyond national control. . . . At the same time, though, nations are strong and struggle in sharpening global competition. U. Kolko 6-7)

This closer integration of the world economic system has sharpened competition in other senses as well, as different business styles and cultures-American, Japanese, European-are increas-ingly called upon to interact more closely and accommodate each other and the host societies in which they operate. The waves of "Japan-bashing" that have swept through the United States are one manifestation of the friction produced by this process; heightened anxieties regarding "whose" transnational corporations will control access to and marketing of strategic technology and re-


sources is another (witness, for example, the 1988 U.S. trade law restricting "purchase by foreigners of industries important for U.S. national security" [Spero 81).

Moreover, the internal organizational structure and policy of transnational corporations tend to reproduce some of the features of the administrative structures of colonial empires, thus engen- dering heightened national consciousness and tensions much the same way as did colonial administrative apparatuses. As Stephen Hymer has argued regarding transnational corporations:

[Elthnic homogeneity increases as one goes up the corporate hierarchy; the lower levels contain a wide variety of nationali- ties, the higher levels become successively purer and purer . . . a common background becomes all-important: . . . nationals [of each subsidiary country] remain rooted in one spot while above them is a layer of people who move around from country to country. . . . In the nature of things, these people (reticu- lators) for the most part will be citizens of the country of the parent corporation (and will be drawn from a small, culturally homogeneous group within the advanced world), since they will need to have the confidence of their superiors and be able to move easily in the higher management circles. Latin Ameri- cans, Asians, and Africans will at best be able to aspire to a management position in the intermediate coordinating cen- ters at the continental level. Very few will be able to get much higher than this, for the closer one gets to the top, the more important is "a common cultural heritage." (142)

In addition, there are the tensions that arise from the actions of subsidiaries in host countries, whether they are incidents like the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India, or whether they are the more everyday activities of using subsidiaries as "milk cows" for the parent company by "borrowing" capital from the subsidiaries or "increasing transfer prices, royalty charges, and management and engineering fees" (J.Kolko 83).The end result is a pattern of ostensible sovereignty and independence of nation-states com-bined with their actual dependence in relation to international regulatory institutions, transnational corporations, and the most powerful states.26 The simple conclusion, then, that with the rise of transnational corporations the national unit of analysis loses its

214 Alok Yadav

pertinence turns out to be more a wish than a reflection of anything we have seen happen in the past quarter century.

The centrality of the nation-state rests, moreover, on its control over one primary element in the productive equation: namely, labor. For while a world market for the movement of capital and commodities has been established (and now with the incorporation of the former Comecon countries and increasingly of China, India, and other formerly insulated economies, has been further consoli- dated), the movement of labor, that is, of people, on a global scale continues to be severely regulated.27 There has, of course, been a huge increase in the magnitude of migrant labor, to the point where many countries depend on the remittances of migrant la- borers for significant proportions of their foreign exchange earn- ings or even of their national incomes,28 but all such movements remain under the control of governmental bodies. Establishing the general terms and conditions of work and providing for the reproduction of the labor pool, especially the skilled labor pool, also remain largely in government hands. National tensions are particularly manifest at the level of labor issues, within corporations and across countries, as the rising xenophobia across Europe since the 1980s attests.

Finally, the importance of the national unit becomes strikingly apparent once one considers that the process of integration of the world economic system has not been inevitable or due to some objective necessity. It has been undertaken in the interests of transnational capital and with the aid of the states most responsive to those interests, and it has depended on the ability to pressure the countries of the South to make themselves subject to the unregulated workings of international capital. Western governments and banks, in particular those of the United States, have used direct pressure and indirect conditionality through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank both to counsel trade- and investment-regime liberalization and to require this as a condition of access to international capital for loans and for negotiating re- scheduling~ of loans. Governments that have striven to pursue alternative paths of economic and social development have been un- dermined by the blocking of or the threat of blocking their access to international capital markets, export markets, and essential im-


ports or by direct subversion or invasion.29 The Non-Aligned Movement, the Group of 77, the United Nations Conferences on Trade and Development, the calls for a New World Information and Communications Order and for a New International Eco- nomic Order requiring "changes in the terms of trade, indexing of the price of commodities to those of industrial products, price supports and buffer stocks, and a moratorium on debt payments" (J. Kolko 38): all these pressures for self-directed development in Third World countries have been fought determinedly and continue to be suppressed, and it is in this context that it has been necessary to demonize the nationalistic investments of many political cultures in the non-Western world. A discussion entitled "Fall- Out of [the] Gulf War" in the Economic and Political Weekly in India notes:

The post-cold war balance with an enhanced role for the U.S. . . . helps in the short run to put the brakes on the emergence of an independent security policy for Europe. This implies that the Third World will face the combined weight of trans-Atlantic enterprise in both civilian and military trade. Immediately there will be greater pressure on the Third World to compromise on intellectual property rights, terms of trade, foreign policy, security policy, etc. . . . And in confronting the combined might of the U.S. and Europe there will be no countervailing force available to them. (Navlakha 1451)

In the absence of a Cold War power balance, the main source of leverage available to Third World governments to combat external pressures will involve mobilizing the nationalist sentiments of their own populations and radically increasing popular participation in public debate and decision-making in order to render unpopular, externally mandated policies unworkable. As Ralph Miliband has commented with regard to "reformist" capitalist governments since the Second World War (which includes many Third World governments interested in the issue of development), "[Tlhey soon found that they would either have to retreat in the face of international pressure, or that they would have to go a lot further on the path of reform" (183). Retreat and subordination are the inevitable alternatives to increased radicalization and popular participation,

216 Alok k d a u

and a strong climate of nationalistic emphasis on meaningful autonomy and independence will be one of the few checks on such retreat.

The prospects for progressive developments are not optimis- tic, but this discussion establishes the case for two likelihoods: first, that nationalistic issues will almost certainly become an increasing source of contestation and conflict in the present era; and second, and in part consequently, nationalistic discourses will be important resources in the vocabulary of progressive politics in this period. None of this is to suggest that all nationalist politics will be progressive, but that point hardly needs to be made.30 What does need to be asserted, given the predominant academic criticism, in the West, of non-Western nationalism, is the complexity of the contemporary conjuncture and the need for effective sources of resistance to the increasingly total consolidation of the system of international capitalism. Raymond Williams's comment that "emphasis on the nation-state taking control of a national political and economic life contradicts very openly the practices and ideals of market mobility and free consumer choice" (192) is indicative of the manner in which nationalist investments can serve as a powerful location for resistance to capitalist norms. Of course, this implies not simple endorsement of nationalist projects, but rather contestation for the meaning and direction of nationalist discourses and their appropri-ation for progressive projects.

Appendix

The Western World The Non-Western World

Open Society. Western nationalism was Closed Society. Here the elements of the product of the Age of Reason- the Enlightenment were rejected as the Enlightenment, Illumini., or unreasonable, even foolish. Aufklarung. This meant the ideas of Nationalism meant not freedom but liberty, equality, and fraternity, as well the duty to serve the state. This was as the concomitants of the authoritarian or closed society. constitutionalism, parliamentarianism, liberalism, democracy, tolerance, and free speech. This was the pluralistic or open society.

Reality. Nationalism in the West Ideality. The non-Western mind was emphasized political reality. It absorbed not by reality but by an


responded to the challenge of building nations without too much regard for the past. The nation itself was regarded as a real, vital, existing thing. Political integration was sought around a rational goal.

Union of Citizens. Western nationalists saw nations as unions of citizens joined by a common will expressed in the social contract and other covenants and plebiscites. The people were to work together for a common future.

Indiuzdualism. Western nationalists approved a legal and rational concept of citizenship. Individual rights were regarded as sacred. All men were to be regarded as fundamentally alike as individuals, no matter what their social class or historic nationality.

Self-Assurance. Western nationalism, reflecting the confidence and optimism of the philosophes of the Age of Reason, was self-assured and positive about its virtues.

Bourgeois Support. Western nationalism was supported by the politically and economically powerful bourgeoisie.

(Taken from Snyder 1990)

eternal search for the ideal Fatherland. This form of nationalism was characterized by myths and dreams of the future, and not by any immediate connection with the present. The newborn nation always looked to the past and to nonpolitical and history-conditioned factors.

Folk Community. Non-Western nationalists regarded the nation as a political unit centering around the irrational, precivilized folk concept. The rallying point was not a free and rational order but the folk community. Emphasis was placed on the diversity and self-sufficiency of nations.

Collectiuzsm. In the non-Western world the decisive appeal was not to individual but to collective rights, to peculiarities of race or class. The idea of citizenship was left purposely vague, thereby lending itself more easily to exaggerations of imagination and to the excitation of emotions.

Inferiority Complex. Non-Western nationalism, without any real roots in socio-political reality, lacked self- assurance. Often enough its sense of insecurity was overcompensated by overconfidence and aggressiveness.

Aristocratic Base. Non-Western nationalism received its main support from a combination of aristocracy and the masses, both conservative minded.

Notes

1. For example, see The New Yorker ("Notes and Comment," 12 Aug. 1991); The Nation (special issue on "Patriotism," 15122 July 1991; Eric Hobsbawm, "The Perils of the New Nationalism," 4 Nov. 1991); Le Monde Diplomatique (Marc Ferro, "Du nationalisme comme rCflexe de survie," Juillet 1991); Tikkun (special focus: nationalism and ethnic particularism, Nov./Dec. 1992).

218 Alok Y&v

2. Some of the major recent publications are listed here in chronological order: John A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Na- tionalism(London: Verso, 1983; rev. ed., 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nationsand National- ism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983); Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism (2nd ed., New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983); Peter Alter, Nationalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), Nationalism, trans. Stuart McKinnon-Evans (LondoniNew York: E. Arnold, 1989); Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups Among the Smaller European Nations, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Cambridge UP, 1985); Im- manuel Wallerstein and Etienne Balibar, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, Balibar trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nationsand Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (New York: Cambridge UP, 1990); Louis Snyder, Encyclopedia of Nationalism (New York: Paragon House, 1990); An-thony D. Smith,National Identity (Reno: U of Nevada P, 1991). In addition, there are innumerable more specialized studies of specific regions or countries.

3. For examples of the literature on economic nationalism, again in chronological order, see Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Modern Reader Paper- backs, 1969); Norman Girvan, Corporate Imperialism: Conflict and Expropriation: Transnational Corporations and Economic Nationalism in the Third World (New York: Monthly Review P, 1978); Otto Hieronymi, ed., The New Economic Nationalism (New York: Praeger, 1980); Gavin Kitching, Development and Underdevelopment in Historical Perspective: Populism, Nationalism, and Industrialization (London: Routledge, 1989); Peter Peterson, Economic Nationalism and Interdependence: The Global Costs of National Choices (Washington, D.C.: Per Jacobsson Foundation, 1984); Peter Burnell, Economic Nationalism in the Third World (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1985); The Report of the South Commission, The Challenge to the South (New York: Oxford UP, 1990). Much of this literature takes up issues of geopolitics as they intersect with economic issues, but sociopolitical issues more broadly conceived and cultural issues tend to be disregarded.

4. Tom Nairn has pointed out this issue of the difference between a case-by- case study of different nationalisms, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a study of a given nationalism that situates it in relation to the "world-historical" context inaugurated by capitalism. "My belief," he writes, "is that the only framework of reference which is of any real utility here [with regard to the question of nationalism] is world history as a whole. . . . Most approaches to the question are vitiated from the start by a country-by-country attitude" (332).

5. Cf. Timothy Brennan's remarks: "impatience with the apparently divisive and warlike character of nationalism is very common among European critics in the postwar period, who work either within a Marxist tradition of 'internation- alism' or a liberal tradition of sensible 'patriotism', perhaps most of all in Britain and the United States where even Left social critics (until very recently) have ritually denounced 'imperialism' while withdrawing their support from the oppositional forces that imperial legacy has inevitably unleashed" (2).

6. In his postwar handbook, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (1955; rev. ed. 1965), Kohn writes:

In the modern West, nationalism which arose in the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, was predominantly a political movement to limit governmental power and to secure civic rights. Its pur- pose was to create a liberal and rational civil society representing the


middle-class and the philosophy of John Locke. When nationalism, after the Napoleonic wars, penetrated to other lands-Central and Eastern Europe or to Spain and Ireland-it came to lands which were in political ideas and social structure less advanced than the modern West. . . . While English and American nationalism was, in its origin, connected with the concepts of individual liberty and represented nations firmly constituted in their political life, the new nationalism, not rooted in a similar political and social reality, lacked self-assurance. Its inferiority complex was often compensated by over-emphasis. (29-30)

Western modernity, rationality and political liberalism are here idealized and con- trasted with the "less advanced" countries of the "East," which suffer from an "inferiority complex" and cannot appropriate these Western virtues. Kohn proceeds to sharpen this distinction still further:

Within the context of the intellectual traditions and the social structure of the modern West, nationalism had represented a movement for a more open society and the pursuit of individual happiness, for the security of civil liberties and the unfettering of thought. After the Second World War, nationalism lost much of its hold on the West. . . . On the other hand, in the East, Communism stressed national sovereignty as never before; there nationalism became the dominant and exclusive force. When nationalism spread to Eastern Europe and later to Asia, to lands with traditions different from those in the West and frequently hostile to modern Western ways, nationalism tended toward the closed society, in which the individual counted for less than the strength and authority of the national whole. Nationalism was considered a panacea for solving all problems and its impatient penchant for action and violence made it susceptible to Communist influences. (8 1-82)

Here we are presented with a quite explicit contrast between the "open" societies of the West and the "closed" societies of the East, in an academic discourse that, despite its convergence with official Cold War propaganda, thinks of itself as far removed from any nationalistic political agenda: "After the Second World War, nationalism lost much of its hold on the West," while Eastern countries continued in many respects "hostile to modern Western ways." The "modern West" and "modern Western ways," here as elsewhere (as we shall see), stand as the measure of modernity in general and mark by contrast the obsolete character of other social formations.

7. Smith is himself the author of five other books on nationalism: Theories of Nationalism (2nd ed., New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983); Nationalism in the Twen- tieth Century (New York: New York UP, 1979); The Ethnic Revival (New York: Cam- bridge UP, 1981); State and Nation in the Third World: The Western State and African Nationalism (New York: St. Martin's P, 1983); and The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Ox-ford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). He is also the author of "Nationalism: A Trend Re- port and Annotated Bibliography," Current Sociology 21.3 (1973): 5-185. Eric Hobsbawm has written that "Professor Anthony Smith is at present the main guide in this field for readers of the English language" (Nations and Nationalism 1990: 2n2). In criticizing aspects of Smith's presentation I do not mean to dismiss the value of his work in other respects or to equate it with the often highly tendentious discussions in Kohn's work.

220 Alok Yadav

8. After describing Kohn's dichotomy between "Western" and "Eastern" nationalism, Smith writes:

This typology can be criticized on a number of grounds. [For instance,] [ilts geopolitical dimension overlooks the influence of both kinds of ideological nationalism in different European communities. . . . Despite these criticisms, Kohn's philosophical distinction between a more rational and a more organic version of nationalist ideology remains valid and useful. It is implicit [in Smith's own book] in the distinction drawn in chapter 1 between "Western" civic-territorial and "Eastern" ethnic-genealogical models of the nation. Here too we have to treat geopolitical labels cautiously. Both models can be found in the "East." in the "West." in Asia. Africa and in Latin America, as well as within many nationalist move-ments. (8 1, emphasis added)

As we have seen, the "philosophical" or "conceptual" distinction at stake here is really between the synchronic and diachronic aspects of any nationalism, and since by Smith's own account there is nothing specifically "Eastern" or "Western" about either of these kinds of nationalism. one is left with the auestion. whv then

i

is it necessary to qualify them in "geopolitical" terms? On the other hand, it is very easy to see what the "useful" effect of these labels is, in coloring our view of geopolitical issues.

9. See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, and Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780.

10. The outdatedness of nationalism in the epoch of "late" or "advanced" or "mature" capitalism is an old theme, especially in the Marxist literature, in which the orthodox position was long defined in significant measure by Lenin's 1913 comments in "Critical Remarks on the National Question." He argued there that, under mature capitalism, there is a tendency "to break down national barriers, to obliterate national distinctions, towards the assimilation of nations, which manifests itself more and more powerfully with every passing decade" (21-23). Of course, especially with his 1917 text on Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, this argument about the antinational tendency of mature capitalism was compa- tible for Lenin with the political support of anti-imperialist nationalisms in the non-European world. As I argue in this paper, however, since World War 11, this theme of the outdatedness of nationalism has been increasingly adopted by "mainstream" opinion in the Western world, but with a political function directly the opposite of the Leninist critique of imperialism or neo-imperialism. (This adaptation of Leninist premises serves to exemplify my contention that our task is neither to champion nor to disavow contemporary nationalisms as such, but to evaluate the conjunctural uses to which they are put.)

11. Quotations are from the 15122 July 1991 issue of The Nation and are identified by page number. In discussing the material in this special issue, I follow most of the contributors in treating "patriotism" and "nationalism" as essentially synonymous in a contemporary setting. Cultural historians concerned with a wider temporal field sometimes like to distinguish between pre-French Revolu- tion "patriotism" and post-French Revolution "nationalism," a distinction not central to our discussion here and one that ought to be (and has been) subjected to historical-critical scrutiny.

12. See especially The Question of Palestine and Covering Islam. In the introduction to the former of these texts, Said writes:


As a Palestinian myself, I have always tried to be aware of our weak- nesses and failings as a people. By some standards we are perhaps an unexceptional people; our national history testifies to a failing contest with a basically European and ambitious ideology (as well as practice); we have been unable to interest the West very much in the justice of our cause. Nevertheless we have begun, I think, to construct a political identity and will of our own; we have developed a remarkable resilience and an even more remarkable national resurgence; . . . above all, despite the fact that we are geographically dispersed and fragmented, despite the fact that we are without a territory of our own, we have been united as a people largely because the Palestinian idea (which we have articulated out of our own experience of dispos- session and exlusionary [sic] oppression) has a coherence to which we have all responded with positive enthusiasm. (x)

Here, there is a quite open willingness on Said's part to identify with "a people," to s ~ e a k for a "we." to invoke their "national historv" and "national resurgence."

0

and to acknowledge the "positive enthusiasm" that this nationalistic investment of identity provokes.

In Covering Islam, Said refers to the project of The Question of Palestine by empha- sizing this national dimension: "my study of Palestine attempts also to describe what has been hidden beneath the surface of Western views of the Orient-in this case, the Palestinian national struggle for self-determination" (ix-x). Indeed, Said's discussion in this later volume of the "coverage" of Islam proceeds against the general background of "the interventions all over Asia and Latin America which regularly pitted the United States against almost every brand of native nationalism" (27), and recognizes the power structures at stake in such interventions as also crucially at stake in the construction of "Islam" in and for the West (31-32, 36, 71-72, 95, 108).

What I am pointing to, then, in this shift between Said's comments in The Nation (addressed implicitly to the uses of American patriotism in the United States), and his comments in these separate volumes is not a "contradiction" but rather the situatedness of Said's remarks, that is, his own responsiveness to issues of context and perspective (see 1981: 154, 161). This responsiveness, I might add, highlights the very issues of community and of who is addressing whom that testify to the power of nationalist constructions of political identity.

13. See also Hendrick Hertzberg (98), Stephen Jay Gould (95), Mario M. Cuomo (83), Sanford Levinson (log), Gore Vidal(128, 130). Many of these characterizations are celebratory of the "clashing diversity of voices that is uniquely American" (The Nation 83 [Mario Cuomo]). In this way, heterogeneity with regard to the United States is generally valorized, while in the corresponding discussions of the heterogeneity of Third World polities, this "clashing diversity" is almost always coded as an unfortunate departure from the European model.

14. Gramsci is, of course, the major source for these understandings of the functioning of hegemony, and his use of the notion of "hegemony" recognizes this incorporation of competing projects within the dominant discourse: "Un- doubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed." But what makes this "compromise equilibrium" a crucial terrain of struggle is the fact that "such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential" without undermining

222 Alok Yadav

the very possibility of hegemony (Gramsci 161). Thus, hegemonic articulation is an inherently unstable political practice, in part because the very "breadth" of any hegemonic discourse opens it up to unanticipated or (from the perspective of dominant interests) untoward applications and uses.

15. With the example of the U.S. government's capitalization on patriotic sentiments in the recent Gulf War in the background, I am not suggesting that nationalism is necessarily a positive political force. What I am suggesting is that nationalist investments are pervasive and powerful-in Ben Anderson's words, they form "the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time" (12). If the Left does not seek to articulate them with a progressive political agenda, these investments will be territorialized by conservative agendas.

16. Pfaff himself would seem to acknowledge the compatibility of nationhood and imperialism when he speaks of "the United States-a nation that has inadvertently become the legatee of that aggressive, expansionist Western imperial civiliza- tion which, in the time of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, Americans believed it was their national mission to dismantle" (88, emphases added). Just as the British empire was acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness, so too, Pfaff would have us believe, the United States has "inadvertently" assumed an imperial role.

The general failure of Western scholars to consider the imperial context of many European nationalisms is symptomatic of the phenomenon I discussed ear- lier, namely the failure to situate domestically oriented discussions of a given nationalism within a wider geopolitical frame of reference. And the general assumption that empire and nation are incompatible phenomena mirrors the current arguments that transnational capitalism and the nation are incompatible phenomena. In both cases, one moves much too quickly from a certain "contradiction" in the import of the two terms to an assumption that therefore there cannot be historically viable forms of accommodation between them. Historical reality, however, it is worth reminding ourselves, is always characterized by constitutive contradictions. I take this point up in greater detail in the last section of the essay.

17. Peter Worsley, for example, writes as below. He is referring to the issue of the cultural determination of "political identityn-but his remarks can be gener- alized to the sociocultural determination of nationality:

Cultural attributes are not so much unambiguous determinants of political identity as resources, used selectively and situationally, according to their utility, rather than absolute borderlines marking one culture off from another (whether sharply or, to use Nadel's term, diacritically). . . . In rebutting the culturalist myth of ethnicity as some primordial need, the Marxist concept of interest has therefore to be introduced. Cultural traits are not absolutes or simply intellectual categories, but are invoked to provide identities which legitimize claims to rights. They are strategies or weapons in competitions over scarce social goods. . . . Affirmations of ethnic identity become particularly passionate when claims to rights are contested by others. (249)

18. See Renan's "What is a Nation?" (1882): "A nation is . . . a large-scale soli- darity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite . . ." (19). Social and historical factors


may help us to explain how or why a particular nationalism took shape, but they are hardly "credentials" that adjudicate entitlement to a nationalism or to nationhood.

19. The extended and uneven project of anglicization and assimilation in Brit- ain has been much discussed by Scottish, Welsh, and Irish (as well as English) writers, and is the central topic of my Cornell University PhD dissertation, "Na- tionalism and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain" (1993). For a discussion of these issues, see Victor Durkacz, The Decline of the Celtic Languages: A Study of the Linguistic and Cultural Conflict i n Scotland, Wales and Ireland from the Reformation to the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1983); R. D. Grillo, Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain and France (New York: Cambridge UP, 1989); Ronald Wardhaugh, Languages i n Competition: Dominance, Diversity, and Decline (Ox-ford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Glanmor Williams, Religion, Language, and Nationality i n Wales: Historical Essays (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 1979); Charles Withers, Gaelic i n Scotland 1698-1981: The Geographical History of a Language (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1984). For the case of Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary France, see more specifically RenCe Balibar, L'institution d u fran~ais: essai sur le colinguisme des Carol- ingtens a la Ripublique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1985); Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue: la rivolu-tion fran~aise et lespatois, l'enqudte de Grigoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1 91 4 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1976).

20. One should note, however, that Gellner equates this centralization of the sociopolitical apparatus with the cultural homogenization of the state. The modern, industrialized world, according to him,

is inevitably one of strong centralized states, carrying our [sic] expen- sive functions in the maintenance not merely of order, but also and above all of a complex infrastructure, including an elaborate educational system, and with considerable occupational and hence geographical mobility. It follows from all this that these units are fairly homogeneous internally in a cultural sense. ("Nationalism" 761).

Indeed, this internal cultural homogeneity becomes the crucial factor in the emergence of modern nationalism and its appeal:

These pools of homogeneous liquid, so to speak, within which fish of the same kind can move without cultural net or hinderance, are of course precisely what the ideal of nationalism requires. That this ideal has come to be implemented is not a consequence of some inherent or universal appeal of the ideal; it is a consequence of the basic organizational principles of modern society. . . . It isn't so much [then,] that nationalism insists on homogeneity. It is an objective need for homogeneity which for better or for worse manifests itself as nationalism. (767-68)

Gellner restricts himself here to a discussion of economic rationalization and what Althusser refers to as ideological state apparatuses. In important respects, he ignores the cultural diversity that is organized through civil society, that exists out- side the formal organization of education and work, or more importantly, that cuts across such formal homogeneity. Nor does he consider the geographical mobility of populations not only within states but between states, the massive di-

224 Alok Yadav

asporic phenomena that have shaped cultural politics in the modern epoch. In brief, the consequence of cultural homogeneity does not follow from the sociopolitical centralization that Gellner highlights.

In any case, Gellner is speaking at a very high level of abstraction here: com- pared to traditional, segmented, mosaic states, modern states are indeed rela- tively homogeneous. But it seems to me that at any socially significant level, modern societies are typically experienced and understood as internally heterogeneous, indeed, as tending to proliferate subcultures and commodified lifestyles.

21. See Barber; Cohen and Rogers; Finley; Gramsci: 421, n. 65; 130-33. The volume edited by Dharam Ghai offers a useful survey of the political responses to the "unprecedented" degree of "external intervention in national policy- making" in the 1980s (25): as various states in Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean accommodate international pressures and "return to prototypical 'neo-colonial' patterns characterized by the clear dominance of a foreign-trade- oriented or financial Clite" (38), new forms of local-level cooperation and solidar- ity have emerged among the groups most adversely affected by this restructuring and excluded from "what often have been rather clientistic and corporate chan- nels of interest representation in Latin American, African and Caribbean states" (39). These new organizations within civil society can "contribute to the creation of a more participatory society in nations where exclusion for many groups has long been the rule" (35), and in particular these civic organizations "tend to involve a disproportionately large number of women . . . drawing [them] out of the isolation of the home and into organizations which must deal with the state . . . [Tlhis implies significant new forms of political practice" (35-36).

22. See "A Theory of Loyalty" in Hirschman for an acute discussion of these issues. Hirschman argues that when, from a given participant's perspective, an organization or a group or collectivity is moving in a negative direction, the factor of "loyalty" will tend to promote a strategy of seeking to make one's "voice" heard over a strategy of opting out or "exiting" from the group's deliberations. Loyalty, in other words, leads people to "use the voice option with greater determination and resourcefulness than would otherwise be the case" (82), and, conversely, the greater the opportunities or tendency for exit, "the easier it appears to be for organizations to resist, evade, and postpone the introduction of internal democracy even though they function in a democratic environment" (84n). Hirschman suggests in relation to "traditional groups, such as family and nation," that, "[hlere the fact that one fully 'belongs' by birthright may nurture voice and thus compensate for the virtual unavailability of the threat of exit" (97-98).

Compare also Achin Vanaik, who, in a recent talk on "Nationalism, Communal- ism, and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in India," suggests that, despite its very real limits, the individual empowerment that the discourse of nationalism has promoted has meant that the nation-state has, through the notion of equal citizenship, served as the limit of actually available political advancement. Its blend of culture and politics, identity and political entitlement, makes nationalism a useful discourse for defining a benchmark of individual empowerment that any political project, progressive or otherwise, will have to meet or surpass if it hopes to garner popular support on the order that nationalism has been able to command.

23. Let me emphasize that I am making a conjectural argument here: given the present restructuring of global relations in the interests of transnational capital, nationalist mobilization of and through the state (and not only the state) becomes a crucial site of resistance to the imperialist penetration of Third World


societies. The "rigidity" that the system of nation-states and nationalistic political communities introduces into the international mobility of capital is an important means of demarcating a more limited field of struggle for progressive political mobilization and of reducing the flexibility of capitalist options. As Ralph Mili- band states, if the structural conditions of integration are such "that only a synchronized international attempt at radical change is likely to succeed," then "it is as well to acknowledge that radical change is out of the question for a very long time to come (maybe for ever), since synchronized international revolutions may be taken to belong to the realm of fantasy" (230). Timothy Brennan's remark that the nation-state is "the last obstacle to the new phase of the world-wide expansion of transnational capital" (3) is excessive in its suggestion that nationalism is the sole vector along which progressive politics in the present epoch must move, but it does specify one crucial vector for any such politics.

24. Chomsky notes further that, "The threat of nationalism is recognized in the public record as well. Thus, after the successful CIA-backed coup that over- threw the parliamentary regime of the conservative nationalist Mossadegh in Iran, restoring the Shah and leaving US oil companies with 40 percent of the formerly British concession, the New York Times commented editorially that all of this was "good news indeed":

Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism. It is perhaps too much to hope that Iran's experience will prevent the rise of Mossadeghs in other countries, but that experience may at least strengthen the hands of more reasonable and more far-seeing leaders. [editorial, 6 Aug. 19541 (50)

Regarding "the global conservative enterprise in which the United States and its allies have been engaged since the end of World War 11," Ralph Miliband writes that, "[clontrary to appearances, the fundamental source of conflict has not been the rivalry between the USSR and the United States, but rather the war which the United States has waged against all the forces of national independence, reform, and revolution in the world" (179).

See, more generally, Gabriel Kolko's Confronting the Third World, which examines the assumptions of post-World War I1 U.S. hegemony. The "interventionist mo- mentum" propelling U.S. foreign policy since the war, Kolko argues, was predicated on a fundamental assumption that the United States "has both the right and the ability to define the politics of any nation it deemed important to its interests" (294). This assumption, rather than a simple anti-Communist ideology and practice, defines the parameters of postwar U.S. foreign policy-namely, the arrogation and enforcement of hegemonic rights in an integrated world economic system. Kolko concludes that, "[flor innumerable small or poor nations, coping with the United States' real role and potential threat is a primordial issue to them as well as a precondition for obtaining the freedom to shape their own development" (295). The recent series of military incursions into and attacks on Lebanon, Libya, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, and Iraq under Reagan and Bush confirms his claim that the "fundamental assumption that the United States retains the right and obligation to intervene in the Third World in any way it ultimately deems necessary, including militarily, remains an article of faith among the people who guide both political parties" (296).

25. I summarize from the discussion in Joyce Kolko, Restructuring the World

226 Alok Yadav

Economy, which is a very useful survey of these developments. See also the Brook- ings Institution study by Joseph Grunwald and Kenneth Flamm, The Global Fac- tory; the Report of the South Commission, under the chairmanship of Julius Ny- erere, The Challenge to the South; and the collection of essays for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, edited by Dharam Ghai, The IMF and the South. Also informative, within its limits, is the survey of "The IMF and the World Bank," by Clive Crook, in The Economist.

26. In a critique of the rationality of contemporary separatist nationalisms, Hobsbawm notes that most states "are economically dependent in two ways: generally, on an international economy they cannot normally hope to influence as individuals; and specifically-in inverse proportion to their size-on the greater powers and transnational corporations" (1977: 7). Such neocolonialism may well be abetted by the division of existing states into smaller, "national" units, but the separatist impulse is only a small subset of actually existing nationalist sentiments, and a much more central one is the nationalist assertion of sovereignty as meaningful autonomy, in resistance to the neocolonial incorporation of the nations of the South into the global economy.

Hobsbawm's claim that, "[hlowever real the dependence of neo-colonialism, the struggle against it simply cannot any longer be crystallized round the slogan of establishing independent political statehood, because most territories concerned already have it" [ l l ] , is either pedantic in its interpretation of the phrase "independent political statehood" or it simply fails to address the fact that "dependence" means the absence of meaningful independence despite nominal sovereignty. There is no reason why this contradiction cannot serve as a site of mobilization to achieve a greater measure of meaningful autonomy, and indeed it has served this function in Latin American countries, for example, since the achievement of independence in the nineteenth century and, more recently, in African countries. Julius Nyerere, in 1976, spoke on this very theme:

Most of Africa is now free from colonial rule. . . . Our mistake was not in our demand forfreedom; it was in the assumption that freedom-real freedom-would necessarily and with little trouble follow liberation from alien rule.

A new [i.e., postcolonial] African government . . . immediately dis- covers that it inherited the power to make laws, to direct the civil service, to treat with foreign governments, and so on, but that it did not inherit effective power over economic development in its own country. . . .Neo-colonialism is a very real, and very severe, limitation on national sovereignty. (quoted by Worsley 318, emphasis added)

Nyerere's insistence that the call for "freedom" and "national sovereignty" is not mistaken indicates how the ideal of political independence serves to focus attention precisely on neocolonialism and economic dependence.

27. On this point, see Jagdish Bhagwati, "Nation-States in an International Framework." Bhagwati's article is also a useful, concise discussion of two questions: "i) is the efficacy of specific, national policy instruments to achieve national objectives impaired by increased interaction with the world economy; and ii) is the ability to implement these national objectives itself impaired by such increased interaction?" (231). (The answer to both questions is, as our discussion has indicated, "yes.")

28. Jordanian Palestinians, some 300,000 of them, work in various Gulf states and send home "more than a billion dollars a year, providing nearly a third of


Jordan's national income" (Viorst 42). About twenty percent of Mexico's popula- tion depends on wages earned in the USA (Worsley 237). Egyptian workers abroad sent back $6-10 billion in remittances in 1984, providing "Egypt's chief source of foreign exchange"; remittances by workers abroad represent "over one- half of the total value of exports" for Pakistan and Bangladesh as well; the rapid growth of this practice more generally is indicated by the fact that the "labor- exporting countries received $31 billion in worker remittances in 1980, com- pared with only $3.8 billion in 1970"; by 1985, there were an estimated 20 million migrant workers in the world U. Kolko 229-31, 324).

29. Among many possible works, and in addition to Chomsky, G. Kolko, and Miliband, see, for an especially clear and compact discussion of the economic pressures, Cheryl Payer, Lent and Lost: Foreign Credit and Third World Development.

30. Thus, for example, the upsurge of "Hindu nationalism" in India in recent years leaves one very conscious of the dangers of certain nationalistic projects. I am not arguing, of course, that every form of Third World nationalism needs to be valorized. What I have tried to assert is the pragmatic usefulness of interna- tionally oriented nationalisms (economic, cultural, political) as a way of articulat- ing and mobilizing investments in notions of self-determination and popular democracy, and in calling attention to the important role the state must play in any attempt to limit the access and power of transnational capitalism.

This leaves unanswered, perhaps, the traditional Marxist objection that it is indifferent to the worker whether slhe is exploited by a foreigner or a fellow national. But I have been evaluating nationalism not as the substantive "content" of a political project, but as an important factor capable of influencing the structure of the international system which establishes the conditions and options for all actors (capitalists and workers) within which any political project will have to proceed. The current restructuring of the world economy in the interests of multinational capital and the intervention (direct and indirect) of advanced capitalist states in Third World countries intensify the already asymmetrical positions from which capital and labour encounter each other in struggle. As Ralph Mili- band has argued, international or foreign intervention and pressure has been a crucial factor in the development of class struggles in all parts of the "dependent" world since World War I1 (see Miliband ch. 6: "The International Dimension of Class Struggle"). Insofar as nationalism hinders or limits this restructuring and this interventionism, it helps increase the viability of dissident political cultures and political projects in the international system.

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Nationalism and Contemporanity

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