Does the Nation-State Work? PDF

CHAPTER 13 Does the nation-state work? MichaelJ. Shapiro The question STATES,NATIONS, AND ALLEGIANCE I!les...

CHAPTER 13 Does the nation-state work? MichaelJ. Shapiro The question STATES,NATIONS, AND ALLEGIANCE I!lestrativc exa mple WORLDS OF UNEASE WITHIN THE NATION-STATE Gencral responses STORIES OF COHERENT NATIONHOOD Bronder issues AN ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL IMAGINARY cONCLUSION THE QUESTION STATES, NATIONS, AND ALLEGIANCE tended to be absorbed in, if not wholly Until recent decades, modern political thinking by, two closcly interrelated historical trajectories, One was the process of cxhausted state fornmation, the other that of nation-building. As a result, modern political discourse was usually understood on the basis of the geopoliticai map of nation-states and the historical trajectory of its formation. of the hyphenated tern 'nation-state', scholars With respect to the state part violence within focused on the process by which states were forned by monopolising 15 As a varicty of historical accounts narrated that story, che mono a bounded territory. diverse sub-state afiliated groupings, asserting polising of violence required disarming recruitment procedures for armies iscal control over the population, and establishing and and bureaucracies. All of these moves were aimed at securing territorial boundaries of the population, in order to and governmentally controlling all aspects centralising control. Accordingly, states were become a separatelv governed entity with centralised 258 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO territorial entities with exclusive, cocrcively, and legally sup- understood primarily as ported sovercignty. the hyphenated expressiontook on its the nation part meaning with contrast, of In as nations are understood as peoples who belong toashared respect to time inasimuch Thus citizen-subjects rcceive wha. community with a historical trajectory. cultural They have both territorial and bistoricl. Jürgen Habermas calls a 'double coding'. the onc involvino But it is controversial as to how the second coding, identitics. historical time, is to be understood. To avoid the assumption that membecrs ofa nation. on the basis of a myth of a prepolitical fact of a quasi state derive their coherencc that the communal attachment of natural people', Habermas (1998) suggests as rather than organic, i.c. based on nation-state members should be regarded civic The way identities have and legal cntitlement rather than hereditary belonging. However, contrary to political of its been thought about to avoid naturalistic identity politics, the state's legitimation is Habermas' attempt also discussed in population frequently involves thc pseudo histories of what Eric Chapter The question control over a 5. and Terence Ranger famouslv referred to as the invention of tradition of identity politics is Hobsbawm examined there in (1992). relation to the feminist movement. At the level of the individual citizen-subject, such inventions operate as a basis for Certain ways have noted that allegiance is best understood as allegiance of thinking of gender and allegiance. As I elsewhere, sexuality play a role in to a story: nation-building as we see in this chapter. The process of producing Given the complex sets of forces that have been responsilble both for assembling a national identity as a people' those groupings identiñied as 'nations' and the ambiguities and is examined in more detail contentiousness associated with the ways that such assemblages claim territories, in Chapter 12. their primary national stories must bear considerable weight. Indeed, there are nothing other than commitments to stories for a national pcople to give themselves a historical trajectory that testifies to their collective coherence. (Shapiro l999: 47) The weight that the stories must bear takes on its significance in the face of competing allegiances, which apply especially to those who reside in a single nation-state but understand their self-fashioning and hence loci allegiance as either split or as existing of elsewhere. While the nation-state deploys various forms of cultural governance to apply centripetal force to national coherence -cerenmonics, national holidays, national museum displays, and so on - other genres or forms reflect the centrifugal forces that annl e those who exist in different imaginaries or different identity narratives (and thus experience various aspects of unease within the nation-state within which thev reril ILLUSTRATIVEEXAMPLE WORLDS OF UNEASE WITHIN THE NATION-STATE French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu pointed to the difhculty of thinking outside ofthe of state that promotc national allegiance with his remark, endeavo. To reasons t by) a thoyobe to think the state is to take the of taking over (or being taken over risk 35). He recommends a method of hyperbolic doubt, which be of the state' (l998: notion Meister Komödic (1 985). Bourdieu's attributes to Thomas Bernhard's novel Alte as  with d exClusive, oerciv das Coerei,., expreSSIOn hus peoples took and conflict both who on be WORKP 259 DOES THE NATION.STATE B. Tickner citizen-subjects coding, that territorial is useful the which creativity is possible space' in or one and structure of social at how a writer who resists the 'genesis look minimum, that wc nolitical members of should implies, at a Bourdieu provides a path nunal fact of. becausc is socially situated. it ganic, attach of - at least complicates nation-state resistance of state-dominated allegiancc political thinking by displacing with the biographical attention to the to the literary analysis 1.e. associatcd with mainstrcam the Never, model or challenges causation cither recycles which a riter based of the field within the cxisting social order spatiotemporality ifinstcad of secing of contrary of intelligibility. However, as a fractal we dominant orders docs, view it zitinnation fractions', as Bourdieu system of social have been what of as a hierarchical worlds that ity or blend of diverse life FIGURE produced amalgam 13.1 Ei field, a historically 'nation-building' and its forms of political Pierre Bourdieu nost destructive forms of soci. a history of state directed the tradition' assembled by personac whose writing challenges raction across time and place. wecan identify counter-hegemonic sfor Sis fo economy, myth of national coherence. writing reflects the counter udy in practically allareas of much of the politics of contemporary is is no exception. Although Specifically, by a history of political fe displaced that have been territorially memories of those groups mode! of confrontation, since the end of the European-oriented counter is associated with the formation Memories and ith has led economy that states is responsible - alte rnative to changes in how and local cconomic management by powerful niemories political order. Global nation ofremembering - fields within the modern ways dramatically different diverse bodies that inhabit the social 22 and violent for depositing the Native American, and arise in Chapters wandan genocide reflected w African American, in the US case, many of state. For examplc, existing idioms 24 where memories would have us believe) select from violent conflict are factors such as exiled writers do not (as Bourdicu globalization, have congealed within state-dominated discussed. le. As of available styles that authors such as Mahr within the hierarchy towards the literary writing expresses profound ambivalence omplex historical social orders.Rather, their tendency of that field triggers, sL because of the is deploved, preciscly readings. The popular filn ficld within which their work that (its primary mode of thought') it to be complicit with the state's presumption The state's way of primeexample. Let's take governs a unitary and coherent national culture. that are in tension thinking here could in plane in which Rwandan commitments perhaps be descriped, of feeling and identity The cxamples of structures I look at thrce cases, the terms used rt were traveling was shot in. space available, are legion, but given the 'picture' Chapter 2, as parlier, with national allegiance and its Alexic, a Native American, Habyarimana, a Hut of the writing of Sherman of the world. reviewing briefl some modes of thought envisioned a power texts constitute sharing Jamaican. Both of tlheir Michelle Cliff, a diasporic nation-building hot by the conventional centuries, of violence the spaces authorised b generated from outside sovereign citizen-subject is an undifferentiated president was individual narrative, within which every targeted ei an ahistorical class structure. tated with the accord's and the social order is merely lac from the start. The assass 1 a genocide Michelle Cliff that left as by one of the span of languages, expressed 100 days. Dur I begin with Michelle fictional characters, Cliff because serves to her observation characterise on the agenda for writers who recognise o identified with Hutu Po her The familiar language The narrator in her novel Frec Id their sstems of intelligibility. games' in the terms sympathizers. Th ). in familiar the traps lurking in thc imperial reflects on the historical role of cach language's participation Used in Chapter 2. Ilings were also Enterprisc commerce murdered of her homeland. 'English', she says, was the tongue of le genocide was neither a domination means the creation of a of categories', by which she affair in 'Spanish was the language which Tutsi miscegenated (mixed) spc biopolitical matrix of economically and politically incligible, heir own families. hegemony. 'Against these blood types, and Latin was the language tongues, she adds 'African of every stripe of Christian collided' (1993: spiritual 7). of her diasporic experience, which leaves the genocide as an Hutus and Tutsis e Although Cliff' writes in English, because that she sees the nation-state as an ontological nizers (Harrow her outside of ordinary national attachments, 2005). concerned as much with identity coherence as with io station, as well as a territorial actor (one RTLM, expl the Tutsi infestation,  260 MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO as symbolic as governance and, accordingly, she sees nation-state on terTitorial control) N Teleobone to Heaven (1987) focuses her novel (alternative Well as territorial. For example. imaginaries ways lives that constitute or produce oppositional to those of transnational wvorld) opposed of the life is and existence novel realised both of imagining the emergence in the national subjects. The diasporic perspective and forth movement of her conventional the backby as back and forth and - geopolitically (as wvell geopolitically linguistically between the US and Jamaica English and Kitty Savage, idioms, standard main character, the collision of dissociated narrative linguistically in from England) and a sct of structure, in the anti-narrative Jamaican patois, and She 3ses of Cliff's writing. fragments. the content as well as centurine to note the form and carly twentieth in the nineteenth It is important bas novel. which as Franco Moretti form of the Although, FIGURE 13-2 the gçnre or third world. forns in the as a nation--building genre, Michelle Cliff narrative displaced other novel often functioned many other third Clif and pointcd out, the nincteenth-century novel; subscquently and clohst in the case of the historical to the national cspecially a site of resistance writine made the noel towards writers have a profound ambivalence world Yet Cliff shows the outsid world. from the language we speak of the irst a thought of extracting If imaginaries the difhculty or control over. contains structures of recognises, of domination we inhabit general because she cncode structures domination in in that a form resistans of coded form, then whilst working within languages imaginary is silencc, her primary linguistic wholly resisr sometimes the only way others. As she has noted, location for one would who is she secs as the ultimate speak manifested of silence is to refuse to out aphasia, which is inflection altogether: to pretend to Cliffs political described as breaking language. Savage, is forces within Kitty be aphasic as a form of colonising her character, book to Heaven when foods in New York. Ulimately, resistance. In her her No Tlephonc a shop with Jamaican of aphasia' This Sex Which Not when she discovers the symptom ls her silence silence via oft a space of One, feminist Luce Cliffs 'attempt to bound to wTite it reflects her - Irnigaray says that faced although consumnmated Clif continues - and assemblaes 70) is never of voices with embedded the patriarchy language, (Aguiar 2001: however hybrid and resistant her cacophony idioms and historical emos in suspicion that are to the dominant Women among fragments in her novels as a resisting body in her writine narrative herself themselves begin by be wholly present to of the state,she can never laughing (1985: 163) Sherman Alexie and also embodies towards writing Cliff's ambivalence shares Michelle For Alexie. the Sherman Alcxie tvo differcnt life worlds. in cónsciousness ofone who exists is both the split occupies his attention, presence in the US, which Indian Low contemporary his main character, ambiguous. Accordingly, and cthnologically his literary geographically (2000), is a writer and doubtless Indian Country Man Smith in his storv, as one who is himself in one of thestory's conversations srand in. Low Man describes along with that of Low Man's Indianness, Moreover, to be anvwhere'. but 'not supposed the story, is highly diluted. He is a Spokane', characters in other Native American in Seattle, and has was born and raised no tribal languages, he spcaks and understands his own reservation only six times. visited a fragmentary mapping has for which Alexie's story provides The country Indian the Oglala, Black Elk roughly 70 years carlier. a prophetic remark by with FIGURE 13-3 resonances after a century in which the political Sherman Alexie. of his Indian country Noting what was left he remarked, [t]hey de westward, Photograph: Jérôme pushed a white cultural nation cconomy of Euroamerica Perlinghi/Corbis  ar and lene B. T DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 261 have made little islands for us..and always, these islands are becoming smaller (Ncihardt l932: 12). Similarly, viewed pictorially, the Indian country' tlhat emerges if in Alexie's literary landscape would have to be a few faintlv visible colour flecks on a US's western And, the precarious and obscure visilbility of map of the states. tellingly, throughout the story's dialogues by continual challenges to that country is reinforced of Man asks The encounters traditional Indian practices intelligibility. For example, when Low an older those of colonisers with clder than Dn! Indian, Raymond, if he is an clder, Raymond shifts to a non-Indian idiom: they colonised are some, not as clder as others', he replies. Given his awareness of the ways in which discussed in Chapters 16 bf the imc colonised by a Euroamerican idiom, and 21. Native American sense-making is always already intera Dup Alexie has his alter cgo Low Man Smith articulate a profound ambivalenge towards to its stu being immersed in the US literary field. Low Man refers to the chain bookstores that Relation carry his books as 'colonial clipper ships', and in the process of moving about an urban terstate to divest himself of his laptop, first venue of a non-chain bookstore, he trics in searclh & obal So trying to trade it in a Seven Eleven store and then handing it to a clerk in a Barnes Noble chain bookstore, pretending he found :ample, it. Id the n whic GENERAL RESPONSES entral STORIES OF COHERENT NATIONHOOD role of (Weste provid Nation-building 1994 In contrast to the writers I treat in the preceding section, much of the history of artistic COun production has been complicit with the cultural governance policies of states seeking l mor o fashion a coherent and unitary national culture. For example, the development of The French headscarf ban, discussed in rebels French Grand Opcra during the ninctcenth century was structured to invite the people Chapter 25, is an :cade initiatives were similarly aimed at the fashioning into the nation, various national theatre example of an attempt st th of national culture, and without state prompting, the nineteenth-century historical to produce a unitary national secuiarism. novels - for example those of Sir Walter Scott - arriculated a geographical dynamic that bels. reflects a process of the cultural integration necessary for the state to laim a coherent opp cultural naion. His novels typically involve a process of border attenuation. p t This nation-building orientation the arts, especially in the nineteenth century, lace of has been cchoed by the dominant approaches to nationalism in the twentieth. The best le known scholars of nationalism –Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Anthony Giddens, roa Charles Tlly, and countless others -have cmphasised the centripetal forces of national art allegiance, primarily by focusing on mainstrean media and state-run agencies and institutions. Inparicular, Benedict Anderson's well known mantra that naions, as For more on these scholars' work on nation "imagincd communitics (1991), became objects of widespread symbolic allegiance building see Chapter 12. through the operation of mediating genres (for example newspapers) is widely accepted by practitioners of comparative politics and international studies. Traditional theorists of nationalism focus on two very different kinds of issues. The first and perhaps most pervasive in the literatures is the problem of allegiance, where 'nationalism' becomes a problem of the process through which citizens become Chapter has a3 discusslon of the identifhed with their nation-statc. To treat that problem theorists turn to various media. importance of media In Anderson's case (1991),the primary medium is the daily newspaper. Other thinkers representations in the context of war, have looked at the roles of national cultural institutions, for example, national theatres 262 MICHAEL ). SHAPIRO FIGURE 34 Paris Opera, architect Charles Garnier, 1857-74. Photo by Flickr member Peter Rivera, Creative Commons attribution 2.0 generic 1986: Danicle dscape painting (Bermingham music (Attali 1985), lan (Kruger 1992), 2000), and novel (Burgovne 1997, Hjort and MacKenzie 1993: Miller 1993). flm the theorist to idioms are adduccd by 1998). In the case of cach medium, (Moretti the nation, for exampie people to imagine the wav the medium encourages identify to identufy its proccss of attenuatine of landscape painting, it in the case to picture' in the case of music,the collectivising of the historical novel, internal borders in the case case of hlm, the wav founding mhs are the sentiments thatharmony creates, in by emphasisine invited people into the natior transmitted, and the wav national theatres etc. Englishness or Irishness or Frenchness, what is distinctive about of third world in the writings however, that thc emphasis be noted. at the results of the nationalist It should For cxamplc, looking has been veny different. (1993)focuses not on thc scholars centripetal Partha Chatterjee imaginarion in Asia and Afrnica, nationalism the way that formation but on a significant difference from aspect ofidentiy involved a in the weSt. For Chatterjee, anti-colonialist nationalisms has been produced much on spiritual media. with imperialist powers and depcnded very struggle Citizens' rights issue has been a treatment of the process by and increasinglv important The second is treated as a citizenship citizens have extracted rights. WVithin this perspective, at which is Chapter 1o looks citizenship', where national afñliation the implications result of enactments, a form of transactional some and betwecn of of claim-making bargaining of not being a citizen of of historically specific processes "the outcome that nation-states the country you want to However, if we recognise state and societal actors' (Tilly 1996). Iive in and Chapter 25 of sociery, example indigenous for explores the link between contain groups that cxist outside of the boundaries citizenship and rights. can be scen as a luxury of peoples who alrcady enjoy some form peoples, claim-making'  DOES THE NATION-STATE WORK? 263 FIGURE 13-5 Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. Photo: O Laura Porter to (2007) licensed About.com, Inc. Wa Arl Introducti War is one collective g ence has lec