State, Nation & Legitimacy PDF

4 State, Nation and Legitimacy The opposition of 'state-centred' explanations for nationalism to those emphasizing prior ethnic bonds is commonly overstated. It would be a mistak...

4 State, Nation and Legitimacy The opposition of 'state-centred' explanations for nationalism to those emphasizing prior ethnic bonds is commonly overstated. It would be a mistake to imagine that either state formation or eth- nicity could provide a 'master-variable' accounting for the whole rise and character of modern nationalism. Common 'ethnic' cul- tures do matter in giving modern nations their identities and emotional attachments, but the creation of modern states- and the wars and other struggles between them- both transforms the way ethnicity figures in people's lives and helps determine which pre- existing cultures or ethnic groups will flourish as nations and which will fail to define politically significant identities. Such states not only shaped national identity domestically, they organized the world of interstate relations in which nationalist aspirations flour- ished among stateless peoples. The rise of the modern state The 'modernity' of the states which grew in Europe especially during and after the era of absolutist monarchies was based pri- marily on their enhanced administrative capacity, their unification of territories under single administrative centres, their replacement of older forms of 'indirect rule' (from tax farming to simply dele- gating authority to feudal nobilities) with an increasingly direct control of and intervention into their disparate territories and populations. their reliance on popular political participation. their capacity to mobilize citizens for warfare. and their assertion of clear boundaries rather than frontiers. 1 A central part of the state State, nation and legitimacy 67 formation project involved the 'pacification' of life within the state's boundaries; indeed, the state's exercise of a monopoloy of violence- or at least legitimate violence- became a crucial tenet of political theory. This involved a challenge to violence by quasi- autonomous authorities, like medieval lords, as well as to brigands, highway robbers, and other outlaws. But while states sought to eliminate such pre-existing forms of non-state violence, they also created new forms and mechanisms of violence. They mobilized more and more effectively for external war, of course, but also pur- sued not only domestic peace but homogeneous and compliant national populations. They did so especially by the (at least puta- tively) legitimate force of police and other state agents. And state agents worked not only by physical force, but by means of symbolic violence. They disciplined domestic populations by means of edu- cational systems and poor relief, religious classifications and IQ tests, criminal records and state-enforced ethnic stigmatizations. The integrated political and cultural communities we understand as nations were created in large part by the rise of such states. Interstate conflict played an important role in changing the form and capacity of states. Military mobilization for the purpose of external warfare served both to enhance internal integration by mixing people from different regions, provinces, and socio-cultural backgrounds, and to promote nationalism through ideological indoctrination and the very processes of mobilization, combat, demobilization and return to civilian life (Hintze 1975; Tilly 1990). Not just European wars, but conflicts over colonies were important -especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, we should not focus so much on the inter-state dimension that we forget the 'internal' processes of state formation that were linked to changes in military conflict. One of the key features of modern warfare has been increasing costs. Because of both new technology and the scale of conflicts, states had to extract unprece- dented levels of resources from their societies (Brewer 19S9; Mann 1993: Chapter 11 ). This not only required force to get civilians to part with their wealth, it encouraged rulers to support civil societies they could not fully control because these were sources of new wealth. It also led to enhanced administrative integration and capacity. Tax collection, for example, was no longer left to quasi- autonomous feudal elites or 'tax farmers', but systematized in the hands of the national government and its bureaucratic agents. As 68 Nationalism important as their material power was their knowledge of just where wealth lay. The key is not just the identification of state with nation. thus. but the structural changes involved in the rise of the modern state. The latter made it possible to conceive of the nation as unitary. Previous political forms neither demarcated clear boundaries nor fostered internal integration and homogenization (Giddens 1984; Mann 1986). Cities dominated hinterlands; sometimes particularly powerful cities dominated networks of others together with their hinterlands. The various kinds of military (and sometimes re- ligious) elites we call feudal controlled substantial territories but with a minimum of centralization of power and limited ability to remake everyday life. Though empires could call on subject peoples for tribute and sometimes foster substantial interaction among diverse subjects, they posed few demands for cultural homogeniz- ation. Modern states, by contrast, policed borders, required passports, and collected customs duties. Domestically too they involved remarkable administrative integration of previously quasi-auton- omous regions and localities. Not only could taxes be collected, but roads could be built, schools run, and mass communications systems created. Eventually. state power could be exercised at the farthest point of a realm as effectively as in the capital. The capacity of states to administer distant territories with growing intensity was largely due to improvements in transportation and communications infrastructure, on the one hand, and bureaucracy and related infor- mation management on the other. It was part of a general growth in large-scale social relations. More and more of social life took place through forms of mediation- markets, communications tech- nologies, bureaucracies - which removed relationships from the realm of direct, face-to-face interaction (Deutsch 1966; Calhoun 1992). Economic development went hand in hand with state formation in expanding this infrastructural integration of dispersed popu- lations.2 Long-distance trade and regional differentiation of pro- duction were factors as basic as the administration of government in the promotion of road building. The labour migrations attendant on improvements in agricultural productivity (though mostly relatively local) not only provided the workers for industrial development but unsettled stable political patterns and communal State, nation and legitimacy 69 institutions for the maintenance of social order. This in turn created the occasion for much more state intervention into the daily affairs of people throughout a country. And of course the integration of economies on a national level not only knited together dispersed individuals and communities, it helped to define the unit of identity. The economy as a putatively self-regulating system of exchanges, however. did not in itself constitute the internal unity of domestic as against foreign trade. To the extent that such inner/outer dis- tinctions operated, they were heavily dependent on states. More- over, at the same time that exchange relations and capital accumulation were being organized at national levels they were already becoming increasingly international. International flows of goods and capital may have been dramatically accelerated in the globalization of the late twentieth century, but they are not altogether new. It is thus a mistake to think of national economics as primary; economics arc not national in some autonomous way but arc made so in varying degrees by state boundaries and poli- cies, geography and physical infrastructure. A new form of political community The transformation and growing importance of the idea of nation was not simply a derivative result of state formation, and certainly not solely something that state makers brought about for their own convenience. On the contrary, nationalism grew partly out of popu- lar challenges to the authority and legitimacy of those at the top of modern states. A crucial thread in the development of nationalism was the idea- and eventually the taken-for-granted, gut-level con- viction - that political power could only be legitimate when it reflected the will, or at least served the interests, of the people sub- ject to it. This locates modern nationalism in the period after the fourteenth century during which popular uprisings and political theory increasingly relied on the notion that 'the people· consti- tuted a unified force, capable not only of rising en ma..·se against an illegitimate state, but capable of bestowing legitimacy on a state that properly fitt