From A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Raj Patel & Jason W. Moore, 2018) p198-200
ALTERNATIVE NATIONALISMS
Consider the country in which a vocal group who identified as the heartland of the nation found their destiny frustrated by the liberal, internationalist ambitions of a ruling party and voted instead for a man who offered in his own personage the firm authority of technocratic rule. A man who promised to get things done for the nation in defiance of Islamic and other terrorist attempts to frustrate national destiny. In this country, ideas of nation, religion, a perceived history of misrule by internationalists, and a betrayal of national greatness propelled a leader to popular preeminence, a man transparent to all on social media yet opaque in his backroom deals. His rule enriched an already wealthy class, but the transfer of wealth happened at the same time that a war on terror and national dissent was prosecuted with noisy, attention-grabbing bravado. We have Narendra Modi’s India in mind, but his rise is one among many upsets to a particular hegemonic order of liberal internationalism.
Hegemony, the idea with which we began this chapter, is never secure or guaranteed. It must always be maintained, by force and suasion. The role of workers in the nation-state, of whatever nation, has been as subservient partners in a hegemonic bloc of forces. The nation is a fiction in permanent flux, written and rewritten to interpret and order its destiny-and thus the present. But the ideas of the nation and its economic destiny aren’t the exclusive domain of a particular hegemonic bloc. Indeed, this is why we see in moments of capitalist crisis – like the one we’re living through today – the rise of alternate interpretations of national destiny. The logic of capitalism’s ecology, its regime of cheap things, has run afoul of nationalism’s language of shared destiny. With capitalism’s riches so glaringly concentrated – sixty-two people own as much as the planet’s poorest three and a half billion – should it be surprising that the hegemony of a liberal bloc has started to crumble? It’s a development long in the making, a phenomenon that we’ve called “global fascism.”
The angst of collective identity presents itself in a moment of uncertainty just as much in the twenty-first century as in the sixteenth, fueled by concerns around trade and economic insecurity. Quite where nation-states move from here is an open question, with possibilities along a spectrum running from a far more horrific politics than we have yet seen this century to a more emancipated world.
Yet the idea of nationhood, of community and a vision for the future circulated, debated, and lived by a large number of people, isn’t automatically toxic or authoritarian. Particularly if it exists in opposition to capitalism’s ecology, as many nations still do. Recall that the United States is a country of more than 500 nations: the Bureau of Indian Affairs recognizes 566. Australia records a similar number of Aboriginal nations, Canada has more than 600, and India has 255 Indigenous nations, whose members total 7 percent of its population. Through recent scholarship and activism, Indigenous groups have explored what a nonpatriarchal Indigenous nationhood might look like. Centrally, it would involve renegotiating relationships around care, nature, and work and managing territory under governance arrangements that strip the state out of the nation-state dyad. Quite where these relations might end up is unclear.
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