The Procrustean Unitary nation-state

Apr 11, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Form dictates function in politics as much as biology. The unitary “nation-state” is one such form that forces us to act in ways that ensures conflict when its inhabitants are from different cultural strains.
One answer to this dilemma, we have proposed, is the loosening up of its political and social dictates through the introduction of federalistic principles of governance.
The concept of the “nation-state” has become such a ubiquitous international norm, that it is difficult for us to realize that the modern state was only born in the last few centuries.
From its European feudal origins where kings had to scrounge their lords to raise armies, the State became omnipotent and omnipresent (a “Leviathan”) as the monarchy centralized power. It was the formation of strong centralized states that led to the sometimes brutal consolidation of nations.
It is not coincident that this shift occurred during the rise of capitalism in its mercantilist and then free-trade phases of that early “globalization”.
The new ideological constructs and their institutionalisation all influenced each other – in the service of capitalism.
When sovereignty shifted towards the people following the French and American democratic revolutions, the state became a more liberal institution – insisting on dealing with citizens as individuals – yet impelled by the economic exigencies to mobilize the entire society.
The necessity for the “people” to perceive themselves as one became even more pressing and E Pluribus Unum became the call of the age. Territorial and ethnic boundaries were made more or less coincident as “nationalism” became the order of the day. Under the doctrine of cujus regio (ejus religio) the religion of the Monarch became the religion of the people and the culture of the dominant group around the Monarch, the culture of the nation.
While the state and nation were stipulated as identical, in reality the state could never become identical with the people living within its territory.
The state may represent the people but the people inevitably will identify easier with their “nation” as constructed by their personal experiences lived within a common language, culture and traditions, than their state.
This does not mean that the state cannot be a site of identification for the people but since the values promulgated by the state being more abstract and “drier”, these will have to be transmitted independently.
Where there are different “cultures/nations” within a state, inevitable systemic strains are unleashed since to create the unified nation there has to be continued application of force, symbolic and physical, on some groups to maintain the “imagined community”.
It is self evident that groups, defined as being “different” on account of their disparate cultures have always existed in the same country.
But for most of the history of mankind it was accepted that these groups could define themselves by their birth in a particular territory simultaneously as “citizens” of that territory or state (legally – jus soli) or as a particular “nationality” depending on their “ties of blood” – culture and heritage (legally – jus sanguinis). While all citizens would have all of the rights and obligations of citizenship, each “nationality” was governed, for instance, by the personal laws of their culture. Cultural communities, therefore, were the bearers of rights.
However while the concept of the “nation state” has become a central pillar of the dominant European political paradigm and a dogma in modern politics, it is but a contingent moment in European history that definitionally insisted on the “societal consensus” and the “melting pot” theory of assimilation.
Even within Britain itself, the Scots, the Welsh and most obstinately, the Irish never fully accepted the homogenizing premises of the nation-state. Early in the day, Ireland declared it would go its own way.
The disappearance of the Soviet yoke in 1989 precipitated the formation of a score of “ethnic” republics in Europe. National unity is always ultimately impossible if it means homogeneity, since such a unity will have to be created (or more mildly, be represented) by a suppression of differences.
The contradictions and problems of the nation-state were compounded after those Imperialistic European states – during their 19th century consolidation phase – partitioned the world into empires and “spheres of influence”. Claiming huge swathes of real estate, which they divided into colonies for administrative convenience, the multitude of ethnic groups within each enclave were suddenly told they had to become cohesive “nations”.
The onus was even greater in those colonies, such as the West Indies, where the “native” groups were practically wiped out, ensuring there were no “natural” cultural strains as in the European model, to evolve into any “national” culture.
The society had to be created almost sui generis – patterned on the European ideal, of course. The local politicians that inherited the colonies adopted this imperialistic homogenising arrogance and insisted on even utilizing force, when necessary to create homogenous “nation-states”. We are reaping the whirlwind: while both the modernization school of the West and the Marxist school of the East had prophesied the eradication of ethnicity and the creation of unified “nation states” (implied with the Marxists) history has proven them completely misguided.
The reasons for this are complex but essentially lay at the heart of the nature of power, the potential for its abuse, its relationship to status, the power of the modern state and the fact that the group that controls that power is invariably from one section.
In a cultural plural society then, power always has an ethnic contour and will be challenged along that parameter. In ethnically heterogeneous states, ethnicity became a dominant cleavage along which mobilization took place even though those who led were invariably from the dominant classes.
Thus behind its egalitarian façade, in Britain the English were always the dominant ethnic group, and its elite, the ruling class. And in the communist U.S.S.R. as late as 1989, nineteen out of twenty members on the ruling politburo were ethnic Russians.
In Guyana, whether the PNC or PPP ran the government, it was seen by the group on the outside as the “other” ethnic group dominating the government.

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