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Volume 2, Number 2-d, 1996Nationalism and World Governance: Comment on Warren Wagar's "Praxis" Terry Boswell Department of Sociology Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322 USA tbos@socsci.ss.emory.edu Copyright 1996 by Terry Boswell. v. 6/10/96 It is no accident that every political leader in current times is disappointing at best. No head of state inspires confidence much less charts a path for other leaders to follow, as did the likes of Roosevelt and Churchill, or Lenin and Mao. Neither left nor right admires President Clinton no matter how far he tacks in one direction or the other. Lest Clinton's wobbly personality be blamed, he fares better in popularity than most contemporary leaders of core states. John Major and Boris Yeltsin have occasionally careened down toward single digits in approval ratings, while Alain Juppe' has piloted France into a whirlpool of social protest. Even once inspiring protest leaders, such as Lech Walesa, Corazon Aquino or Benazir Bhutto, appear adrift once they obtain state power. While political pundits may endlessly sing the siren song of personal "character" and "values," they do so only because they have no faith that any policy, plan or platform is obviously better than any other. Wily politicians respond by competing over who would be [Page 1]
better at doing less. The problem, however, is not in
the leaders, but rather, it is the sovereign state
itself that has lost efficacy.
The decline of state efficacy has its source in
the remarkable increase in the pace of world
integration, or "globalization," that has occurred over
the last two decades. Increased economic and cultural
interpenetration across state boundaries is obvious to
most observers. The surprise is short lived when we
find such ironies as that both sides in the 1992 Gulf
War followed the battles on CNN, that Chinese students
raised a "Statue of Liberty" during the 1989 protest in
Tiananmen Square, or that in 1994 the US dollar became
legal tender in Cuba. With globalization has also come
a somewhat less evident decline in a state's ability to
manage its share of the world economy.
Hardest hit have been the lower classes who had
over the past half century used their electoral power
to garner state protection from market despotism.
Explanations of stagnant wages, declining unions,
increased child labor, corporate restructuring,
government deficits, and shrinking welfare provision
all point in varying degrees to increased world
integration. The legitimacy of the state and of
political action declines correspondingly. Older
generations lament noticeable losses of state power and
benefits, while some younger ones shed their
traditional idealism for public cynicism and private
nihilism. Globalization of cultural idioms further
undermines the protection that national traditions and
cultural diversity provide domestic markets from
international competition. As such, decline of the
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state is seen as a crisis in national values.
The solution to the inefficacy of the national
state, and the desperation of the lower classes, is a
world state, one dedicated to the goals of global
democracy and socialist equity. So claims Warren Wagar
in his recent essay, "Toward a Praxis of World
Integration," a programmatic follow-up to his
speculative utopian novel, _A Short History of the
Future_. The Enlightenment project of rational progress
toward egalitarian universalism can be continued only
by taking the task to the global level. A world party,
so says Wagar, is a necessary step toward and agent of
that project. Building a world party is thus a moral
task for responding to the current, and future,
development of the world-system.
Yet, the popular response to state illegitimacy
has been far from any notion of an Enlightenment
progress toward universalism. Instead, the most common
populist response has been nationalist. The burst of
new states in Central and Eastern Europe is but the
most visible manifestation of a rise of nationalist
fervor throughout the world. From Azerbaijan to
Quebec, ethnic populations with identifiable
territories, i.e., nations, increasingly seek their own
separate states. The result has been a massive
outpouring of nationalist sentiment and of ethnic
separatism within what had previously been long stable
multi-nation states.
Wagar seems to have found his enemy. The
destruction of Sarajevo, a city that as recently as
1984 was a crowning symbol of ethnic integration and
universalism, is perhaps the most telling indicator of
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this new wave of destructive nationalism. Highly
nationalistic right wing terrorists, such as skinheads,
militia members, and religious fundamentalists, have
replaced infantile leftists as the prime global source
of bombings and assassinations. While such extremists
have long existed in various guises, they are now the
fringe of a larger tide of nationalist parties and
politicians. The relationship of extreme to mass
organizations on the right resembles more the 1920s and
30s than anything in the post-war period up till now.
Even among prominent conservative intellectuals, no
longer does the memory of NAZI horrors seem to impede
them from reviving ideologies of racial superiority,
whether biological (The Bell Curve) or cultural (The
End of Racism). Nor does refutation by reputable
scientists or flagging by respected journalists any
longer seem to constrain their popularity.
Wager condemns nationalism as the central
impediment to global statehood. Nationalism and
globalism are irreconcilable, he claims, because
national rights are antithetical to worldwide
individual equality and the rational planning goals of the
Enlightenment. The goals of his world party must begin
with condemning separate national identities and
renouncing the independence of national states. A
world party, he claims, has not just the organizational
task, but also the moral imperative to reject cultural
relativism and national identity, and instead embrace
the Enlightenment goals of Western civilization.
I want to take issue with Wagar on the
irreconcilability of nationalism and globalism. Quite
the contrary, I portend that they are inexorably
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intertwined. The growth of single nation states is
both a product and source of global organization.
While I agree with Wagar on the value of a world state,
rather than oppose ethnic identity, national
liberation, or multi-culturalism, supporters of global
governance must reassert national self-determination as
the central principle of interstate relations.
National self-determination is a component of universal
human rights, not an opposing principle.
The surge of nationalism is, ironically, driven in
no small part by the very process of world integration
that makes state power less potent, and global
statehood a real possibility. From a world-system
perspective, world integration is a continuous and
cumulative process of at least 500 years duration.
However, the pace of this integrative process has
accelerated markedly since the mid-1970s as a response,
and a solution, to an uneven and stagnant world economy
(the "B" phase) and a decline of US hegemony. In a
cumulative process, even a small increase in growth
rates soon has large effects. The result is a
conspicuous qualitative shift in political structures
within a single generation that accompanies the less
perceptible ongoing changes. What is a long term
process thus appears to be a novel phenomenon because
adaptation to the process now elicits integral rather
than incremental change.
While globalization reduces political potency
within existing states, it increases dramatically the
importance of relations between states. With the
growing importance of interstate relations comes an
increase in the value of joining the interstate system,
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which requires having a sovereign state. World
integration spawns ethnic separatism as subordinate
nationalities gain less from having a voice within an
increasingly ineffectual state, and more from
interstate relations. Likewise, dominant ethnic groups
demand reinforcement of their national identity, and
the competitive advantage nationals have within it.
The breakdown of multi-nation states into multiple
nation-states becomes a tragedy precisely when self-
determination and tolerance are denied. Sarajevo
again provides the telling example in that its survival
and that of Bosnia depend precisely on the enforcement
of interstate relations by supra-state organizations
(UN, NATO).
This is not to deny the evils of national
chauvinism, but to assert national self-determination
as a necessary remedy. Certainly Wagar has identified
an enemy for our times where the national identity of one
ethnicity comes at the expense of any other. The human
tragedy from ethnic separatism in Yugoslavia, Sri
Lanka, Tibet, Lithuania, Northern Ireland, and
elsewhere cannot be denied. Yet which of the national
minorities in each of these cases should be denied
self-determination? Would a world state have decreed
that Slovenia or Croatia, or even Bosnia, must remain
federated with a Serb dominated Yugoslavia? Or to take
Wagar at his utopian best, should a world state strip
Slovenians, Croatians, and Serbs of their separate
national identities and replace them with an
indistinguishable global citizenship?
I think the answer is that a global principle that
denies imperial or racist domination does so by
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asserting the cultural autonomy of nations and ethnic
groups, not denying it. For oppressed peoples,
nationalism is a source of resistance and sustenance.
Without respecting self-determination, few oppressed
nationalities would support a world party or state, and
most would realistically fear a possible global
imperialism. To be sure, self-determination
contradicts and overrules that part of any national
heritage that includes imperialism or racism. On that
score, Wagar and I are in full accordance. But such a
global principle does not deny nationalism per se and
instead defends it in such a way that all nations have
a self-interest in supporting.
What is critical to recognize is that "sovereign"
states and national identities are created by the
interstate system. That system is the set of agreed
upon institutions, treaties, rules and unwritten norms
that govern relations between states, ranging from
United Nations peacekeeping forces to proper
diplomatic etiquette. The system was forged in Europe
during the (first) Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and was
spread worldwide by capitalist and colonial expansion.
Whatever the origins of a state, whether ancient
principality or recent ex-colony, its definition and
survival as "sovereign" has since depended upon
recognition from other states as a compliant member of
the interstate system. Prior to 1945/60, admission was
primarily limited to imperial states. Since that time,
however, for a variety of reasons entry is potentially
open to any nation that can militarily control a
territory. As a result, we have seen a geometric
increase in the number of states, first from
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decolonization and now from the break-up of multi-
nation states.
Admission to the system as sovereign is now
codified and institutionalized by the United Nations.
In principle, this includes acceptance of universal
human rights. Wagar may scoff at how powerless is the
UN to enforce any such standard. Yet one might have
said the same 200 years ago about slavery, or 100 years
ago about colonialism, or even 50 years ago about
racist segregation. The definition of a legitimate
state now includes them all, as even a state as
powerful as South Africa was forced to finally admit.
National cultures are highly diverse, often
inconsistent, and constantly evolving. They change in
response to global capitalist and other processes
without any necessary loss of identity. People can
hold allegiance to both national and global principles,
just as we maintain loyalty to both family and nation.
Admittedly powerless itself, the UN increasingly
serves as the medium through which the rules of
interstate relations are elaborated and enforced.
States support UN and other interstate governance of
the interstate system not out of moral exhortation, but
out of material self-interest. Trade and other
interactions between states, like any other exchange,
requires pre-contractual standardization and post-
contractual enforcement. The greater the number of
states and the more integrated their economies, the
greater the importance of a supra-state governance of
interstate relations.
The true enemy of the Enlightenment is
imperialism, and its biological twin of racism, which
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is identified with nationalism only when self- determination is denied. Wagar's suggestion that a world party condemn national self-determination only gives comfort to that enemy. Wagar is right, in that a world party is necessary for building a democratic world state that will protect and uplift the lower classes. He is mistaken, however, in seeing nationalism as the moral antipathy of global citizenship. Rather than a contradiction, world governance and nationalism are two sides of the same coin, minted by globalization. [Page 9]
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