I’ve been wondering about a lot of different things lately.
I have thought of myself as an opponent of nation-states and national ‘sovereignty’, for example. I believed that nationalism (or what Basil Davidson called ‘nation-statism’ in his useful book ‘The Black Man’s Burden’) was usually exclusive (in North America, for example, it is often a kind of settler ideology that excludes both exploited immigrants, displaced indigenous people, and african-americans) and often destructive. I thought of national ‘sovereignty’ as an excuse used by elites to do terrible things to their populations. I made some of these arguments in an interview with Mike Albert.
But recently, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between nationalism and imperialism, and it seems to me that in this world national sovereignty is one of the only possible political defenses against imperialism that has some power. You can attack Colombia’s Uribe or Israel’s Sharon for their vicious mobilization of nationalism for murderous purposes. But you can’t forget that Venezuela’s ‘proceso’, or Bolivia’s movements, are about developing a country for the benefit of the people of that country — a nationalist idea, that ends up being an anti-imperialist idea. And indeed, it seems to me that the strongest grounds for opposing the US occupation of Iraq (or the coup in Haiti) is the nationalist idea of “Iraq for the Iraqis.” Tricky there, too, because there are losers in these national projects — certainly Saddam’s version of nationalism was a horrific one for those excluded from his notion of the national identity.
The question is, what is the next step? If you don’t like imperial occupation and colonization, what do you fight for? A vision of a different global order, open borders, some innovative protections for culture and freedom, the kinds of things I was arguing for in the interview? Or should we dream first of nation-states of citizens who can democratically control their own fates, decide on their own development, decide on their own resources, without interference or imposition from outsiders?
The United Nations is supposed to be a body that balances the universal needs and rights of all people with the reality that national states are the arena where most rights and responsibilities are exercised. I don’t think we’re going to jump from the current imperial nightmare into a just global order without something happening in between (maybe what happens in between is something like what George Monbiot proposes for a global order?)
Is the arena for that the national state? Is the mobilizing force behind it nationalism? It has certainly been one of the strongest anti-imperialist forces in the past, for all its flaws.
Let’s change scales and look at a different strategic question. Vijay Prashad’s latest ZNet Sustainer Commentary makes some interesting points about relating to electoral politics (something I try to think about as well). He says that the Anybody But Bush argument is the wrong one to have: it’s ineffectual, it’s the wrong issue — “Nader’s 2.9 million votes in 2000 is far less than the number of people who went to see Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 on its opening night: the point is not to fight over those who come to the polls, but to engage those potential voters who have either been deviously disenfranchised, or who feel no stake at all in either the democratic institutions or else in the movement for social change.”
To Vijay, “Our communities are active in many arenas (against police brutality, against workfare, against racism, against warfare, against domestic violence, against ecocide, against homophobia, against the working-class, against local sovereignty, against injustices of all kinds) – we need to move from these vibrant, often successful struggles to a different level. We have to have the courage to move toward the electoral domain to solidify our gains and to risk governance, with all its problems.”
The idea is that we “already have a social movement that has made many gains, and it is up to us to move our base to the polls to elect viable and decent local candidates who are accountable to our movements.” Examples? “The successful candidacies of Boston’s Felix Arroyo, Providence’s Miguel Luna, Austell’s Alisha Thomas, Tucson’s Raul Grijava, Newark’s Ras Baraka, New Platz’s Jason West…” I don’t know anything about these folks — but I would be interested to learn more about them… perhaps from the book Vijay cites, called “How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office” by the League of Pissed Off Voters. They have a 30 year plan. I like the last line of Vijay’s comment — the task is to make “the link between the struggle and the election. This is a far more important task than to treat our vote as a commodity and decide which shop to sell it to in exchange for some measure of personal satisfaction.”
Keeping that link alive though is tricky, because what inevitably happens is that elected politicians cease to be accountable to their constituencies. And progressive local politicians quickly discover that the real power lies elsewhere. How can a movement that can achieve a degree of local power make a transition to real power at the national or international level, without getting stuck?
