Nation state, nationalism, instruments of capitalism (2nd part)

Grazia.tanta@gmail.com 28/12/2019 1[Escrever
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Nation-state, nationalism, instruments of capitalism (2/3)
Summary
1. How capitalism created the nation-state
2 - Nationalism as an instrument of ideological control
3 - To each nation a nation-state?
4. Capitalism magnifies the nation-state in its process of consolidation.
5 - The capitalist globalization reconfigures the role of the nation-state
5 .1 - Some segments taken from the domain of nation-states
6 - The State, local manager of the stratification of the Human beings
///+
3 - To each nation a nation-state?
If a nation-state arose only and "naturally" on the basis of a nation - characterized by
ethnicity, culture, common past, religion, language or all - it would be necessary to explain
why there are only about 200 nation-states and no more than 7000 corresponding to each
specific culture/language binomial anchored in more or less specific territories. If so, one
might wonder, where is the Monegasque nation, the identity of Liechtenstein, or that of
each of the former English Caribbean colonies transformed into nation-states to serve as
offshores to mafia for accommodation and money laundering?
If this assumption were true, how many would be liberation wars, conflicts, massacres,
deportations and refugee columns fleeing the repression powers (bit) welcoming of
independence postures? How many would be arrested for separatism or fighters for the
independence of their homeland?
Refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean are fleeing economic disruption, banditry and,
poverty and not as victims of the struggle of their cultures and ethnic groups to create a
nation-state. And Rohingyas who flee to Bangla Desh do not do so by independentist
drives.

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Many of that cultures, have few members, specific mass or even will to build a nation-
state for them; and they would certainly have the opposition of the host nation-state
apparatus little given, by nature, to territorial losses. On the other hand, these subaltern
cultures within a typical nation-state, with armies, police, a state-run nationalist
propaganda apparatus, and a totalizing educational system, are repressed to fade away;
or, accept them as generating elements of tourist attraction.
Today, national liberation wars are scarce, after the golden age of decolonization in the
1960s and 1970s. Tamils in Sri Lanka did not achieve independence after many years of
war; native nations in the US are subject to tourist visibility, such as museum pieces;
Kurds are gaining some autonomy in devastated Syria and Iraq; Palestinians remain
confined to real outdoor prisons; the separation between Czechs and Slovaks proceeded
peacefully despite their many affinities; Scotland expects better days to separate from
formal Windsor tutelage; in Spain, Catalans, Basques and Galicians continue to have their
own independence refused in the post-Francoist regime; and South Sudan recently split
from Arab-based Sudan after a period of war… for oil sharing.
The decolonization of Africa was in many cases peaceful and, in the case of the
Portuguese colonies, the colonial liberation wars ended in the mid-1970s, later of Algeria’s
in1965; followed shortly thereafter by the collapse of the regime of the original population
exclusion in Zimbabwe; to which that regime gave a name that honored a racist
businessman named Cecil Rhodes. In South Africa, the apartheid regime continued until
the 1990s when it was established as a multi-ethnic nation-state with eleven official
languages under the leadership of the outstanding figure of Nelson Mandela. At the same
time, Namibia became a nation-state free of South African tutelage after a long liberation
war. The ensuing conflicts in Africa, apart the massacres in Rwanda or the division into
two of an artificial Sudan, had not origin in ethno-cultural issues; just power struggles,
plunder (oil, gold, uranium, rare minerals… ) and migrants deals of transport to the
Mediterranean, with western involvement, as is observed in the Sahel.
The nation-state in its genesis brought together nations and territories - by integration or
absorption - by assigning national labels to each human being; however, this figure only
applied in fact in Europe and, in the late eighteenth century in the United States as well,
although in China and Japan there were also centralized nation-states, but within
autarchic models, unrelated to the dynamics of capitalism.
In parallel with the most extensive or intensive character of European colonial rule, the
presence of his power began to wane in the transition between the eighteenth/nineteenth.
After the creation of a slave and genocidal republic by European settlers - USA1
- the
pioneer Haiti - a republic of former slaves - emerged, followed by the independence of
South America, where each nation-state was ruled by an immense variety of cultures and
ethnicities but under the political and military hegemony of the Creoles, more or less direct
descendants of the Spanish and Portuguese colonizers. However, the Monroe doctrine -
America for Americans - actually meant US suzerainty on the continent, with the conquest
1
Symbolically, the first US president, George Washington was a wealthy owner of immense numbers of slaves.

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of the last Spanish colonies and the perennial habit of intervening in the "backyard" south
of Rio Grande - with invasions, military coups, dictatorships, assassinations, and more
recently through sanctions - with the support, tolerance or distraction of European nation-
states.
Until World War I, war was the common means of creating or expanding nation-states, in
many cases with very unstable borders, especially in Central Europe where the German
Confederation and Austria shared the domain of the so-called Holy Empire (which was
then a heap of hundreds of small and large landlords); and, in Eastern Europe dominated
the empires, Russian and Ottoman, the last, in a usual struggle with the Persian Safavids,
for control of Mesopotamia. In the western part of Europe were the maritime powers that
controlled the colonial trade, with France in a position of two faces; on one hand, France
had its colonial ambitions contained and reduced by the greater English power and, on the
other, it was looking for a great European continental empire, centered in Paris, as two
Napoleons (the original and the third) had tried to erect. Russia, meanwhile, expelled the
Swedes from the eastern bank of the Baltic and became the main beneficiary of the
collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian electorate while extending territorially to Alaska… later
sold to the US.
Europe stood out through the conquest, dispute, and occupation of colonial territories, as
well as inter-imperialist wars or occupation of the weaker. Faced with decaying imperial
powers in the late nineteenth century until World War I - Austria-Hungary and Turkey -
with the aim of dismantling them, the idea of “each nation its nation-state” was defended,
however impracticable that it would be in the Balkan or the Middle East countries, given
the territorial and cultural interpenetration of the peoples of these regions . At the same
time, the imperial powers were dividing Africa among themselves, drawing boundaries
with no concern in the face of the divisions they created within ethnic groups, peoples and
tribes or, in keeping previous political structures, in North Africa or the Sahel. Africans
were inferior beings, a concept properly defended by "scientists" involved in targeting of
human races in and sterilization of mentally handicapped or for people with less
handsome features. In America, after the US conquest of vast Mexican territories, a
relative peace reigned in the South, in the Creole states; only the final expulsion of the
weakened Spanish colonialists (from Cuba and Puerto Rico) was missing, as well as the
English colonies (notably Canada); but the last belonged to the most powerful nation-state
of the time.
Ataturk, after the break of the Ottoman Empire, took as far as possible the idea of national
uniformity within Turkey; it has exchanged Greek populations in Asia Minor for Turkish
inhabitants of Greece and the genocide of Armenian Christians, who could be… adopted
by the Tsar of Russia at Turkey's expense. Still, to upset Turkey's “identity,” Kurdish
nationalism remains, to this day without recognition for the constitution of a nation-state.
Shortly after the dismantling of the Turkish and Austro-Hungarian empires, Yugoslavia
emerged as a mosaic of peoples with various religions and languages (which were close,
unlike religions), with diverse communities very mixed and borders very difficult to draw;
However, this time the great powers intended to give the whole a rational and viable

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dimension. To avoid “balkanization” the idea of “each nation, its state” was left behind.
Despite this diversity, the Yugoslavs strongly resisted Nazi occupation, despite the
support of the Ustachas (basically Croatian Catholics) to the occupier, in a fiercely anti-
Serbian posture inherited from Austrian memory.
About eighty years later, again that principle of accentuation and exacerbation of the
nationalist spirit returned to Yugoslavia as the product of various interests of entities alien
to its people. Germany intended to widen the field of trade expansion by benefiting from
the breakup of Comecon; pope Wojtyla wanted to integrate the former Austrian provinces
of Catholic tradition (Slovenia and Croatia) in his ultra-reactionary crusade spirit against
Belgrade and the Serbs, with traditionally good relations with Russia; and finally, the US
(dragging the EU alongside it) again encouraged “balkanization” with the creation of a
tripartite Bosnia-Herzegovina, FYROM (now Northern Macedonia), Montenegro and the
creation of a territory (Kosovo) promoted to nation-state to receive the big military base
Boldsteen where US can oversee the entire Balkan Peninsula, preventing against Russian
influence on the Slavic peoples of the region.
The same principle of “each nation, its state” was not, of course, followed in the
decolonization of Africa; so the colonial boundaries were maintained, enclosing, in
general, in each one, many ethnicities and languages that, as a rule, have centuries,
sharing in common the same space. For example in the Niger valley cohabit hundreds of
ethnic groups and languages. The creation of nation-states by the colonial powers did not
end this cohabitation, complemented with some languages of communication between
distinct communities; the strangeness was the existence of borders and the presence of
indigenous political classes as delegates of the former colonizers - the so-called "black
skin, white mask"2.
The same happened with the Quechua language, spoken by
indigenous peoples from Colombia to Argentina, along with the Spanish language
introduced by the colonizer.
It would be insane to apply the identity principle to Africa. First, because it would result in
a confused and debatable redefinition of spaces and peoples; secondly, the colonial
nations sought to maintain their preferential influences and business in the independent
territories, as well as the continuation of mining exploitation and plantation regimes. On
the other hand, the small westernized elites, heirs of the colonial administration, did not
want to open the dossier of the pre-colonial ethnic groups, which would restrict their
powers to the cultural and ethnic nuclei from which they came; or lose their role as
intermediates face to Western capital in a broad space, supra-tribal. Particularly, it was
required to them to provide a stable operation of markets ... and loot. Thus, the only cases
of future partitions would come - after long and violent conflicts - with the Ethiopia/Eritrea,
Sudan/South Sudan separations and, unrecognized by the 'international community', in
the Somalia/Somaliland case.
2
Title of a Franz Fanon’s book

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The British Indian Empire was initially divided into four nation-states, all far from ethnic,
cultural or linguistic oneness. With the notable exceptions of Japan and Korea, the same
is true in almost every Asian country. Indonesia is another great mosaic of languages and
ethnicities but, the Dutch colonizers never even tried to install the use of their language,
accepting the continuity of Malay, traditional language of communication in the region;
The Dutch confined the use of its language in the upper circle of colonial administration.
Geopolitics is a game of economic, financial and logistical interests and makes peoples
and nation-states as instruments of dispute, whether more intense or destructive, as
political classes manage to - or fail to - instill the venom of nationalism and exclusion of
the Other, for the benefit of indigenous or globalized capitalism.
Most cultures or languages do not aspire to the constitution of a nation-state, and for
various reasons:
 Many, they think if dispersed by several nation-states, each of those, is contrary to
cede part of its territory to one of its minorities; also, is hard to a nation-state to admit
its minority will join a group of people with the same culture but, living in a second
nation-state; and, in addition, it would be hard to accept the emerging, of a third
nation-state as a product of that agglutination. Indeed, the sharing of Jammu-Kashmir
between India and Pakistan reveals that neither of these countries will give up a
millimeter of territory, either to the other or to the creation of a new state sovereignty.
 As a rule, a nation-state has its state structures occupied by ethnicities, unique or
strongly majority cultures, with the monopoly of the police, military, judicial apparatus;
and it is usually within this dominant culture that local or national economic power
also is linked. The minorities only rebel if discriminated, constrained in their life-
enhancing desires to a social promotion; or, if under cultural, linguistic, or religious
repression, as happen in Northern Ireland Catholic community, but not in the
Hungarian Catholic communities in Serbia or Romania (both Orthodox), as in the
Turkish minority in Bulgaria.
 There are also cases where political power is based on minorities. One can quote to
the Maronites in Lebanon, used by the French to create a separate political entity
from Syria, following the First World War but since, outnumbered by the Shiites; or in
present-day Syria whose political power belongs to Alawite minority. In the cases of
Maronites or Alawites, there are identities based on religion (present or inherited from
ancestors) but in the case of Afro-Americans the identification and segregation are
based on the more or less present African origin, the skin color; the same is
happening in Brazil.
The relevance of immigrants, especially in Europe and the US, has grown and is marked
by discrimination, exclusion, persecution; their acceptance is more problematic, the more
different is the physical or cultural typology of them. Being a South American immigrant in
the US has different social and political acceptance conditions towards immigrants from
Europe and in Europe, there are obvious differences whether the immigrant is African,

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Islamic or from Eastern Europe. The discrimination of immigrants is always constructed by
a packed narrative of prejudice as being opportunistic, to explore the social security
systems, and be thieves, dirty, rapists, terrorists, disturbing the good and heavenly peace
in their place of adoption. Synthetically, it is called to this set of preconception, racism;
and, by the way, is interesting to remember racism has its origin in the Iberian Peninsula3
Jews, for about two millennia - and despite their ethnic and social divisions - lived in well-
identified communities without a nation-state, self-segregating themselves to remain a
community or, being segregated and persecuted for political reasons, religious or popular
envy, or as origin of popular discontent in the nation-states where they lived For centuries
they never sought to constitute a nation-state until they took advantage of this fashion, in
the late nineteenth century, to launch this project, emigrating a few thousand to Palestine,
where for many centuries there was only a small Jewish community in harmony with the
Islamic majority. Zionism, the racist doctrine of defending the Israelites as an anointed
people, advocated an occupation of Palestine as their ancestral homeland and, with
English support, they established themselves in that territory, expelling or segregating its
occupying ancestors, victims of brutalities that can be compared with those of the Nazis. It
is, therefore, a “scientific”, exclusionary and fascist nationalism, anchored in the support of
the US and the political and financial power of Jewish-origin oligarchs. Only money and its
resulting influence allow such "national" excrescence.
Conversely, Gypsies have always been poor, segregated and wandering communities,
pushed into ostracism, with a particular presence in the Balkans, where they developed a
very interesting musical culture. No financial or political power offered them a territory to
build a nation-state.
What is the nation-state? It is a contingency where other contingencies came to an end,
with an apparatus called the State, with totalitarian rights of repression and plundering of
“its” inhabitants, segmented according to the various performances defined by the State4.
The State is filled by a hierarchy more or less mafia - the political class, in permanent
liaison with the top of the range of capital; national and global. To color and brighten this
sinister picture, they joined this nation-state with a hymn and a flag.
4 - Capitalism magnifies the nation-state in the process of consolidation
Globalization, in its earliest form, began when Lucy's sons left the Rift Valley and set off to
uncertain destinations; but losing, temporarily (thousands of years) each other's
references5
. And it was widening its geographical scope, including more and more human
3
Racismos – Francisco de Bethencourt
4
O Homem, ser social e fragmentado (Man, social and fragmented being)
http://grazia-tanta.blogspot.pt/2013/02/o-homem-ser-social-e-fragmentado.html
5
The 20 million people in Mexico caused by the arrival of the Spanish, measles and, smallpox (in addition to
the superiority of the latter), mainly due to Mexicans having no contact with other humans. since the Bering
Strait was flooded again after the last ice age.

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communities, mainly through the formation of empires that created the security conditions
for the exchanges. Alexander of Macedonia wanted to conquer the world but was
thwarted by the forests of India, the heights of Pamir and the fatigue of his troops. Later
the Romans turned the Mediterranean into a Mare Nostrum stopping at the edge of the
stormy Atlantic, behind the defensive wall against the Picts in the west, the Sahara in the
south, the Rhine and the Danube in the north, and the confrontation with the Parthians in
the east. Still later, the Muslim empires formed sea and land bridges with India and China,
with Marco Polo, Venice and, Genoa linking Asia with the rest of feudal Europe. This
distant commerce focused on luxury goods whose high price resulted in part of the total
dimension of travel and the risks during it.
If one thinks of globalization in simple geographical terms, it was consummate with the
deeds of Colombo, Vasco da Gama and Magalhães, followed by the unveiling of some
corners, until the eighteenth century with Cook and, already in the twentieth century, with
the explorers of the polar zones. Anchored in five European Atlantic countries - Portugal,
Spain, the Netherlands, France and, England - globalization has developed war, trade,
conquest, slavery, technological developments and a huge exchange of knowledge. From
this chaotic, unscheduled evolution resulted in a new way of generating wealth -
capitalism - which had as its essential instruments:
 the nation-state, as an organizational model of people, goods and, capital, anchored
in a well-defined space;
 nationalism as ideology, form to agglutinate a specific and multifaceted population but
excluding or suspicious of the outsiders;
 and finally, the State, as the managing apparatus of wealth creation, keeping the
population pacified by law or by repression.
As the world is an open space, the distant trade in luxury goods or spices desired by the
wealthy - now most numerous - was highly profitable. Artisan production of goods,
destined for a nearby area, typical of medieval times, gave way to production to distant
destinations, unknown to their producers and on a scale that would not fit the capacities of
medieval artisans, grouped in brotherhoods6
.
If there is no link between producer and consumer everything becomes dependent on the
trader who defines prices, quantities and, (high) profit margins that allow large
accumulation of money and the creation of a banking and financial sector. Traders and
owners of a country proceed to a collective defense, as cartel (avant la lettre) face the
external competition, with the royal support for Indies Companies, holding the "national
"monopolies" (read, of the richest merchants), extending the administrative functions of
the kingdom, with the king to levy duties on imports and to defend national production
from foreign competition. The national word became vulgar, precisely with the
consolidation of the nation-state, as an attribute of all that is belonging to or an attribute to
6
Curiously, certain relatively privileged professional categories are once again assumed as true
brotherhoods, in spite of the open and free-market logic contained in the neoliberal discourse.

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the nation-state. And each nation-state was like a fortress that, through cannon and
commerce, took the world as a market, never losing its individuality.
This protected space, with an administrative and military apparatus with a king at the top,
gains uniformity and cohesion versus the outside, from which threats may arise; the
relevance of borders and the call for war for territorial conquests for the capture of lands
and people from markets emerges. Kings increase their power with a broader
administrative area - treasury, customs, army and navy, police, courts, and administrative
and labor control legislation - far beyond what was required in feudal landlords. Great
drivers of these transformations were the rich traders of global transactions, with the East
Indies, the West Indies, or engaged in the African slave trade, notably from the
seventeenth century.
The demarcation of borders, the existence of an administrative and financial structure
through an apparatus - State - in a well-defined and well-defended space, materializes the
nation-state, a fortress-state. For example, in France, with the ordinances of Villiers-
Cotterêts (1539), a national register of births and deaths is made from the registers of
religious structures; and along with the usual Latin, the French language was adopted,
which would become the only one used, after the French Revolution (although there were
many versions of it). On the other hand, these ordinances contained the prohibition of the
brotherhoods of arts and crafts, typical structures of the feudal era, taken as surpassed by
globalization and consolidation of the implicit logic of the market.
What has come to be called the national bourgeoisie establishes an intimate relationship
with the State, personalized in a king or equivalent (Cromwell) as the leader of the nation-
state; a cohesive set against the outside or in the repression of disgruntled social strata.
The presence of the state apparatus is an essential requisite for increasing the wealth and
power of the richer traders who may be called capitalists - they own moving capitals, arm
ships, trade and order fabrics, weapons ... especially for sale outside, nearer or farther.
Capitalist production requires a device (State) to its service, a territorial delimitation and
cataloging of the population as nationals, keeping out as foreigners, people with any
distinction towards people belonging to the nation. It must be noted that China, initially
with an administrative organization, technology and greater wealth than Europeans, has
never shown interest in developing trade with these "barbarians." And because of their
size, China understood do not develop foreign transactions since the fourteenth century,
mocking objects Westerners later had, for exchange purposes. The big problem arose in
the nineteenth century when the "barbarians" forced China, at the threat of its cannons, to
collaborate in enriching foreigners by buying opium.
The Netherlands stands out as heir to a commercial and manufacturing tradition with roots
in the Middle Ages and with the freedom of thought it consolidated, after a long war
against the claims of Spain; the last, anchored in the typical power of heritage in feudalism
sink financially in constant wars in the defense of its very fractioned possessions in
Europe and encysts as the guardian of Catholic traditionalism, fighting the humanist

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ideas7
. The treaty of Westphalia is followed by a long period of rivalry between France and
England until the last assumes clear world leadership with the defeat of Napoleon and the
Treaty of Vienna in 1815. After the Franco-Prussian War (1870) England shares global
hegemony with Germany and the US, a balance that will break with World War I, when
Germany loses all its colonies and the US overcomes England as the main power. After
World War II US strengthened its leadership in the western world and the first
configuration of a world system - financial (Bretton Woods, IMF…), commercial (GATT /
WTO) and military (NATO); but with the Soviet Union as a rival power, particularly in the
military field. The UN appears as a descendant of the defunct League of Nations, as a
common denominator among the nation-states, strengthening the role of these as
sovereign elements framing the population; however, with a directory of major powers -
the USA, France, Great Britain retains, the USSR and China (first as an ally of the West
and then under the current form of the People's Republic, positioned alongside the
USSR).
Published:
Nation-state, nationalism, instruments of capitalism (1ª part)
https://grazia-tanta.blogspot.com/2019/12/nation-state-nationalism-instruments-of.html
https://www.slideshare.net/durgarrai/nationstate-nationalism-instruments-of-capitalism-1-part
To be continued:
Nation-state, nationalism, instruments of capitalism (3/3)
This and other documents, here:
http://grazia-tanta.blogspot.com/
http://www.slideshare.net/durgarrai/documents
https://pt.scribd.com/uploads
7
At the most prestigious Iberian university - Salamanca - Augustinians and Trinitarians in the 17th century get
involved because some considered Adam imperfect after God had removed a rib (to create his wife) and
others understood that the same God has filled the hole with meat (!)

Nation state, nationalism, instruments of capitalism (2nd part)

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