CAS Final, Essay Example

1. Gellner’s commentary on the invention of nations through a process of nationalism is, in many ways, reified when one considers the historical record of ‘nations’ and state-making. Fundamentally, all nations are, by their very nature, ‘imagined communities’: they are social groupings composed of some number of people who share in some common imagining of group identity (Anderson 6). Even very small nations are composed of far more people than any one of their members could ever hope to know in their lifetime; thus, this felt, shared identity is not predicated on knowing one’s co-nationals (6).

Here, however, a caution: the mere fact that nationalism imagines nations and, in a very real sense, often brings them into being, does not necessarily mean that these nations are somehow ‘false’. As Anderson points out, Gellner overplays his hand, effectively implying that there are communities of some type which may be said to be more ‘genuine’ or ‘true’ than nations, when in fact absolutely all communities that involve more people than any one person could ever hope to know are in some sense imagined (6). What truly matters, then, is the means by which an imagined community comes into being, the rationale behind its creation, and the ways in which it is maintained (6).

Here, comparisons with other types of imagined communities are illustrative. Anderson observes that long before modern nationalism, there were already sacral communities, consisting of those united in shared adherence to the doctrines and teachings of such religions as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the like (12). These communities were united by meaningful symbols and a sense of common identity in their shared beliefs. So powerful were these ties that they undergirded whole civilizations composed of many different, readily distinguishable cultural entities. Christendom and the Islamic Ummah are two of the greatest examples: long before modern times, both spanned many cultures and embraced substantial fractions of the earth’s population (12).

The parallels and the contrasts between sacral communities and nations are telling. For one thing, nations are far more parochial. Historically, Christendom united the Norman, the Breton, the Basque, and the French, to say nothing of the Castilian, the Catalan, the Picard, the English, and many others. In more recent centuries, French nationalism has united the French, including the Normans, but not the Bretons and certainly not the Basques. Thus, nationalism is always far more limited in scope than the sacral communities that certain religious traditions have forged (Anderson 12-18). However, it is nonetheless very compelling: after all, nationalisms played an absolutely seminal role in the successful independence movements in the Americas from the late 18^th-early 19^th centuries; in the upheavals that rocked so much of Europe in the 19^th century, and in tearing apart the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires in the early 20^th century. Nationalism, then, is capable of not only creating an imagined community, but also inspiring members of such a community, under certain circumstances, to fight for it. Here, a particularly superlative example is the historic assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie carried out by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip: Princip saw himself as a member of an imagined community, a nation, called ‘Yugoslavia’, and it was in the service of furthering the self-determination of this nation that he fired the shots that led to World War I.

Princip’s choice of target, the heir to the sprawling Habsburg dynastic state of Austria-Hungary, stands as an iconic example of the clash between nationalism and that other great type of imagined community, which for centuries and indeed millennia stood as the preeminent form of state-level organization: the dynastic state (Anderson 18-19). The dynastic state differs from the nation-state, the logical end-point of any nationalism, in that it is conceived of in terms of the subjects of a particular dynasty, rather than the co-nationals or compatriots of a shared patria or fatherland. Dynastic states have typically sought to bolster their legitimacy through claim to some kind of divine sanction, and at least in the Medieval to Early Modern European states system, they were quite capable of expanding not only by success in war, but also by sexual politics (19-20). As such, successful dynastic states have often consisted of an assortment of culturally diverse communities, and are typically ordered on the pattern of an imperial core or metropole, and subservient peripheries.

Dynastic states were undermined, and nationalisms fomented, by means of print-capitalism and the Enlightenment-era ideas it diffused (Anderson 20-25, 49-55). The consequences were such history-making and iconic clashes between nationalism and the dynastic state as the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Latin American Wars for Independence (49-60). While nationalism has toppled dynasts aplenty, it has also installed more than its fair share of despots, ranging from Napoleon to Franco to Hitler. And for minority groups within the borders or on the peripheries of nation-states, the rise of nation-states has brought processes of assimilation and subjection. Familiar examples include Franco’s attempt to Castilianize Spain at the expense of Catalans and Basques, and the attempts of the United States and Australia to suppress the cultures of their respective indigenous peoples. In Southeast Asia, by way of another example, the post-colonial states have carried on and intensified the classical- and colonial-era state-making projects at the expense of the non-state peoples that inhabit their peripheries (Scott 15-30). Thus, nationalisms are capable of fostering robust ethnic chauvinisms, and harnessing them to state power. This is surely one of the most important characteristics of nationalism with respect to recent centuries.

2. Olson’s 1963 essay “Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force” constitutes one of the earliest direct criticisms of modernization theory. Contra the claims of Rostow et al. that the United States ought to precipitate the crucial socioeconomic watershed of “take-off” to modernization, Olson argued—and bolstered his argument with a great deal of empirical evidence—that although “absolute income level was correlated to political stability, income growth rates—especially in poor countries—were correlated to instability” (Gilman 219). But if rapid economic growth could precipitate political instability, then a central tenet of modernization theory had to be called into question: namely, the idea that economic growth would predictably produce modern, developed nations that would be resistant to Communist takeovers, this of course being a crucial part of the great project of the modernization theorists (219-220).

Rostow in particular elevated the concept of economic-growth-as-progress to the status of gospel. In his formulation, there is a sharp divide between pre-modern societies, which he characterizes as “pre-Newtonian”, and modernized or “Newtonian” societies: the former are technologically and attitudinally limited and backward, while the latter boast advanced technologies and entrepreneurial attitudes (4-5). Lerner echoes these sentiments in his discussion of the coming of modernization to an Anatolian village near Ankara: modernization means technology, commerce, and wider mental horizons (19-23). Of the many limitations of Rostow’s and Lerner’s formulation, the insufficient consideration it gives to the disruptive effects of modernization on ‘subaltern’ groups must surely be high on the list. Polanyi gives a particularly salient example from the cockpit of modernization, England: the enclosure movement of the 16^th-17^th centuries, which devoured the commons and displaced the peasantry in order to facilitate commercial sheep-raising (20-23).

In fact, there are very compelling reasons why economic growth may precipitate political instability under some circumstances. Understanding this casts important light on a key weakness of modernization theory. In the first place, economic growth may produce political instability because the people have more opportunities to exchange information, organize, and assemble. Autocratic, dictatorial regimes tend to suppress these freedoms, which creates inefficiency and contributes to much higher rates of poverty (Anderson 20-30, Frank 4-9, Skocpol 4-8). Regimes as disparate as North Korea, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, Franco’s Spain prior to economic reforms after World War II, and Myanmar under Than Shwe demonstrate this. Why, then, did the Soviet Union fall after a period of economic liberalization under Gorbachev, where it had failed to fall under Stalin, despite the horrors of collectivization, the Great Terror, and the general blatant disregard for human life and wellbeing that characterized Stalin’s regime? Broadly, as is commonly known, the answer is that the costs of rebellion under Stalin were too high, and Stalin was able to reward the essential members of his ruling coalition while running a highly repressive, centralized planned economy. Gorbachev, however, faced a stagnating Soviet economy, and a lack of the necessary political will to implement the type of repressive apparatus that characterized Stalin’s rule. Again stating the obvious, but as a direct result, he liberalized the Soviet economy in order to increase the wealth from which the state could draw through taxation.

Gorbachev took a risk that failed him and cost him his regime and the Soviet Union itself, but the underlying logic was sound, and it demonstrates a key problem with modernization theory: modernization theory is unilinear, and fails to consider different paths to modernity, including differing stories of state engagement with modernity (Gilman 220-222). The Russian Imperial-Soviet experience was very different from the respective experiences of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, based on a host of factors pertaining to the respective trajectories of social, political, and economic development of each of these countries.

And as Latham explains, the focus of the modernization theorists was on service to the (American) state (6). As such, they were afflicted with a particular blind spot where factors such as labor unrest, economic depression, and social radicalism were concerned, all of these being factors that can, after all, exert significant impacts on the course of modernization (6-7). In Seeing Like a State, Scott delivers an especially potent criticism of modernization theory, effectively demonstrating that a long-standing feature of state-making projects since antiquity has been the effort to make people and resources legible to the state, i.e. capable of being taxed. Mobile peoples and remote, difficult-to-access lands have long presented knotty problems to states. Unsurprisingly, then, a key aspect of modernization in many quite disparate places and times has entailed utilizing new technologies to make these resources legible to the state: witness the appropriation of land from indigenous peoples by white settlers in many parts of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape, appropriation made possible by advances in firearms, seafaring ships, and the like, as well as such infrastructure projects as the American Trans-Continental Railroad and the Czarist Russian Trans-Siberian Railroad. The infamous ‘marketing boards’ set up by European imperial regimes in colonial Africa are another example of the use of state power to render peoples and their resources more ‘legible’, i.e. taxable. This is modernization from a state’s-eye point of view (Scott 1-5, 75-79, Wolf 4-14). Thus, relatively little of modernization theory remains valid today. At best, it offers some, very limited, insights into the characteristics of economic growth and modernization in some (mostly Western) societies. At worst, it ignores a whole host of dynamics involving class, core-periphery relations in state-making projects, and the choices faced by state and non-state actors in various circumstances.

3. Fundamentally, every successful modern revolution has defined itself in national terms because the internal class and economic dynamics of the state have served as the arena in which the revolutionary forces have struggled against the ancién regime. This has been true both in cases where the revolutionary movement successfully created a new polity out of the fabric of a larger polity, as was the case with the United States of America and the South American states liberated by Bolivar and San Martin vis-à-vis the imperial metropoles of Britain and Spain, respectively, and in cases wherein the revolutionary movement radically transformed an existing polity, as was the case with France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949, and Iran in 1979 (Anderson 47-60, Skocpol 3-10). In every case, it was necessary for the revolutionaries to seize the levers of state power in order to affect their revolution, precisely because these selfsame levers were the instruments of the very class arrangements against which they were rebelling. In short, defeating the ancién regime was inseparable from seizing control of state power, meaning that the revolutionaries had in each case to set themselves to this task (Skocpol 4-7).

State power, then, is central to a consideration of the political and class dynamics against which successful modern revolutions have been waged. For political revolutions such as the American Revolution and the South American independence struggle waged by Bolivar and San Martin, the seizure of state power represented the national aspirations of politically active strata in Anglo-American and Ibero-South American societies, respectively: under the influence of Enlightenment-era ideas that weakened the traditional legitimacy of sacral monarchy and promoted new conceptions of governance, these revolutionaries sought to wrest state power from distant imperial metropoles (Anderson 49-61). However, these revolutions differed in character from the French Revolution and Haitian Revolution, not to mention the Mexican, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese and Iranian Revolutions of the 20^th century, in that they were not social revolutions, that is, revolutions designed to remake not only political but also social processes (Skocpol 4-8).

For social revolutionaries, it is not enough to seize state power: society must also be refashioned. This may lend itself to a certain internationalism, particularly in cases where the surrounding international environment appears to be ripe for the export of the revolutionary ideals—witness the progress of France’s Revolutionary and especially Napoleonic armies across Europe, to say nothing of the Soviet Union’s Comintern (Skocpol 5-8). Despite the internationalism of Lenin’s vision, and despite—or because—of Kremlin control of the Comintern, national considerations prevailed, especially under Stalin. Never mind that the Soviet Union refused nationality in its name, it was fundamentally a state with a Russian ethno-territorial core, a fact of which the Georgian-born Stalin remained keenly aware. As is well known, Stalin made peace with the Russian Orthodox Church and drew on such iconic figures in Russian history as Alexander Nevsky during the dark years of the war, when the Soviet Union faced the full might of Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Stalin’s accommodation with Russian religion and history is telling: it represents a self-conscious awareness of the continued practical relevance of some kind of nationhood to a state run by a social revolutionary party on ostensibly internationalist principles.

While Anderson observes that the Soviet Union’s refusal of nationality marks it the legatee of its Czarist, dynastic predecessor, this demonstrates an essential point: nations matter because they are reinforced through state-making processes (1-5). For the Bolsheviks, the October Revolution brought the opportunity to implement their vision on a vast, hitherto-dynastic imperial state. However, Lenin’s fantasies notwithstanding, this state remained, at its core, a Russian-dominated state, because the geopolitical and administrative legacy of what the czars had wrought could not so easily be undone: the very class struggles and wartime experiences that bred the October Revolution within the Russian Empire were the product of the state structures of the same. This in turn ensured that it would be a fundamentally Russian state that the Bolsheviks inherited.

Thus, administrative practice and state power reinforce the concept of the imagined community of the nation, a concept that is durable enough to prove not only desirable but necessary for every successful modern revolution. Given the role of state power in creating and fostering any given ancién regime against which a revolutionary movement acts, this is no wonder. Indeed, it would be surprising if a social revolutionary movement refused any definition in national terms, given the preeminence of the nation in a state-dominated world (Anderson 5-15, Frank 4-8, Skocpol 4-10, Wallerstein 387-400). Another aspect of this, however, concerns the actual exercise of power by the ruling coalition installed by a successful social revolution, and the incentives that they face. By way of example, consider the case of Ethiopia’s 1974 military coup, in which a group of young military officers called the Derg removed Emperor Haile Selassie from power. While ostensibly presiding over a socialist revolution, Derg leader Mengistu Haile Mariam soon contrived to remove all threats to his power and rule in a high-handed and authoritarian manner resembling that of his imperial predecessor. Mengistu enriched himself and his cronies with the lavish subsidies he received from the Soviet Union, even at the cost of undermining Ethiopia’s war effort against Eritrean separatists. Like other revolutionary despots, including Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-Sung, and Fidel Castro, Mengistu found the levers of state power conducive to his political survival and personal fortunes. The personal incentives of the new ruling elites installed by social revolutions, then, present an especially compelling rationale for those regimes’ continued use of nationhood: states and their tax bases and other resources are too useful not to be exploited.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. The Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. New York: Verso, 2006. Print.

Frank, Andre G. “The Development of Underdevelopment.” Monthly Review 18.4 (September 1966): 3-17. Print.

Gilman, Nils. Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Print.

Latham, Michael E. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era. University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Print.

Lerner, Daniel. The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. The Free Press, 1958. Print.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Beacon Press, 1957. Print.

Rostow, W. W. The Stages of Economic Development: A Non-Communist Manifesto. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MS: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Print.

Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

—. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998. Print.

Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions. Cambridge, MS: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Print.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays by Immanuel Wallerstein. Cambridge, MS: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Print.

Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, 1982. Print.