Nation-State, Postcolonial Theory, and Global Violence

Author(s): Epifanio San Juan Jr.

Source: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology , Summer 2002, Vol.
46, No. 2 (Summer 2002), pp. 11-32
Published by: Berghahn Books

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23170149

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Nation-State, Postcolonial Theory,
and Global Violence

Epifanio San Juan, Jr.

After the excesses of fascism in World War II and inter-ethnic conflicts in

Africa, the Middle East, and the former Yugoslavia, it became axiomatic for
postmodernist thinkers to condemn the nation and its corollary terms,
'nationalism' and 'nation-state,' as the classic evils of modern industrial
society. The nation-state, its reality if not its concept, has become a kind of
malignant paradox if not a sinister conundrum. It is often linked to violence
and the terror of 'ethnic cleansing.' Nonetheless, the U.N. and the interstate
system of nation-states still function as seemingly viable institutions of
everyday life.1 How do we explain these seemingly paradoxical trends?
Let us review the inventory of charges made against the nation-state
and its cognate concepts. Typically described in normative terms as a vital
necessity of modern life, the nation-state emerged after the breakup of the
medieval Christian empire. It has employed violence to accomplish ques
tionable ends—colonial annexation of territories, conquest of markets, sys
tematic extermination of natives. Its disciplinary apparatuses for war and
pacification are indicted for committing unprecedented barbarism. Exam
ples of disasters are the extermination of indigenous peoples in colonized
territories by 'civilizing' nations, the Nazi genocide of Jews and inferiorized
populations, and most recently 'ethnic cleansing' in Yugoslavia, Rwanda,
and Sri Lanka. Pursuing a line of thought elaborated by Kedourie, Chatter
jee, and others, Cobban (1994) asserted a widely shared view that the the
ory of nationalism has proved to be one of the most potent agencies of
destruction in the modem world. In certain cases, nationalism mobilized by
states competing against other states has become synonymous with totali
tarianism and fascism. Tilly (1975), Howard (1991), and Smith (1979) all

Social Analysis, Volume 46, Issue 2, Summer 2002

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12 Epinfaniû San Joan, Jr.

concur in the opinion that war and the military machine are principal deter
minants in the shaping of nation states. Giddens (1985: 219) defines nation
alism as "the cultural sensibility of sovereignty" (note the fusion of culture
and politics] that unleashes administrative power within a clearly demar
cated territory, "the bounded nation-state." Although it is allegedly becom
ing obsolete under the pressure of globalization (for qualifications, see
Sassen, 1998), the nation-state is considered by "legal modernists" (Berman
1995) as the prime source of violence against citizens and entire peoples.
Postmodernist critiques of the nation (often sutured with the colonial
ist/imperialist state) locate the evil in its ideological nature. This primarily
concerns the nation as the source of identity for modern individuals via cit
izenship or national belonging (Taylor 1999), converting natal filiation (kin
ship) into political affiliation. Identity implies definition by negation,
inclusion based on exclusion underwritten by positivist logics of represen
tation (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). But these critiques seem to forget that
the nation is chiefly a creation of the modern capitalist state, that is, a his
torical artifice or invention. As Arrighi (1993: 162) observes, the Settlement
of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty-Year War, marked the "reorganiza
tion of political space in the interest of capital accumulation" and signaled
"the birth, not just of the modern inter-state system but also of capitalism
as a world-system." Under this imperialist world system, Bukharin reminds
us, "the state power sucks in almost all branches of production; it not only
maintains the general conditions of the exploitative process; the state more
and more becomes a direct exploiter, organizing and directing production
as a collective capitalist" (Callinicos 1982; 205).
It is a truism that nation and its corollary problématique, nationalism,
presupposes the imperative of hierarchization and asymmetry of power in a
political economy of general exchange. The prime commodity exchanged is
now labor-power. Founded on socially constructed myths or traditions, the
nation is posited by its proponents as a normal state of affairs used to legit
imize the control and domination of one group over others. Such ideology
must be demystified and exposed as contingent on the changing grid of
social relations; i.e., on how domination by force is legitimized via the state.2
This heuristic notion of the state as distinguished from the nation in the
field of social power eludes postcolonial thinking. Postcolonial theory claims
to expose the artificial and arbitrary nature of the nation.3 Such signifiers of
homogeneity not only fail to represent the diversity of the actual 'nation' or
body politic, but also serve to impose the interests of a section of the com
munity as the general interest.4 But this is not all. In the effort to make this
universalizing intent prevail, the instrumentalities of state power—the mili

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 Nation-State, Postcolonial Theory, and Global Violence 13

tary and police, religious and educational institutions, judiciary and legal
apparatuses—are deployed. Hence, from this orthodox postcolonial stance,
the nation-state and its ideology of nationalism are alleged to have become
the chief source of violence and conflict since the French Revolution.

Anatomy of Violence

Mainstream social science regards violence as a species of force that vio

lates, breaks, or destroys a normative state of affairs. It is coercion tout
court. Violence is often used to designate force devoid of legitimacy or
legally sanctioned authority. Should violence, as an expression of physical
force, always be justified by political reason in order to be meaningful thus
acceptable? If such a force is used by a state, an inherited political organ
legitimized by 'the people' or 'the nation,' should we not distinguish
between state-defined purposes, and in what specific way nationalist ide
ologies or nation-making mechanisms are involved in those state actions?
State violence and assertion of national identity need not be automatically
conflated so as to implicate nationalism—whose nationalism?—all class/
state actions in every historical era. It would ignore the historically specific
"field of power" (in Bourdieu's sense) in which symbolic capital is
deployed in the interests of those who monopolize statist capital. Devoid of
such specification, postcolonialists tend to indulge in an absolutist censure
of nation-state power bereft of intentionality—i.e., power is reduced to vio
lence construed as merely physical force akin to tidal waves, earthquakes,
and volcanic eruptions.
Violence, properly construed, signifies a political force that demands
dialectical triangulation in order to grasp how nation and state are impli
cated in it. We might use, at this juncture, Arendt's distinction between
"power" as the socially sanctioned ability to act in concert, "force" as the
"energy released by physical or social movements," "authority" as a prop
erty that elicits obedience without coercion, and "violence" as the instru
mental use of implements to multiply natural strength. Arendt (1970: 49)
notes how violence is often conflated with the power of government, but
this is a mistake. The power of the state really depends on whether its com
mands are obeyed by its army or police forces who wield the instruments
of violence; thus:

where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use ...
Everything depends on the power behind the violence. The sudden dramatic
breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obe

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14 Epinfanio San Juan, Jr.

dience—to laws, to rulers, to institutions—is but the outward manifestation of

support and consent

from the citizenry (see also Benjamin 1978). In what sense is the nation or
the symbolic capital of nationalism utilized as an instrument of violence or
a means for legitimizing state power?
A materialist histoncization of the phenomenon of nationalism is
needed to determine the complicity of individual states in specific out
breaks of violence. Postcolonial criticism supposedly abhors totalization or
generalization. But postcolonialists like Bhabha (1990) resort to a ques
tionable use of the versatile performativity of language to ascribe a semiotic
indeterminacy to all nationalitarian projects, reducing the multifarious nar
ratives of nations/peoples to a formulaic paradigm of hybridity and syn
cretism. Bhabha's absolutization of contingency and local knowledge
derived from Foucault (1984), especially the dogma of singularity attached
to the "event" as "the reversal of a relationship of forces" (see Ebert 1996),
rules out the sedimented potency of traditions, the counter-memory of pop
ular-democratic revolts, and the structuring impact of habitus in regions
and localities deemed crucial in undermining colonial authority. While
postcolonialists (like Bhabha) seek to expose the doubled or supplementary
nature of the national sign in order to open a critical space to alter the com
munal values of the dominant culture and to allow 'the people' to negoti
ate other possibilities in their placing between object and subject status,
they eliminate outright the nation-form as a possible vehicle for popular
struggles. The subalterns are forbidden to speak their own collective ethos
of insurgency in their ethnic idioms. While the state has "govemmental
ized" power relations, analysis of the nation-state cannot exhaust the polit
ical economy of power-knowledge (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982; Lemert and
Gillan 1982). History is reduced to the ambiguities of aleatory occurrences
immanent in the arbitrary play of textualities. This move rules out system
atic critique and political intervention. The social field of contending deter
minate forces represented by political parties and diverse organizations
cannot be conceived at all in the face of unintelligible singularities defying
the mediating categories of class, nation, race, gender, etc.
In this light, what makes the postcolonialist argument flawed becomes
clear in its non-referential semiotics (explicated below), and a kind of non
sequitur reasoning justified by a general deconstructive, post-structuralist
rationality. It is perhaps easy to expose the contingent nature of the nation
once its historical condition of possibility is pointed out. But it is more dif
ficult to argue that once its socially contrived scaffolding is revealed, then

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 Nation-btate, rostcoionial 1 tieory, and Global Violence 15

the nation-state and its capacity to mobilize and apply the means of vio
lence can be restricted if not curtailed. Exposing the artificiality of the
nation is not the same as delegitimizing the violence of the state or the
political authority of the classes and groups manifest in juridical institu
tions and state bureaucracy.
We can pose this question at this point: can one seriously claim that
once the British state is shown to rest on the myth of the Magna Carta or
the U.S. government on the covenant of the Founding Fathers to uphold the
interests of every citizen—except, of course, African slaves and other non
white peoples, then one has undermined the power of the British or Amer
ican nation-state? Not that this is an otiose, wrong-headed task. Debunking
has been the classic move of those protesting against an unjust status quo
purporting to be the natural and normal condition for everyone. But it
should not be mistaken as a substitute for the actual organized resistance
of the oppressed and exploited multitudes.
It is not superfluous here to counsel ourselves again; the weapon of
criticism, as Marx once said, needs to be reinforced by the principled criti
cism of weapons. If we want to guard against committing the essentialist
dogmatism of the imperial nationalists, we need a historicizing strategy of
ascertaining how force—the energy of social collectivities—turns into vio
lence for the creation or destruction of social orders and singular life-forms,
rhe sovereignty struggle of aboriginal groups-has become a crucible for
testing solidarity or betrayal. Understood as embodying "the pathos of an
elemental force," the insurrectionary movements of indigenes have been
ieemed the source of a dynamic primordial energy that feeds "the legal
Modernist composite of primitivism and experimentalism," a fusion of
"radical discontinuity and reciprocal facilitation" (Berman 199S: 238). But
the American Indians (as well as native Hawai'ians) are asserting a com
munal right to lands they have been dispossessed of; their struggles for self
determination, coeval with the rise of the imperial nation-state, belong to a
kind of 'modernity' not comprehended by postcolonial doctrine.
The question oí the violence of the nation-state thus hinges on the link
age between the two categories, 'nation' and 'state.' A prior distinction
should perhaps be made between 'nation' and 'society', since these two are
often muddled in postcolonial discourse. While the former "may be
ordered, the [latter] orders itself " (Brown 1986]. Most historical accounts
remind us that the modern nation-state has a beginning—and conse
quently, it is often forgotten—and an ending. But the analytic and struc
tural distinction between the referents of nation (local groups, community,
domicile or belonging], and state (Bourdieu's meta-capital, governance,

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16 EpinfaniD San Juan, Jr.

machinery of sanctioning laws, disciplinary codes, military) are often

elided, because the force of nationalism is often conflated with the violence
of the state apparatuses, an error compounded by ignoring the social
classes involved in each sphere. This is the lesson of Marx and Lenin's nec
essary discrimination between oppressor and oppressed nations—a nation
that oppresses another cannot really claim to be free. Often the symptom of
this fundamental error is indexed by the formula of counterpointing the
state to civil society, obfuscating the symbiosis and synergy between them.
This error may be traced partly to the Hobbesian conflation of state and
society in order to regulate the anarchy of the market and of brutish indi
vidualism violating civil contracts (Oilman 1993).

Mapping Nation Forms

Before dealing with how society was nationalized, it may be useful to recall
the metaphysics of the origin of the nation elaborated in Renan's 1882 lec
ture, 'What is a nation?' This may be considered one of the originary loci
of nationalism (in Europe, at least), conceived as a primitivist revolt against
the centralized authority of modernizing industrial states. Renan's idea of
the nation as a kind of total destiny finds resonance in Weber's praise of the
state's capacity to impart meaning to death, the state as a "purposefully
constructed, functionally specific machine" (Poggi 1978: 101) which
appeals to and mobilizes nationalist sentiments. While Renan emphasized
a community founded on acts of sacrifice and their memorialization, this
focus does not abolish the fact that the rise of the merchant bourgeoisie
marked the start of the entrenchment of national boundaries first drawn in

the age of monarchical absolutism. The establishment of the market coin

cided with the introduction of taxation, customs and tariffs, punctuated by
the assertion of linguistic distinctions among the inhabitants of Europe.
Polanyi's (1957) thesis of The Great Transformation urges us to attend to
the complexities in the evolution of the nation-state in the world system of
commodity exchange. We should also take into account Gellner's (1983)
argument that cultural and linguistic homogeneity has served from the out
set as a functional imperative for states administering a commodity-cen
tered economy and its class-determining division of social labor.
Balibar provides a more empirically nuanced explanation for how soci
ety was nationalized. Starting from the premise that the world-economy is
a system of constraints, not a self-regulating invariant system (as academic
globalization theory would have it), subject to the unpredictable dialectic of

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 Nation-State, Postcolonial Theory, and. Global Violence 17

its internal contradictions, Balibar describes how the privileged status of

the nation form,

derives from the fact that, locally, that form made it possible (at least for an
entire historical period) for struggles between heterogeneous classes to be con
trolled and for not only a 'capitalist class' but the bourgeoisies proper to emerge
from these—state bourgeoisies both capable of political, economic and cultural
hegemony and produced by that hegemony (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 90).

Thus, to resolve the internal contradictions, the bourgeoisie restructured

the state in the national form. This nationalized state intervened (accord
ing to Balibar and Wallerstein) "in the very reproduction of the economy
and particularly in the formation of individuals," whereby individuals of all
classes were subordinated "to their status as citizens of the nation-state, to
the fact of their being 'nationals.'" The key term in this narrative of nation
alization is "hegemony," in this instance capitalist hegemony (domination
by consent) based on formal nationalization of citizenship.
This function of hegemony, now realized through the sublimation of
class contradictions in the nation form, is ignored by postcolonial theory.
Postcolonialists subscribe to a post-structuralist hermeneutic of nationalism
as a primordial destabilizing force devoid of rationality. Thus, while the
shaping of the nation-state over centuries of profound social upheavals did
not follow a transparent linear trajectory, that is not enough reason to ascribe
an intrinsic negativity or belligerency to the nation as such.5 States may rise
and fall, as the absolute monarchs and dynasties did, but sentiments and
practices constituting the nation follow another rhythm or temporality not
easily dissolved into the vicissitudes of the modern expansive state.6
What seems obvious here is that the effects of state violence, or the
consequences of instrumental application of force (following Arendt), can
not be judged as damaging or healthy without defining clearly the
actors/agents involved, the purposes or ends of state activity, and the social
field of forces in their dialectical interaction at specific historical conjunc
tures and epochs.7
In pursuing a historically situated analysis of violence, we must avoid
collapsing the difference between the concept of the 'nation-state' and the
complex, variegated import of nationalist agendas around the world.
Whence originates the will to exclude, to dominate? Philosophically, this
has been traced to the dialectical emergence of the communal universal self
threatened by the violence of the Other in Hegel's philosophy. Politically,
nationalism has served a practical function. According to Giddens (1987:
172), "what makes the 'nation' integral to the nation-state ... is not the

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18 Epinfanio San Juan, Jr.

existence of sentiments of nationalism but the unification of an adminis

trative apparatus over precisely defined territorial boundaries in a complex
of other nation-states." That is why the rise of nation-states coincided with
wars and the establishment of the military bureaucratic machine. From this
perspective, the state refers to the political institution with centralized
authority and monopoly of coercive agencies coinciding with the rise of
global capitalism, while nationalism denotes the diverse configuration of
peoples based on the commonality of symbols, beliefs, and traditions.
Mindful of fundamentalist teleologies and moralisms, one must guard
against confusing historical periods and categories. Imagining the nation
unified on the basis of secular citizenship and self-representation, as
Anderson (1991) once demonstrated, was only possible when print capi
talism arose in conjunction with the expansive state. But that in turn was
possible when the trading bourgeoisie developed the means of communi
cation under pressure of market competition and internal exigencies. More
over, the dissemination of the Bible in different vernaculars did not
translate into a monopoly of violence by the national churches. In Latin
America, the "nation as imagined community" exhibited multiple symp
toms of abortive birth, stagnation, and premature decay, precipitated by
mutations in the social field, in which the violence of the feudal/tributary
landlord and slaveholding classes collided with the predatory incursions of
mercantile and industrial capitalism (Franco 1997). It is obvious that the
sense of national belonging, whether based on clan or tribal customs, lan
guage or religion, certainly has a historical origin and localizing motivation,
different from the emergence of the capitalist state as an agency to rally the
populace to serve the needs of the commercial class and the goal of accu
mulation. The uneven development of colonized nation-states led by com
pradors and feudal landlords, dependent formations that have been
thoroughly investigated by Amin (1980), Gran (1996), and others, must be
distinguished from the European metropolitan experience discussed by Bal
ibar, Giddens, and others.

Refusals and Denials

Given the rejection oí a materialist analysis of the contradictions in any socia

formation, postcolonial critics find themselves at a loss in making coher
sense of nationalism as a historically variegated phenomenon. The reaso
lies in their adherence to the closure of conventionalist self-referentiali
wrongly ascribed to Saussure (Merquior 1986). Whereas, in C.S. Peir

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 Nation-State, Postcolonial Theory, and Global Violence 19

semiotics, signs are not only limited to iconic and symbolic kinds, but also
perform indexical functions (reference to an experimentally verifiable world
outside discourse), postcolonial theory is locked in a "prison-house of lan
guage" and the vertigo of ceaseless interpretation (Sheriff 1989). The com
munity of interprétants disappears (Rochberg-Halton 1986). Representations
of the historicity of the nation give way to a Nietzschean will to invent real
ity as polysémie discourse, a product of enunciatory and performative acts.
No wonder the nation becomes culpable of nationalist aggression.
Postcolonial critics resort to a duplicitous if not equivocating stance in
regard to nation-centered cultures vis-à-vis diasporic cosmopolitanism (see
Appadurai 1994; Mohanty 1994). They perceive nationalism as "an
extremely contentious site" in which notions of self-determination and
identity collide with notions of domination and exclusion. Such opposi
tions, however, prove unmanageable indeed, if a mechanical idealist per
spective is employed. That view in fact leads to an irresolvable muddle in
which nation-states as the field of antagonism for the extraction of surplus
value (profit) and 'free' exchange of commodities also become violent
agencies preventing 'free' action in a global marketplace that crosses
national boundaries. Averse to concrete historical grounding, postcolonial
ism regards nationalist ideology as the cause of individual and state com
petition for goods and resources in the 'free market; with this market
conceived as a creation of ideology. One postcolonial authority (Ashcroft et
al. 1998: 151), in a mode of double-speak, attributes violence to the nation
state on one hand and liberal disposition to the nation on the other:

The complex and powerful operation of the idea of a nation can be seen also
in the great twentieth-century phenomenon of global capitalism, where the
'free market' between nations, epitomized in the emergence of multinational
companies, maintains a complex, problematic relationship with the idea of
nations as natural and immutable formations based on shared collective val
ues. Modern nations such as the United States, with their multi-ethnic compo
sition, require the acceptance of an overarching national ideology [in pluribus
unam). But global capitalism also requires that the individual be free to act in
an economic realm that crosses and nullifies these boundaries and identities.

First of all, it is misleading and foolish then to label the slogan 'one in
many' as the U.S. hegemonic ideology. Officially the consensual ideology of
the U.S. is neoliberal 'democracy' centered on a normative utilitarian indi
vidualism with a neo-social Darwinist orientation. U.S. 'Manifest Destiny'
has been refurbished with a global modernizing mission: witness Bosnia,
Afghanistan, and Colombia. The doctrine of formal pluralism underwrites
an acquisitive or possessive ethos that fits perfectly with mass con

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20 Epinfanio San Juan, Jr.

sumerism and the gospel of the unregulated market. Global finance capital
and business finds sanction in this brand of U.S. cosmopolitanism signaled
by McDonald, Microsoft/IBM, Broadway musicals, and Hollywood films
(McChesney et al. 1998).8
We have now moved from the formalistic definition of the nation as a
historic construct to the nation as a character in the all-encompassing plot
of capitalist development and imperial expansion. What role this protago
nist has played and will play is now the topic of controversy. It is not
enough to simply ascribe to the trading or commercial class the shaping of
a new political form, the nation-state, to replace city-states, leagues, munic
ipal kingdoms, and oligarchic republics. Why such 'imagined communities'
should serve as a more efficacious political instrument for the hegemonic
bloc of property-owners, is the question which I have already anticipated at
the beginning of this essay.
Another approach to our topic is to apply dialectical analysis to the his
torical record of national sovereignty alluded to earlier. Historians have
described the crafting of state power for the new bourgeois nations in
Enlightenment philosophy. During the emergence of mercantile capitalism,
Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius theorized the sovereignty of the nation as a
pivot of centralized authority and coercive power (Bowie 1947). The French
Revolution posited the 'people,' the universal rights of man, as the founda
tion of legitimacy for the state. In the passage from the nineteenth to twen
tieth century, the people as nation, the historical act of constituting the
polity as national-popular domain of public life, gradually acquired enough
libidinal cathexis to inspire movements of anticolonial liberation across
national boundaries. Its influence on the U.S. Constitution as well as on
personalities like Sun Yat-Sen, Jose Rizal, and other 'third world' radical
democrats has given the principle of popular sovereignty a cross-cultural if
not universal status (on Filipino nationalism, see San Juan 2000). Within
the system of nation-states, for Marxists, "recognition of national rights is
an essential condition for international solidarity" (Lowy 1998: 59) in the
worldwide fight for socialism and a class-less political order.
Nations thus differ in terms of who controls state-power and for what
ends. Capitalist states claim legitimacy in terms of the putative rule of the
majority. The universal principle of people's rights is generally considered
to be the basis of state power for the modern nation, "the empowerment,
through this bureaucracy, of the interests of the state conceived as an
abstraction rather than as a personal fiefdom" (Ashcroft et al. 1998: 153).
A serious mistake occurs when the nation and its legitimating principle of
popular sovereignty becomes confused with the state bureaucracy con

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 Nation-State, PostcoloniaL Theory, and Global Violence 21

strued either as an organ transcending the interest of any single class, or as

the 'executive committee' of the bourgeoisie. A mechanical, not dialectical,
method underlies this failure to connect the ideology, politics, and eco
nomics of the bourgeois revolution with the supremacy of the propertied
class. This quasi-Hegelian interpretation posits the popular will of post
Renaissance nation-states as the prime motor of world expansion, of nine
teenth century colonialism. Instead of regarding the West's "civilizing
mission" as a program informed by the gospel of progress via profit-mak
ing, postcolonialists consider the ideology of national glory tied to "the uni
fying signifiers of language and race."
Ideological justification in actuality precedes and accompanies colonial
conquest and domination. Nationalism, the need to superimpose the unify
ing myth of the imperial nation-state, is not only generated by the bourgeois
agenda of controlling and regulating the space of its market, but also by the
imperative of seizing markets and resources outside territories and peoples.
Nationalism is then interpreted by postcolonial theorists as equivalent to
colonialism; the nation is an instrument of imperialist aggrandizement; thus,
if newly liberated ex-colonies employ nationalist discourse and principles,
they will only be replicating the European model whose myths, sentiments,
and traditions justified the violent suppression of "internal heterogeneities
and differences." The decolonizing nation is then declared an oxymoron, a
rhetorical if not actual impossibility. One example often adduced is Irish cul
tural nationalism; its culturalist absolutism, in Deane's (1998: 368) judg
ment, "has found in postcolonialism the future that it deserves."
Lacking any historical anchorage, the argument of postcolonial theory
generates inconsistencies due to an exorbitant culturalism and the concen
tration on diffuse power networks inspired by Foucault (Smart 1985). Just
as Foucault repudiated Marxism for being an inversion of bourgeois politi
cal economy, postcolonialists condemned nationalist thought for adopting
the same essentialist, transcendental, objectifying epistemology of Orien
talism (Lazarus 1999). Foucault rejects foundationalist historiography, but
succumbs to the fallacy of equating all questions of law and sovereignty
with monarchical absolutism. Rose (1984: 200) has detailed the numerous
sophistries in Foucault's ontology of power, in which juridico-discursive
concepts are refunctionalized after their negation by his rules of imma
nence, continual variations, double conditioning, and technical polyvalence
of discourse, noting that Foucault regards violence as endemic: "By draw
ing on a theory of civil society without a theory of the state Foucault does
not open up the perspective of myriad powers in place of the conventional
sovereign and singular power, he introduces or posits a spurious universal:

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22 Epinfanio San Juan, Jr.

warfare." Foucault's omnipresent power as a constitutive subject in the

Kantian or Husserlian sense (Callinicos 1989), or as Nietzschean power
knowledge causing mischievous mayhem everywhere, finds its resonance
in the postcolonial repertoire of mimicry, ambivalence, indeterminacy, as
well as in the deconstructive methodology of the Subaltern Studies group
(Callinicos 1995). This relativistic perspectivalism, which ironically pre
scribes totalizing schemes, cannot discriminate between the reactive
nationalism of the oppressor, and that of the oppressed.
Rejection of the political economy of structured power relations leads
to untenable and spurious interpretations of the historical process. Because
they disregard the historical evolution of the nation-state discussed by Bal
ibar (1991), Anderson (1991), Smith (1971), among others, postcolonial
critics uphold the sphere of culture as the decisive force in configuring
social formations. Not that culture is irrelevant in explaining political antag
onisms. Rather, it is erroneous when such antagonisms are translated into
nothing but the tensions of amorphous cultural differences. The dogma of
cultural difference (for Taylor (1990), the need and demand for recognition
in a modern politics of identity) becomes then the key to explaining subal
ternity, racism, and class exploitation in subordinated, neocolonized for
mations. Ambivalence, hybridity, and ludic interstitiality become privileged
signifiers over against homogenizing symbols and indices whose "author
ity of cultural synthesis" is the target of attack. Biopolitics, disciplinary
regimes of power/knowledge, and discursive performances serve as the
primary foci of analysis over against the practices of "localized material
ism" and a demonized economistic reductionism.
The limits of fetishisizing culture in postcolonial theory can be illus
trated briefly. The most flagrant evidence of constrained parameters in post
colonial diagnosis may be found in its construal of racist ideology as "the
construction and naturalization of an unequal form of intercultural rela
tions" (Ashcroft et al. 1998: 46], If racism occurs only or chiefly on the level
of "intercultural relations," from this constricted optic, the other parts of a
given social formation (political, economic) become superfluous and mar
ginal. Politics is then reduced to an epiphenomenal manifestation of dis
course and instrumentalized language-games.

Fanon's Intervention

In the discourse of postcolonialism, dependent nations and the nation

of neo-colonized peoples are charged for being complicit with the con

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 Nation-btate, Postcolonial Theory, and Global Violence 23

oí Western colonialism, and its Enlightenment metanarrative. They become

anathema to deconstructionists hostile to any emancipatory project in the
'third world' inspired by egalitarian, socialist goals. This is the reason why
postcolonial critics have a difficult time dealing with Fanon (1961), and his
engagement with decolonizing mass violence as a strategic response of
people of color to the inhumane violence of occupying settlers and pil
lagers. Fanon's invocation of a nation-making principle is the direct antithe
sis to any culturalist syndrome, in fact, an antidote to it, because he
emphasizes the organic integration of cultural action with a popular-demo
cratic program of subverting colonialism. Discourse and power are articu
lated by Fanon in the dialectics of practice inscribed in the specific
historical conditions of their effectivity. Fanon's theory of national libera
tion proves itself a true "concrete universal" in that it incorporates via a
dialectical sublation the richness of the particulars embodied in the Alger
ian revolution and generalized in the revolt of the impoverished majority,
"the wretched of the earth."

uiven this historicizmg method, Fanon refuses any demarcation of cul

ture from politics and economics. Liberation is always tied to the question
of property relations, the social division of labor, and the process of social
reproduction—all these transvalued by the imperative of the radical trans
formation of colonial relations and its Manichean subterfuge. Opposed to
Fanon's denunciation of "abstract populism," Bhabha and others (Said
1993) fetishize an abstract 'people' located in diasporic flux and borderline
spaces. Such recuperation of colonial hegemony via a 'third space' or con
trapuntal passage of negotiation reveals the comprador character of post
colonial theories of translation and cultural exchange. Transcultural
syncretism devised to abolish the nation substitutes for anti-imperialist rev
olution a modus vivendi of opportunist compromises.
National liberation and social justice via class struggle are interdepen
dent. As Marmora (1984: 113) observes, "[w]hile classes, in order to
become predominant, have to constitute themselves as national classes, the
nation arises from class struggle." This is why, for Marx and Engels (1968:
22), the proletariat in bondage to capital does not have a country—unless
it has constituted itself as the nation through the ordeals of class war:
"Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat is at
first a national struggle," a fight for hegemonic leadership. The popular
democratic aspiration for self-determination contains both national and
social dimensions. This elucidates the objective significance invested in
Gramsci's ideal of the national-popular: proletarian hegemony as national
collective will of peoples built from alliances, compromises, affiliations,

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24 Epinfanio San Juan, Jr.

and pedagogical sharing of national conditions and traditions—people, not

the bourgeoisie, become the nation (Forgacs 1993; Wertheim 1974).
Analytically, one must clearly distinguish between the state as an
instrument of class interest and the nation/people as the matrix of emer
gent sovereignty. The authority of the bourgeois state as regulative juridi
cal organ, and administrative apparatus bearing a monopoly of coercive
force, derives from its historical origin in enforcing individual, civic rights
of freedom against the absolutist monarchy. National identity is thus used
by the state to legitimize its actions within a delimited territory in the
process of commanding the mobilization and coordination of policy (Held
1992). Formally structured as a Rechtsstaat, the bourgeois nation-state
functions to insure the self-reproduction of capital through market forces
and the continuous commodification of labor power (Jessop 1982). Fanon
understands that anti-colonial insurgency challenges the global conditions
guaranteeing valorization and realization of capital, conditions in which
internationalization and nationalization of circuits of capital are enforced
by the bloc of capitalist nation-states and its hegemony over others.
One can resolve the initial paradox of the nation, a Janus-faced phe
nomenon (Nairn 1977), by considering its historical background. The idea
of state-initiated violence (as opposed to communal ethnic-motivated vio
lence) performs a heuristic role in the task of historicizing any existing state
authority and questioning the peaceful normalcy of the status quo. The pre
vailing social order is then exposed as artificial and contingent; what is
deemed normal or natural reveals itself as an instrument of partial interests.
But the relative permanence of certain institutional bodies and their effects
must be acknowledged in calculating political strategies. The long duration
of collective and individual memories exerts its influence through the medi
ation of what Bourdieu (1993) calls "habitus" and its activation in various
fields of social transactions.

The space of the nation is always a field of conflict among social blocs
for hegemony. One then discovers that the state's hierarchical structure is
made possible because of the institutionalized violence that privileges the
hegemony (moral and intellectual leadership crafted via negotiating com
promises) of a bloc of classes over competing blocs and their alternative
programs. Hegemony is always underwritten by coercion (open or covert,
subtle or crude) in varying proportions and contingencies. The demarcated
territory claimed by a state in rivalry with other states becomes for Weber
one major pretext for the state monopoly of legitimate violence in order to
defend private property and promote the overseas interests of the domes
tic business class (Kräder 1968). Historically the nation form, as men

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 Nation-btate, Fostcoloriial Iheory, and Global. Violence 25

tioned earlier, becomes a vehicle tor unifying classes and groups under
bourgeois hegemony.

Retrospective and Inventory

l'he classical Marxist view oí violence rejects the Utopian idealization as

well as the mechanical calculation of means-ends that vitiates the logic of
Blanquist and Sorelian conceptions of social change (Sorel 1972). Marx dis
avowed Utopian socialism in favor of the overthrow of the bourgeoisie
through a combination of violent and peaceful means depending on the
ever-changing alignment of forces. Instrumentalism is subordinated to a
narrative of emancipation from class bondage. The objective of emancipat
ing labor associated with the nation/people requires the exposure of com
modity-fetishism, and the ideology of equal exchange of values in the
market. Reification and alienation in social relations account for the bour
geois state's ascendancy. Where the state bureaucracy supporting the bour
geoisie and the standing army do not dominate the state apparatus
completely (a rare case) or has been weakened, as in the case of the monar
chy and the Russian bourgeoisie at the time of the 1917 Revolution, the
working class might attain their goal of liberation by peaceful means; but
in most cases, "the lever of the revolution will have to be force" harnessed
by the masses in solidarity, unified by a program of abolishing the entire
class system and its foundation.
Based on their historical inquiries, Marx and Engels understood the role
of violence as the midwife in the birth of a new social order within the old
framework of the nation-state. In his later years, Engels speculated that
with changes in the ideological situation of classes in any national territory,
"a real victory of an insurrection over the military in street fighting is one
of the rarest exceptions." In an unusual historic conjuncture, however,
the Bolshevik revolution mobilized mass strikes, thus disproving Engels.
Nonetheless, Marx's "analytical universality," to use Dunn's (1979: 78)
phrase, remains valid in deploying the concept of totality to comprehend the
nexus of state, class and nation. We can rehearse here the issues that must
be examined from the viewpoint of totality: was Lenin's "dictatorship of the
proletariat" an imposition of state violence, or the coercive rule of the peo
ple against the class enemy? If it is an instrumental means of the new pro
letarian state, did it implicate the nation? Is violence here both structured
into the state system of apparatuses and inscribed in the collective agency
of the working masses cognized as the nation? Is the political authority

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26 Epinfanio San Juan, Jr.

invoked by the proletarian state embodied in the class interest of all those
exploited by capital (in both periphery and center) ascendant over all?
Marxists critical of Leninist interpretation denounce the use of state
violence as an anarchist deviation, an arbitrary application of force. They
affirm instead the law-governed historical process that will inevitably trans
form capitalism into socialism, mainly through the spontaneous develop
ment of the productive forces, whatever the subjective intentions of the
political protagonists involved. Such fatalism, however, rules out the inter
vention of a class-for-itself freed from ideological blinders and uniting all
the oppressed with its moral-intellectual leadership, the cardinal axiom of
socialist revolution (Lukács 2000).
I think the most persuasive Marxist exposition on the role of violence
in socialist revolution is Merleau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror (1947).9
Revolutionary violence arising from social contradictions acquires legiti
macy by the commitment of humans in a common situation, fighting injus
tice and daily exploitation within the national space, for a humanist future
already being realized in the totality of historical acts.
Neoliberal thinkers, for their part, reject violence as an end in itself while
accepting the brutalizing force of the market as normal and natural. Nor do
they heed the cry of victims already doomed by the structure of their situa
tion. This is epitomized by legal scholars who contend that primordial nation
alist claims should be regulated by autonomous international law, "the
domain of the metajuridique" (Berman 1995). By identifying nationalism as
a primitive elemental force outside the jurisdiction of positive law, the legal
expert claims to be receptive to its experimental creativity so that new admin
istrative techniques can be devised to regulate the destabilization of Europe—
and, for that matter, its colonial empires—by "separatist nationalisms." The
aim is to pacify subalternized classes by juridical and culturalist prophylactic.
As I have noted, in dealing with Fanon's work, the nature of violence
in the process of decolonization cannot be grasped by such dualistic meta
physics epitomized in the binarism of passion-versus-law. What is needed
is the application of a historical materialist critique to the complex problem
of national self-determination (as already envisaged by Merleau-Ponty and
others). Revolutionaries like Lenin and Luxemburg, despite their differ
ences, stress the combination of knowledge and practice in analyzing the
balance of political forces. They contend that class struggle is a form of
knowledge/action, the civil strife of political groups, which can synthesize
wars of position (legal, peaceful reforms) and the war of maneuver (orga
nized frontal assault by armed masses, to use Gramsci's terminology) in the
transformation of social relations in any particular nation.

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 Nation-State, PostcoloniaL Theory, and Global Violence 27

What should be stressed here is the philosophical underpinning of the

struggle for recognition and recovery of dignity. It invokes clearly the
Hegelian paradigm of the relation between lord and bondsman in The Phe
nomenology of Mind. In this struggle, the possibility of violence mediates
the individual's discovery of his finite and limited existence, his vulnera
bility, and his need for community. Hoffman's (1989: 145) gloss underlines
the Hegelian motif of freedom as risk: "Violence ... is the necessary condi
tion of my emergence as a universal, communal being ... for I can find
common ground with the other only insofar as both of us can endure the
mortal danger of the struggle and can thus think independently of a blind
attachment to our particular selves." Since the nation evokes sacrifice
(Renan), the warrior's death on the battlefield (Weber), honor (Sorel), self
transcendence, destiny, the state seeks to mobilize such nation-centered
feelings and emotions to legitimize itself as a more inclusive, less artificial
reality to attain its own accumulative goals. This metaphysical speculation
needs the necessary interrogation of critique (Benhabib 1986). One must
qualify it by specifying the state as bourgeois "meta-capital" that supervises
"the violent domination of men by men through the private possession of
social capital" (Caudwell 1971: 110).
Beyond the simplistic formulas of postcolonial thought, the nationalist
struggle for recognition impelling anticolonial revolts displays a con
tentious, even recalcitrant, complexity. One must also estimate the weight
of other variables, such as the uneven development of the world system of
nation-states as a whole, the interaction of various fields of power (Bour
dieu's meta-capital vis-à-vis symbolic capital in each formation), and the
vicissitudes of the post-Cold War accumulation crisis. In any case, whatever
the moral puzzles entailed by the manifold genealogies of the nation-state,
it is clear that a dogmatic pacifism is no answer to an effective compre
hension of the real world, and grassroots intervention in it. Given the con
tinued existence of nation-states amidst the almost unchallenged power of
transnational corporations, and the bloc of rich nation-states led by the cur
rent world-hegemon (the U.S.), can we choose between a 'just' and an
'unjust' war when nuclear weapons that can destroy the whole planet are
involved? Violence on such a scale obviously requires the dialectical tran
scendence of the system of nation-states, of states administered by histori
cally decadent and moribund classes, in the interest of global justice and
survival (Meszaros 2001).
Overall, the question of violence cannot be answered within the frame
work of the Realpolitik of the past, but only within the framework of
nation-states living in mutual reciprocity. Causality, however, must be

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28 Epinfanio San Juan, Jr.

ascertained and responsibility assigned even if the nation is construed as

"an interpretive construct" (Arnason 1990: 230). My view is that the action
of the propertied classes using the various state organs for the legalized
expropriation of unpaid labor (surplus value) of millions of people around
the globe is the crux of the problem. Precisely because of corporate global
izing, Petras and Veltmeyer (2001: 54) cogently explain, "it is impossible to
conceive of the expansion and deepening involvement of multinational
banks and corporations without the prior political, military and economic
intervention of the nation-state." If nations have been manipulated by
states dominated by possessive/acquisitive blocs that have undertaken and
continue to undertake imperial conquests ostensibly for humanitarian
goals, then the future of humanity and the entire ecosystem can be insured
only by eliminating those institutions and practices that are the source of
material and symbolic violence inflicted on their citizens by these states.
I propose that we reappropriate the internationalist horizon of a revo
lutionary Marxism that has so far been confused with its multiple national
bureaucratic counterfeits.10 It is appropriate to add here Luxemburg's
insistence that:

no nation is free whose national existence is based upon the enslavement of

another people ... So long as capitalist states exist, i.e., so long as imperialis
tic world policies determine and regulate the inner and the outer life of a
nation, there an be no 'national self-determination' either in war or in peace
(1976: 290).

Within such a framework, the nation-form, and its surrogates, can then be
reconstituted and/or superseded in order to insure that the new social
arrangements will not generate opportunities for profit-motivated state vio
lence to recur. That revolutionary transformation will surely render obso
lete all postcolonial speculations on the withering of the nation, much less
the nation-state, in a world where transnational finance governs almost
absolutely but, we hope, not permanently.

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 Nation-State, PostcoloniaL Theory, ana Global Violence 29

NOTES

1. After September 11 2001, the U.S. nation-state is evolving into a besieged 'homeland,'
hence the zealous enforcement of "national security" measures.
2. Bourdieu's (1998: 41-42) reformulation of Max Weber's formula of the state as the agency
monopolizing the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a definite terri
tory/population is useful here:
The state is the culmination of a process of concentration of different species of cap
ital; capital of physical force or instruments of coercion (army, police), economic
capital, cultural or (better) informational capital, and symbolic capital. It is this con
centration as such which constitutes the state as the holder of a sort of metacapital
granting power over other species of capital and over their holders.
This meta-capital, more precisely, statist capital (Bourdieu 1991; 1992) enables the dom
inant class to articulate the field of national identity, the habitus of national belonging,
to reinforce the prevailing ownership/allocation of economic and symbolic capital. A cri
tique of essentialist nationalism, or its expression in "bodily beliefs," passions and dis
positions that make up the habitus of racism, cannot succeed unless it enables "the
transformation of the conditions of the production and transformation of dispositions"
(Bourdieu 2000: 180), conditions which are social constructs or artifacts resulting from
historical struggles.
3. "This myth of nationhood, masked by ideology, perpetuates nationalism, in which spe
cific identifiers are employed to create exclusive and homogeneous conceptions of
national traditions" (Ashcroft et al. 1998: ISO).
4. One example is the imposition of 'Englishness' on the heterogeneous constituencies of
the U.K. after World War II, as Hall (1997) recently pointed out.
5. One need only remember the untypical origins of the German and Italian nation-states,
not to mention the often intractable nationalist mobilizations in Greece, Thrkey, and the
colonized regions
6. Nor does this mean that nations, whether in the North or South, exert a stabilizing and
conservative influence on social movements working for radical changes in the distribu
tion of power and resources.
7. Otherwise, white-supremacist nationalism may be lumped with struggles for genuine
national autonomy or sovereignty on the ground that both invoke the 'nation.'
8. Within this framework, one can comprehend how the ruling bourgeoisie of each sover
eign state utilizes nationalist sentiment, and the violence of the state apparatuses to
impose their will. Consequently, the belief that the nation-state simultaneously prohibits
economic freedom and promotes multinational companies actually occludes the source
of political and juridical violence—for example, the war against Serbia by the NATO (an
expedient coalition of nation-states led by the U.S.), or the stigmatization of rogue and
'terrorist' states (North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan—"the axis of evil") by the dra
conian standards of 'transnational' capitalism. One can then assert that the most likely
source of political violence—I am speaking of that kind where collective energy and
intentionality are involved—is the competitive drive for accumulation in the world mar
ket system, where the propertied class of each nation-state is the key actor mobilizing its
symbolic capital constituted by ethnic loyalties and national imaginaries.
9. Merleau-Ponty (1969: 126-127) displaces the means-ends problematic by locating rev
lutionary action in the praxis of the proletariat already at work in history: "The prole
tariat is both an objective factor of political economy and a system of subjective
awareness, or rather a style of coexistence at once fact and value, in which the logic of
history joins the forces of labor and the authentic experience of human life."
10. Lowy's (2000: 10-11) advocacy may help cure the intellectual pessimism that paralyzes
the optimism of the will of those fighting the relentless commodification of the planet:

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30 Epinfanio San Juan, Jr.

Marxism has the advantage of a universalistic and critical position, in contrast to

the passions and intoxications of nationalist mythology. On the condition, however,
that this universalism does not remain abstract, grounded on the simple negation of
national particularity, but becomes a true "concrete universal (Hegel)," able to
incorporate, under the form of a dialectical Aufhebung, all the richness of the par
ticular ... For Marxism, the most important universal value is the liberation of
human beings from all forms of oppression, domination, alienation and degrada
tion. This is a Utopian universality, in opposition to the ideological ones, which
apologetically present the Western status quo as being the accomplished universal
human culture, the end of history, the realization of the absolute spirit. Only a crit
ical universality of this kind, looking towards an emancipated future, is able to over
come shortsighted nationalisms, narrow culturalisms, and ethnocentrisms.

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