Empire (18 page)

command.

Birth of theNation

The concept ofnation in Europe developed on the terrain ofthe

patrimonial and absolutist state. The patrimonial state was defined

as the property ofthe monarch. In a variety ofanalogous forms in

different countries throughout Europe, the patrimonial and absolut-

ist state was the political form required to rule feudal social relations

and relations ofproduction.1 Feudal property had to be delegated

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and its usage assigned according to the degrees ofthe social division

ofpower, in the same way that levels ofadministration would have

to be delegated in subsequent centuries. Feudal property was part

ofthe body ofthe monarch, just as, ifwe shift our view toward

the metaphysical domain, the sovereign monarchic body was part

ofthe body ofGod.2

In the sixteenth century, in the midst ofthe Reformation and

that violent battle among the forces of modernity, the patrimonial

monarchy was still presented as the guarantee ofpeace and social

life. It was still granted control over social development in such a

way that it could absorb that process within its machine ofdomina-

tion. ‘‘Cujus regio, ejus religio’’—or really, religion had to be

subordinated to the territorial control ofthe sovereign. There was

nothing diplomatic about this adage; on the contrary, it confided

entirely to the power ofthe patrimonial sovereign the management

ofthe passage to the new order. Even religion was the sovereign’s

property. In the seventeenth century, the absolutist reaction to

the revolutionary forces of modernity celebrated the patrimonial

monarchic state and wielded it as a weapon for its own purposes.

At that point, however, the celebration ofthe patrimonial state

could not but be paradoxical and ambiguous, since the feudal bases

ofits power were withering away. The processes ofthe primitive

accumulation ofcapital imposed new conditions on all the structures

ofpower.3 Until the era ofthe three great bourgeois revolutions

(the English, the American, and the French), there was no political

alternative that could successfully oppose this model. The absolutist

and patrimonial model survived in this period only with the support

ofa specific compromise ofpolitical forces, and its substance was

eroding from the inside owing primarily to the emergence of new

productive forces. The model did survive nonetheless, and, much

more important, it was transformed through the development of

some fundamental characteristics that would be bequeathed to suc-

cessive centuries.

The transformation of the absolutist and patrimonial model

consisted in a gradual process that replaced the theological founda-

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tion ofterritorial patrimony with a new foundation that was equally

transcendent.4 The spiritual identity ofthe nation rather than the

divine body ofthe king now posed the territory and population as

an ideal abstraction. Or rather, the physical territory and population

were conceived as the extension ofthe transcendent essence ofthe

nation.
The modern concept of nation thus inherited the patrimonial body
of the monarchic state and reinvented it in a new form.
This new totality ofpower was structured in part by new capitalist productive processes on the one hand and old networks ofabsolutist administration

on the other. This uneasy structural relationship was stabilized by

the national identity: a cultural, integrating identity, founded on a

biological continuity ofblood relations, a spatial continuity ofterri-

tory, and linguistic commonality.

It is obvious that, although this process preserved the material-

ity ofthe relationship to the sovereign, many elements changed.

Most important, as the patrimonial horizon was transformed into

the national horizon, the feudal order of the subject
(subjectus)

yielded to the disciplinary order ofthe citizen
(cives).
The shift of the population from subjects to citizens was an index of the shift

from a passive to an active role. The nation is always presented as

an active force, as a generative form of social and political relations.

As Benedict Anderson and others point out, the nation is often

experienced as (or at least functions as if it were) a collective imagin-

ing, an active creation ofthe community ofcitizens.5 At this point

we can see both the proximity and the specific difference between

the concepts ofpatrimonial state and national state. The latter

faithfully reproduces the former’s totalizing identity of both the

territory and the population, but the nation and the national state

propose new means ofovercoming the precariousness ofmodern

sovereignty. These concepts reify sovereignty in the most rigid

way; they make the
relation
ofsovereignty into a
thing
(often by naturalizing it) and thus weed out every residue ofsocial antagonism.

The nation is a kind ofideological shortcut that attempts to free

the concepts ofsovereignty and modernity from the antagonism and

crisis that define them. National sovereignty suspends the conflictual

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origins ofmodernity (when they are not definitively destroyed),

and it closes the alternative paths within modernity that had refused

to concede their powers to state authority.6

The transf

ormation ofthe concept ofmodern sovereignty

into that ofnational sovereignty also required certain new material

conditions. Most important, it required that a new equilibrium be

established between the processes ofcapitalist accumulation and

the structures ofpower. The political victory ofthe bourgeoisie,

as the English and French revolutions show well, corresponded to

the perfecting of the concept of modern sovereignty through that

ofnational sovereignty. Behind the ideal dimension ofthe concept

ofnation there were the class figures that already dominated the

processes ofaccumulation. ‘‘Nation’’ was thus at once both the

hypostasis ofthe Rousseauian ‘‘general will’’ and what manufactur-

ing ideology conceived as the ‘‘community ofneeds’’ (that is, the

capitalist regulation ofthe market) that in the long era ofprimitive

accumulation in Europe was more or less liberal and always bour-

geois.

When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the concept

of nation was taken up in very different ideological contexts and led

popular mobilizations in regions and countries within and outside

Europe that had experienced neither the liberal revolution nor the

same level ofprimitive accumulation, it still always was presented

as a concept ofcapitalist modernization, which claimed to bring

together the interclass demands for political unity and the needs of

economic development. In other words, the nation was posed as

the one and only active vehicle that could deliver modernity and

development. Rosa Luxemburg argued vehemently (and futilely)

against nationalism in the debates internal to the Third International

in the years before the First World War. Luxemburg opposed a

policy of ‘‘national self-determination’’ for Poland as an element of

the revolutionary platform, but her indictment of nationalism was

much more general.7 Her critique ofthe nation was not merely a

critique ofmodernization as such, although she was no doubt keenly

aware ofthe ambiguities involved in capitalist development; and

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she was not primarily concerned with the divisions that nationalisms

would inevitably create within the European working class, al-

though her own nomadic passage through central and eastern Eu-

rope certainly made her extremely sensitive to this. Luxemburg’s

most powerful argument, rather, was that nation means dictatorship

and is thus profoundly incompatible with any attempt at democratic

organization. Luxemburg recognized that national sovereignty and

national mythologies effectively usurp the terrain of democratic

organization by renewing the powers ofterritorial sovereignty and

modernizing its project through the mobilization ofan active com-

munity.

The process ofconstructing the nation, which renewed the

concept ofsovereignty and gave it a new definition, quickly became

in each and every historical context an ideological nightmare. The

crisis ofmodernity, which is the contradictory co-presence ofthe

multitude and a power that wants to reduce it to the rule ofone—

that is, the co-presence ofa new productive set offree subjectivities

and a disciplinary power that wants to exploit it—is not finally

pacified or resolved by the concept ofnation, any more than it was

by the concept ofsovereignty or state. The nation can only mask

the crisis ideologically, displace it, and defer its power.

TheNation and theCrisis of Modernity

Jean Bodin’s work lies at the head ofthe road in European thought

that leads to the concept ofnational sovereignty. His masterwork,

Les six livres de la Re´publique,
which first appeared in 1576, right in the middle ofthe Renaissance crisis, addressed the current civil and

religious wars in France and Europe as its fundamental problem.

Bodin confronted political crises, conflicts, and war, but these ele-

ments ofrupture did not lead him to pose any idyllic alternative,

not even in simply theoretical or utopian terms. This is why Bodin’s

work was not only a seminal contribution to the modern definition

of sovereignty but also an effective anticipation of the subsequent

development ofsovereignty in national terms. By adopting a realistic

standpoint, he managed to anticipate modernity’s own critique

ofsovereignty.

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Sovereignty, Bodin claimed, cannot be produced by the unity

ofthe Prince and the multitude, the public and the private, nor

can its problem be resolved so long as one holds to either a contractu-

alist or a natural right framework. Really, the origin of political

power and the definition ofsovereignty consist in the victory of

one side over the other, a victory that makes the one sovereign

and the other subject. Force and violence create the sovereign. The

physical determinations ofpower impose the
plenitudo potestatis
(the fullness ofpower). This is the plenitude and the unity ofpower,

since ‘‘the union of[the republic’s] members depends on unity

under a single ruler, on whom the effectiveness of all the rest

depends. A sovereign prince is therefore indispensable, for it is his

power which informs all the members of the republic.’’8

After discarding the framework of natural right and the tran-

scendental perspectives that it always in some way invokes, Bodin

presents us with a figure ofthe sovereign, or rather the state,

that realistically and thus historically constructs its own origin and

structure. The modern state arose from within this transformation,

and only there could it continue to develop. This is the theoretical

hinge on which the theory ofmodern sovereignty is linked to

and perfects the experience of territorial sovereignty. By taking up

Roman law and drawing on its capacities to articulate the sources

ofright and order the forms ofproperty, Bodin’s doctrine became

a theory ofa united political body articulated as administration that

appeared to surmount the difficulties of the crisis of modernity.

The displacement ofthe center oftheoretical consideration from

the question oflegitimacy to that ofthe life ofthe state and its

sovereignty as a united body constituted an important advance.

When Bodin spoke of‘‘the political right ofsovereignty,’’ he al-

ready anticipated the national (and corporeal) overdetermination

ofsovereignty, and he thus opened an original and direct path that

would stretch forward across the subsequent centuries.9

After Bodin, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there

developed in Europe simultaneously two schools ofthought that

also accorded the theme of sovereignty a central role and effectively

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anticipated the concept ofnational sovereignty: the natural right

tradition and the realist (or historicist) tradition ofstate theory.10

Both schools mediated the transcendental conception ofsovereignty

with a realistic methodology that grasped the terms ofthe material

conflict; both brought together the construction ofthe sovereign

state with the constitution ofthe sociopolitical community that

later would be called nation. As in Bodin, both ofthese schools

continually confronted the crisis of the theoretical conception of

sovereignty, which was itselfcontinually reopened by the antagonis-

tic powers ofmodernity and the juridical and administrative con-

struction ofthe figure ofthe state.

In the natural right school, from Grotius to Althusius and from