Empire (20 page)

carried the standard ofthe counterrevolutionary project on the

European continent. The continental conceptions ofthis spiritual

construction revived both the historical and the voluntarist traditions

ofthe nation and added to the conception ofhistorical development

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a transcendental synthesis in national sovereignty. This synthesis is

always already accomplished in the identity ofthe nation and the

people. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, claims in more or less

mythological terms that the fatherland and the people are representa-

tives and gauges ofearthly eternity; they are what here on earth

can be immortal.24 The Romantic counterrevolution was in fact

more realistic than the Enlightenment revolution. It framed and

fixed what was already accomplished, celebrating it in the eternal

light ofhegemony. The Third Estate is power; the nation is its

totalizing representation; the people is its solid and natural founda-

tion; and national sovereignty is the apex ofhistory. Every historical

alternative to bourgeois hegemony had thus been definitively sur-

passed through the bourgeoisie’s own revolutionary history.25

This bourgeois formulation ofthe concept ofnational sover-

eignty surpassed by far all the previous formulations of modern

sovereignty. It consolidated a particular and hegemonic image of

modern sovereignty, the image ofthe victory ofthe bourgeoisie,

which it then both historicized and universalized. National particu-

larity is a potent universality. All the threads ofa long development

were woven together here. In the identity, that is, the spiritual

essence, ofthe people and the nation, there is a territory embedded

with cultural meanings, a shared history, and a linguistic community;

but moreover there is the consolidation ofa class victory, a stable

market, the potential for economic expansion, and new spaces to

invest and civilize. In short, the construction ofnational identity

guarantees a continually reinforced legitimation, and the right and

power ofa sacrosanct and irrepressible unity. This is a decisive shift

in the concept ofsovereignty. Married to the concepts ofnation

and people, the modern concept ofsovereignty shifts its epicenter

from the mediation of conflicts and crisis to the unitary experience

ofa nation-subject and its imagined community.

Subaltern Nationalism

We have been focusing our attention up to this point on the

development ofthe concept ofnation in Europe while Europe was

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in the process ofachieving world dominance. Outside ofEurope,

however, the concept of nation has often functioned very differ-

ently. In some respects, in fact, one might even say that the function

ofthe concept ofnation is inverted when deployed among subordi-

nated rather than dominant groups. Stated most boldly, it appears

that
whereas the concept of nation promotes stasis and restoration in the
hands of the dominant, it is a weapon for change and revolution in the

hands of the subordinated.

The progressive nature ofsubaltern nationalism is defined by

two primary functions, each of which is highly ambiguous. Most

important, the nation appears as progressive insofar as it serves as

a line ofdefense against the domination ofmore powerful nations

and external economic, political, and ideological forces. The right

to self-determination of subaltern nations is really a right to secession

from the control of dominant powers.26 Anticolonial struggles thus

used the concept ofnation as a weapon to defeat and expel the

occupying enemy, and anti-imperialist policies similarly erected

national walls to obstruct the overpowering forces of foreign capital.

The concept ofnation also served as an ideological weapon to ward

off the dominant discourse that figured the dominated population

and culture as inferior; the claim to nationhood affirmed the dignity

ofthe people and legitimated the demand for independence and

equality. In each ofthese cases,
the nation is progressive strictly as a
fortified line of defense against more powerful external forces.
As much as those walls appear progressive in their protective function against

external domination, however, they can easily play an inverse role

with respect to the interior they protect. The flip side ofthe structure

that resists foreign powers is itself a dominating power that exerts an

equal and opposite internal oppression, repressing internal difference

and opposition in the name ofnational identity, unity, and security.

Protection and oppression can be hard to tell apart. This strategy

of‘‘national protection’’ is a double-edged sword that at times

appears necessary despite its destructiveness.

The nation appears progressive in the second place insofar as

it poses the commonality ofa potential community. Part ofthe

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‘‘modernizing’’ effects of the nation in subordinated countries has

been the unification ofdiverse populations, breaking down reli-

gious, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. The unification of

countries such as Indonesia, China, and Brazil, for example, is

an ongoing process that involves overcoming innumerable such

barriers—and in many cases this national unification was prepared

by the European colonial power. In cases ofdiasporic populations,

too, the nation seems at times to be the only concept available

under which to imagine the community ofthe subaltern group—as,

for example, the Aztlań is imagined as the geographical homeland

of‘‘la Raza,’’ the spiritual Latino nation in North America. It

may be true, as Benedict Anderson says, that a nation should be

understood as an imagined community—but here we should recog-

nize that the claim is inverted so that
the nation becomes the only way
to imagine community!
Every imagination ofa community becomes

overcoded as a nation, and hence our conception ofcommunity

is severely impoverished. Just as in the context ofthe dominant

countries, here too the multiplicity and singularity ofthe multitude

are negated in the straitjacket ofthe identity and homogeneity of

the people. Once again, the unifying power of the subaltern nation

is a double-edged sword, at once progressive and reactionary.

Both ofthese simultaneously progressive and regressive aspects

ofsubaltern nationalism are present in all their ambiguity in the

tradition ofblack nationalism in the United States. Although de-

prived as it is ofany territorial definition (and thus undoubtedly

different from the majority of other subaltern nationalisms), it too

presents the two fundamental progressive functions—sometimes

by striving to pose itselfin an analogous position to the proper,

territorially defined nations. In the early 1960s, for example, after

the enormous impetus created by the Bandung Conference and the

emerging African and Latin American national liberation struggles,

Malcolm X attempted to redirect the focus ofdemands ofAfrican

American struggles from ‘‘civil rights’’ to ‘‘human rights’’ and thus

rhetorically shift the forum of appeal from the U.S. Congress to the

U.N. General Assembly.27 Malcolm X, like many African American

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leaders at least since Marcus Garvey, clearly recognized the powerful

position ofspeaking as a nation and a people. The concept of

nation here configures a defensive position of
separation
from the hegemonic ‘‘external’’ power and at the same time represents the

autonomous power
ofthe unified community, the power ofthe people.

More important than any such theoretical and rhetorical prop-

ositions, however, are the actual practices ofblack nationalism, that

is, the wide variety ofactivities and phenomena that are conceived

by the actors themselves as expressions ofblack nationalism: from

community drill teams and parades to meal programs, separate

schools, and projects ofcommunity economic development and

self-sufficiency. As Wahneema Lubiano puts it, ‘‘Black nationalism

is significant for the ubiquity of its presence in black American

lives.’’28 In all these various activities and realms oflife, black nation-

alism names precisely the circuits ofself-valorization that constitute

the community and allow for its relative self-determination and

self-constitution. Despite the range of disparate phenomena called

black nationalism, then, we can still recognize in them the two

fundamental progressive functions of subaltern nationalism: the de-

fense and the unification of the community. Black nationalism can

name any expression ofthe separation and autonomous power of

the African American people.

In the case ofblack nationalism too, however, the progressive

elements are accompanied inevitably by their reactionary shadows.

The repressive forces of nation and people feed off the self-valoriza-

tion ofthe community and destroy its multiplicity. When black

nationalism poses the uniformity and homogeneity of the African

American people as its basis (eclipsing class differences, for example)

or when it designates one segment ofthe community (such as

African American men) as de facto representatives of the whole, the

profound ambiguity of subaltern nationalism’s progressive functions

emerges as clearly as ever.29 Precisely the structures that play a

defensive role with respect to the outside—in the interest of further-

ing the power, autonomy, and unity ofthe community—are the

same that play an oppressive role internally, negating the multiplicity

ofthe community itself.

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We should emphasize, however, that these ambiguous progres-

sive functions ofthe concept ofnation exist primarily when nation

is not effectively linked to sovereignty, that is, when the imagined

nation does not (yet) exist, when the nation remains merely a

dream. As soon as the nation begins to form as a sovereign state,

its progressive functions all but vanish. Jean Genet was enchanted

by the revolutionary desire ofthe Black Panthers and the Palestin-

ians, but he recognized that becoming a sovereign nation would

be the end oftheir revolutionary qualities. ‘‘The day when the

Palestinians are institutionalized,’’ he said, ‘ I will no longer be at

their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like the other

nations, I will no longer be there.’’30 With national ‘‘liberation’’ and

the construction ofthe nation-state, all ofthe oppressive functions

of modern sovereignty inevitably blossom in full force.

Totalitarianism of theNation-State

When the nation-state does function as an institution of sovereignty,

does it finally manage to resolve the crisis ofmodernity? Does the

concept ofthe people and its biopolitical displacement ofsover-

eignty succeed in shifting the terms and the terrain of the synthesis

between constituent power and constituted power, and between

the dynamic ofproductive forces and relations ofproduction, in

such a way as to carry us beyond the crisis? A vast panorama of

authors, poets, and politicians (often emerging from progressive,

socialist, and anti-imperialist movements) have certainly thought

so. The conversion ofthe nineteenth-century Jacobin Left into a

national Left, the more and more intense adoption of national

programs in the Second and Third Internationals, and the nationalist

forms of liberation struggles in the colonial and postcolonial world

all the way up to today’s resistance ofnations to the processes of

globalization and the catastrophes they provoke: all this seems to

support the view that the nation-state does afford a new dynamic

beyond the historical and conceptual disaster ofthe modern sover-

eign state.31

We have a different perspective on the function of the nation,

however, and in our view the crisis ofmodernity remains resolutely

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open under the rule ofthe nation and its people. When we take

up again our genealogy ofthe concept ofsovereignty in nineteenth-

and twentieth-century Europe, it is clear that the state-form of

modernity first fell into the nation-state-form, then the nation-

state-form descended into a whole series of barbarisms. When class

struggle reopened the mystified synthesis ofmodernity in the early

decades ofthe twentieth century and demonstrated again the power-

ful antithesis between the state and the multitude and between

productive forces and relations of production, that antithesis led

directly to European civil war—a civil war that was nonetheless

cloaked in the guise ofconflicts among sovereign nation-states.32

In the Second World War, Nazi Germany, along with the various

European fascisms, stood opposed to socialist Russia. Nations were