[Marxism] The Twilight of the Nation State

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

With the war in Iraq now in its fourth year, all other struggles against 
imperialism have seemed to recede into the background. However, with the 
German protests against the G8 meeting in early June, we are reminded 
that the anti-globalization movement still has the power to move large 
numbers of people into struggle. Furthermore, at a higher level, the two 
struggles against the occupation of Iraq and against neoliberal trade 
agreements are dealing with the same phenomenon. That at least would be 
the argument of Prem Shankar Jha, the author of the recently published 
“The Twilight of the Nation State: Globalization, Chaos and War.” While 
the question of whether the nation-state is being made obsolete by 
globalization will continue to be debated now and in the future, there 
can be little argument with the mass of data presented by Jha. He makes 
a stunning case for the existence of a systematic domination of the weak 
by the powerful and the need to resist it.

As a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International 
Affairs in 1995, Jha found himself growing increasingly uneasy with 
triumphalist Fukuyama-style encomiums to capitalist democracy. Until 
that year, he had been an editor at the Hindustan Times and had his 
doubts about the free market system from first-hand experience. The 
India he was familiar with first-hand seemed to defy Fukuyama’s pat 
solutions. His unease was communicated in a series of articles for “The 
Hindu” that year, one of which presciently concluded that “a large 
segment of society now feels that it has become a victim of changes over 
which it had no control, and which the government and ruling class did 
nothing to protect it from.” Those articles form the kernel of “Twilight 
of the Nation State.”

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/06/15/the-twilight-of-the-nation-state/

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