[PEN-L:1898] Globalisation and nationalism

[D Shniad <shniad@xxxxxx>]

Home with the flu over the weekend, I was browsing through
some material on the bookshelf when I came across the 1994
issue of the _Socialist Register_.  The title of this issue
was "Between Globalism and Nationalism."

I remembered having read and been impressed by a copy of Leo
Panitch's article on "Globalisation and the State," which
Patrick Bond had been kind enough to send in my direction in
xerox form.  But I couldn't remember the specifics of
Panitch's argument.  So I re-read it in book form.

(I'm going to focus on Panitch's comments.  But other
articles in this volume that were directly on point: Penner
Arthur MacEwan contributed a piece entitled "Globalisation
and Stagnation"; Manfred Bienefeld from Carleton
University's School of Public Administration added
"Capitalism and the Nation State in the Dog Days of the
Twentieth Century"; Gregory Albo from the Department of
Political Science at York University wrote on "'Competitive
Austerity' and the Impasse of Capitalist Employment
Policy.")

I found one extended quote from Panitch's article to be
particularly a propos in the context of the debate here on
Pen about globalisation:

     ...[T]hose who want to install a
     "transnational democracy" in the wake of the
     nation state allegedly having been by-passed
     by globalisation simply misunderstand what
     the internationalisation of the state is
     really all about.  Not only is the world
     still very much composed of states, but
     insofar as there is any effective democracy
     at all in relation to the power of
     capitalists and bureaucrats, it is still
     embedded in  political structures which are
     national or subnational in scope.  Those who
     advance the nebulous case for an
     "international civil society"  to match the
     'nebuleuse' that is global capitalist
     governance usually fail to appreciate that
     capitalism has not escaped the state but
     rather that the state has, as always, been a
     fundamental constitutive element in the very
     process of extension of capitalism in our
     time.

     ....The international constitutionalisation
     of neo-liberalism has taken place through the
     agency of states, and there is no prospect
     whatsoever of getting to a _somewhere else_,
     [emphasis in the original -- referring to
     quote from _Alice in Wonderland_ cited at the
     beginning of the article] inspired by a
     vision of an egalitarian, democratic and
     cooperative world order beyond global
     competitiveness, that does not entail a
     fundamental struggle with domestic as well as
     global capitalists over the transformation of
     the state.  (p. 89.)

I subscribe to this analysis completely.

Sid Shniad