[PEN-L:1940] Re: Norway and Canada

[dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx (Doug Henwood)]

At 11:10 AM 12/12/95, D Shniad wrote:

>In response to my comments about his original posting, Doug
>then added insult to injury, saying "...I wonder what Norway
>and Canada would be like if there were no MNCs and
>imperialist monsters like the UK and US around, the
>countries that created and maintain the modern global
>division of spoils.  I sometimes think that people in
>these countries want it both ways -- First World
>incomes, but without the moral stigma that comes
>with being a global bully."
>
>Doug made this last comment presumably in response to
>the positions that Trond (a Norwegian) and I (a
>naturalised Canadian) have been saying in the context of
>the PI-PN debate.  I haven't heard logic [sic] comparable to
>this since I resisted the Vietnam war in the 1960s; at
>that time, pro-war folks insisted that I had no right to
>oppose the war unless I was willing to serve in the US
>military.

I don't see this as a relevant analogy at all. I'm glad you resisted the
draft and wish lots of others had too. My point is that the "progressive
nationalists" don't take a sufficiently skeptical view of sovereignty.
Haven't Canadian nationalists long used the phrase "branch-plant economy"
to describe Canada, and others criticized the "rocks & trees" model of
development; so where were the HQ of those branches or the customers for
primary products exports if not in the US? While Canadians lament their
dependency on the US, they are less quick to admit that their prosperity
has in no small measure been powered by the extraordinary propserity of the
US. Sovereignty is a slippery concept in a world as interdependent as this.

Leo Panitch is right that the national state has been essential to the
development of capitalism, and that struggle over the state is what a good
bit of politics is about, but that isn't all it's about; if you're fighting
the national state, you don't have to do it nationally. Sometimes capital
needs & uses the national state, sometimes it doesn't. Why should
anticapital be any different?


Doug

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Doug Henwood
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