Page 15 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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progress, civilization, and modernity.
Like the majority of the world populations,
African Americans and Oromos were entangled in an already-racialized global capi-
talist system in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively, via slavery and
colonialism.
The new political structure that initially emerged with capitalism in Western Eu-
rope was the absolutist state.This state was required to balance the actions of the com-
peting social forces such as monarchies, the aristocracy, feudal lords, the nascent
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capitalist class, the peasantry, and the emerging working class. The absolutist state
created a centralized political umbrella under which it managed and controlled these
competing social forces.“The centralized monarchies . . . represented a decisive rup-
ture,” Perry Anderson notes,“with the pyramidal, parcellized sovereignty of the medi-
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aeval social formations, with their estates and liege-systems.” This state created a
centralized and concentrated “national” power by destroying a village-level parcellized
power.The processes of state- and nation-building had transferred the allegiance of
people from a lineage or clan, village or city-state, to a “nation” through developing
state nationalism.With the emergence of capitalism, bureaucracy, taxation, trade, and
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diplomacy were organized at the “national” level.
The development of capitalism also facilitated competition among the emerging
European states. John Breuilly suggests that political absolutism developed to over-
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come various “threats to unity from within and sovereignty from without.” Despite
the fact that the monarchies struggled to create strong, centralized, and absolutist
states, the continued power of aristocracy, the growing power of the merchant class,
and the emerging interstate system forced them to need the assistance of either the
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aristocracy or the merchant class to increase their power. In these processes,“nation-
states”and the interstate system emerged with the development of capitalism.The fail-
ure of any state to dominate other states in Western Europe made possible the
development of an interstate system. 24
The concepts of nation, nationalism, and the citizen were invented with the emer-
gence of the nation-state in the capitalist world system. Originally state nationalism
emerged through restructuring the absolutist state into the nation-state.The capitalist
class developed bourgeois democracy and state nationalism with the development of
the nation-state in Western countries.The development of state nationalism and bour-
geois democracy in France and in other Western countries demonstrated the victory
of the capitalist class over the remnants of the feudal class, the peasantry, and the work-
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ing class. The cases of Great Britain and France make these points clear.“Just as in
England the puritans, with their zeal for a new material-spiritual life, left an indelible
stamp on the course of English nationalism,” Snyder writes,“so in France did the Ja-
cobins, with their call for individualism and democracy, leave an imprint on French
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nationalism.” The absolutist state evolved into the nation-state in England in 1689
and in France in 1789.
Since the absolutist state used arbitrary power against the people it ruled, its subjects
struggled to establish the rule of law and democracy.This contributed to the develop-
ment of the nation-state.With the elimination of absolutism and the emergence of the
capitalists as the new dominant class, the popular democracy that the working class, the
peasantry, and other revolutionary forces struggled for was suppressed and bourgeois
democracy was established. According to Louis Snyder, “The French Revolution as-
serted nationalism as a revolutionary force among a people who had enjoyed little po-
litical freedom.The French version of nationalism was to take on a missionary coloration