Imagine an alien from another planet who lands on Earth after a nuclear
holocaust has destroyed all life but has left undamaged terrestrial libraries and
archives. After consulting the archives, suggested Eric Hobsbawm, our observer would
undoubtedly conclude that the last two centuries of human history are incomprehensible
without an understanding of the term nation and the phenomenon of nationalism.
The nation–state, along with the
consumer, laborer, and capitalist, comprise, we suggest, the essential elements of the
culture of capitalism. It is the nation–state, as Eric Wolf (1982:100) suggested,
that guarantees the ownership of private property and the means of production and provides
support for disciplining the work force. The state also has to provide and maintain the
economic infrastructure—transportation, communication, judicial systems, education,
and so on—required by capitalist production. The nation–state must regulate
conflicts between competing capitalists at home and abroad, by diplomacy if possible, by
war if necessary. The state plays an essential role in creating conditions that inhibit or
promote consumption, controls legislation that may force people off the land to seek wage
labor, legislates to regulate or deregulate corporations, controls the money supply,
initiates economic, political, and social policies to attract capital, and controls the
legitimate use of force. Without the nation–state to regulate commerce and trade
within its own borders, there could be no effective global economic integration. But how
did the nation–state come to exist, and how does it succeed in binding together often
disparate and conflicting groups?
Virtually all people in the world consider
themselves members of a nation–state. The notion of a person without a nation, said
Ernest Gellner (1983:6), strains the imagination; a person must have a nationality as he
or she must have a nose and two ears. We are Americans, Mexicans, Bolivians, Italians,
Indonesians, Kenyans, or members of any of close to two hundred states that currently
exist. We generally consider our country, whichever it is, as imbued with tradition, a
history that glorifies its founding and makes heroes of those thought to have been
instrumental in its creation. Symbols of the nation—flags, buildings,
monuments—take on the aura of sacred relics.
The attainment of "nationhood" had
become by the middle of the twentieth century a sign of progress and modernity. To be less
than a nation—a tribe, an ethnic group, a regional bloc—was a sign of
backwardness. Yet fewer than one-third of the states in the world are more than thirty
years old; only a few go back to the nineteenth century; and virtually none go back in
their present form beyond that. Before that time people identified themselves as members
of kinship groups, villages, cities, or, perhaps, regions, but almost never as members of
nations. For the most part, the agents of the state were resented, feared, or hated
because of their demands for tribute, taxes, or army conscripts.
States existed, of course, and have existed for
five to seven thousand years. But the idea of the nation–state, of a people sharing
some bounded territory, united by a common culture or tradition, common language, or
common race, is a product of nineteenth century Europe. Most historians see the French
Revolution of 1789 as marking the beginning of the era of the nation–state. Yet in
spite of the historical newness of the idea, for many people nationality forms a critical
part of their personal identity. Some of the questions we need to explore are: How did
the nation–state come to have such importance in the world? Why did it develop as it
did, and how do people come to identify themselves as members of such vague abstractions?
Finally, why does the nation–state kill as often as it does?
The question of killing is important, because
today most killing and violence is either sanctioned by or carried out by the state. This
should not surprise us: most definitions of the state, following Max Weber’s
(1947:124–135), revolve around its claim to a monopoly on the instruments of death
and violence. "Stateness," as Elman Service (1975) put it, can be identified
simply by locating "the power of force in addition to the power of authority."
Killing by other than the state, as Morton Fried (1967) noted, will draw the punitive
action of organized state force.
The use of force, however, is not the only
characteristic anthropologists emphasize in identifying the state; social
stratification—the division of societies into groups with differing access to wealth
and other resources—is also paramount. Yet even here the state is seen as serving as
an instrument of control to maintain the privileges of the ruling group, and this, too,
generally requires a monopoly on the use of force (see Cohen and Service 1978; Lewellen
1983).
Thus to complete our description of the key
features of the culture of capitalism we need to examine the origin and history of the
state and its successor, the nation–state.
