I’ve just been invited to a talk next week at the New America Foundation titled “Does Nation-Building Have a Future? Lessons from Afghanistan.” The presenter is James Dobbins, who seems to have a pretty “realist” and well-informed view of such matters.
But it got me to thinking about this whole concept of “nation-building”, as it is used by so many earnest western policy people with regard to disordered countries in the Third World.
Can a nation, as such, actually be built? Even more important: Can it ever be “built” by outsiders?
I’m dubious in the extreme.
A “nation”, as such, can surely only ever come into being through the actions– more or less voluntary– of its citizens.
Does South Africa constitute a single discernible “nation”? Does Spain? Does Catalunya? Does Belgium?
All fascinating questions. Equally fascinating, the whole history of what the old Arab nationalists would have called “qita’iya” (sectionalism) within the Arab world… That is, the emergence over time of a distinctively “Jordanian”, or “Lebanese”, or “Qatari” view of national self-identification.
It strikes me that what outsiders can and do have an effect on in many of these cases is the establishment of state structures, with identified geographic boundaries between them… and then, if these states succeed at delivering basic services to their people, they acquire or increase their level of endogenous legitimacy, and thereby, something like a “national sensitivity” starts to take root.
Among the citizens concerned… which is the important point here.
In other words, contrary to the way many westerners talk about these matters, the state in many important ways predates and incubates the “nation”. Benedict Anderson argued much this same point in his work on “Imagined Communities.”
And actually the state’s capabilities, including its efficiency in delivering basic services (including crucially, public security) and its ability to provide predictable regulation for economic life, are often much more important to the wellbeing– and even survival– of its citizens than any sense of “nationalism”, which operates at a much more abstract level of human experience. But states never are and never can be, culturally neutral. They always have a cultural content, as manifested in the languages accepted as “official”, the calendar of work- and rest-days, and so on. This cultural content can be either “ethno-national” in content (as with language policies), or religious (as with most work-day calendars), or, more usually, both.
So religion can often be as important a determinant of the cultural content of a country as ethnicity. States are not necessarily defined in ethnic (or “national”) terms… Though as we have seen in the cases of Israel and Pakistan, where a state is formed on explicitly religious lines, that religion acquires within that state much of the character of a “nationality.” Here again, we see that the state predates the “nation.”
So back to the question posed by Dobbins. Shouldn’t outsiders be looking at the question of our countries’ support for effective state-building in Afghanistan or other disordered countries, rather than “nation”-building?
I guess another reason I feel uneasy with the concept of nation-building is that it seems such an extremely socially and psychologically intrusive thing to do. Outsiders would essentially be messing with the way people self-identify and feel. That’s no business of outsiders! But for the people(s) of Afghanistan– okay, definitely more than one “people” there– establishing a basically effective system of country-wide governance is certainly a strong and common interest. I’d call that state-building rather than nation-building.
And if the help of outsiders is indeed needed (as it seems probably to be), there is no reason to think the US of A– whose “national culture” contains a strong strain of disdain for the idea of government as such– is particularly well qualified to lead this effort…
18 thoughts on ““Nation-building”– some quick thoughts”
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Interesting post, Helena.
Can a nation, as such, actually be built? Even more important: Can it ever be “built” by outsiders? […] A “nation”, as such, can surely only ever come into being through the actions– more or less voluntary– of its citizens.
I agree that nations are primarily built from within. That’s one of the things that makes national identities so durable: they’re as much constructs as any other social or political grouping, but they’re constructed in large part by their members.
Whether a nation can be built from the top down, however, remains an open question. The prototype is, of course, Kemalist Turkey, which succeeded in coercing much of the country to adopt a Turkish identity (although it failed spectacularly with the Kurds). Nyerere did pretty well in Tanzania with less coercive methods, and the jury’s still out on Indonesia – there are several separatist regions, but Sukarno, who explicitly modeled his policies on Kemalism, managed to instill a sense of Indonesian-ness in much of the rest of the population.
As for whether nations can be built by outsiders, that depends on who is considered an outsider. They probably can’t be built by outsiders who don’t try to make themselves part of the nation, which pretty much excludes American-directed efforts elsewhere in the world.
It strikes me that what outsiders can and do have an effect on in many of these cases is the establishment of state structures, with identified geographic boundaries between them… and then, if these states succeed at delivering basic services to their people, they acquire or increase their level of endogenous legitimacy, and thereby, something like a “national sensitivity” starts to take root.
Welllll… maybe. A functioning state can help promote the growth of a national consciousness, especially if the educational and political institutions help foster it. On the other hand, the existence of a functioning Spanish state hasn’t dampened Catalan or Basque nationalism, nor did the existence of a functioning Cypriot state during 1960-74 resolve the differences between ethnic Turks and Greeks. And I won’t even begin on Yugoslavia (although there, the attempt to make internal political boundaries conform to ethnic boundaries may have helped keep national distinctions alive).
I think this goes back to the point you made earlier about nations being largely self-constructed. As such, they are sometime more durable than more “artificial” (I hate that word) constructs such as states. Certainly enough so that the premise “nation follows state” doesn’t work with regularity.
So religion can often be as important a determinant of the cultural content of a country as ethnicity. States are not necessarily defined in ethnic (or “national”) terms… Though as we have seen in the cases of Israel and Pakistan, where a state is formed on explicitly religious lines, that religion acquires within that state much of the character of a “nationality.” Here again, we see that the state predates the “nation.”
Possibly so for Pakistan, but not for Israel – the sense of Jews as a people was as prevalent in the tenth century as in the twentieth. Jews were an ethnic diaspora united by cultural ties and shared history as well as religion, and met all the traditional criteria for “nationhood” except a defined territory. I really don’t think that territory should even be a determinant; groups such as Jews and Roma have been able to maintain national coherence without it. But that’s largely beside the point.
So back to the question posed by Dobbins. Shouldn’t outsiders be looking at the question of our countries’ support for effective state-building in Afghanistan or other disordered countries, rather than “nation”-building?
I suspect that’s what most people who use the term actually mean.
I suspect that’s what most people who use the term actually mean.
Yes, you’re probably right, but the lack of clarity still bothers me.
Also, when other people– especially the ‘targets’ of these efforts– hear the term ‘nation-building’, doesn’t it sound like an unacceptably intrusive form of social engineering? How would you or I like it if Afghans came to our country and told us they’re here to build “the American nation”? Invites pushback, I’d say, much more than if they came and said, “We’re here to give you advice on how to establish working structures of governance… ”
Also, if we specify that the goal is working structures of governance, then that really does encourage people to look at what makes a governance structure effective, how do we gauge that, etc. Once we look at that, many US ideas (reliance on armed private contractors! radical dismembering of state-structure capabilities! first-past-the-post elections! strong bias toward private-sector ‘solutions’!) look a whole lot less responsive/useful in places reeling from recent conflict than models developed in the European social democracies or even China…
Also, when other people– especially the ‘targets’ of these efforts– hear the term ‘nation-building’, doesn’t it sound like an unacceptably intrusive form of social engineering?
Quite possibly. Has anyone ever asked them, or has anyone in the countries where “nation-building” projects are taking place expressed their thoughts on the matter? I’d be interested if so.
Once we look at that, many US ideas […] look a whole lot less responsive/useful in places reeling from recent conflict than models developed in the European social democracies or even China
Agreed about the US ideas, but I’m not sure I’d look to either Europe or China for an alternative model. The European social democracies’ success in dealing with internal conflicts is heavily dependent on (1) their level of economic development, and (2) the presence of institutions at the international level to resolve disputes and enforce human rights. China… well, the governance structure there is very arbitrary, and it’s not a good idea to be a Tibetan or Muslim. Their minority policies are otherwise relatively enlightened – I’ll give them that – but it’s a big “otherwise.”
If I were looking for examples, the first place I’d go would be the most analogous cases – i.e., developing countries that have successfully resolved conflicts. Mozambique, maybe, or South Africa.
The single most important example of “nation building,” imho, is France in 18th and 19th centuries: in form of the centralizing zeal of the Revolutionaries and their successors who forced the French language, Napoleonic code, and officials from Paris often literally at the point of the bayonet (or, cannon, in case of Alsace) upon the Alsatians, Provencals, and Bretons. Of course, today, that would be considered barbaric–and it didn’t work in Japanese-controlled Korea or Russian-controlled Poland. The correct statement, I think, is that states may precede nation, but not necessarily–if, for whatever reason, people subject to “outside” rule resist and options to suppress them aren’t up to the par.
A particularly interesting example, to me (for a number of different reasons, including some personal) are the re-emergence of the Lithuanian nation in 19th century. The upper classes had mostly become Polonized and only peasants remained “Lithuanian,” after centuries of “union” with Poland, but by 19th century, Lithuania was under Russian rule–under which both Lithuanian and Polish identities were suppressed. Yet, somehow, a “Lithuanian” national identity emerged and became “respectible” again. There’s gotta be an interesting back story to this, but I’ve yet to come across one in a language I can read (most English language books on this general topic seem to be much weighed from the Polish perspective…)
“Does Nation-Building Have a Future? Lessons from Afghanistan.”
The verse “Nation-Building” start and used very widely in Iraq I never heard this term about Afghanistan.
Anyway first what means nation building really?
Why Western likes this term and trying to imposing on other nation some like Iraq is one of the first civilization on this earth now a “nation” if we can cal it had 400 years take the lead and carry nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What the real agendas hidden under Nation Building?
These are more concern point than analysing and talking about some other nation development and past.
In the End what about China or Russia do they need nation building also in the west eyes and scholars like Helena?
The single most important example of “nation building,” imho, is France in 18th and 19th centuries […] Of course, today, that would be considered barbaric
So would Kemal’s Turkey. For that matter, so would the example I didn’t mention before: post-genocide Rwanda, in which the Kagame government has aggressively tried to replace Hutu and Tutsi identities with a constructed Rwandan nationhood. (Maybe the word I should use is “reconstructed,” given that Rwanda was a precolonial state and caste identities were mutable, but by the time of the genocide, they’d had a century or so to harden into ethnicities.) I’d guess that such brutality is inherent in any top-down nationalizing effort, given that such projects represent attempts by the state to change very deep-seated and closely held attitudes.
Jonathan Edelstein,
to replace Hutu and Tutsi identities with a constructed Rwandan nationhood.
What seen from Nation Building examples is in fact oppose the nationalism, what seen in some examples that Nation building demolish the Nationalism by replacing with new mixed society some times that no root so whatever in that land like S. Africa.
I heard one of top US official in Afghanistan speaking throw BBC radio and talking about Afghanistan he mention some thing about future of Afghanistan and afghani nation he said Afghani should learn to live on same land with the foreigners!!!. So the question here what he meant foreigners? Who are they? From where are these foreigner came?
Is Afghani or Afghanistan problem is they do not love and don’t like foreigners? The realities on the ground exactly opposites.
Btw, Jonathan Edelstein, not sure some report about Kamal Ataturk linked him to Zionist/ Masonic side what’s your take about it?
There were a lot of rumors about Kemal being a “donmeh,” or a secret Jew who pretended to be a Muslim. As far as I know (although I could be wrong), there was never any proof of this and the rumors were politically based.
The bit about “loving foreigners” is just plain weird. As long as they are real “foreigners,” i.e. the folk who will go away some time in the future, people generally seem to have no trouble whatsoever. One thing I can tell you is that, for all the talk about alleged ethnocentrism, Koreans and Japanese love foreigners. The problem that they have is with people who “should be foreign, but aren’t,” i.e. the people who aren’t like them, but have stuck around for decades or even centuries–and aren’t going away, like the ethnic Chinese in Korea or the ethnic Koreans in Japan. I guess the “problem” as such in Afghanistan are other ethnic groups or even tribes–who won’t be “leaving” any time soon.
To the extent that nation-building were “successful” in places like France or Turkey is that the ways of the dominant tribe were forced upon these “people who should be foreign but aren’t” so that they don’t look or act foreign any more. Their success depended, it seems, on the extent to which the repressed peoples were organized to retain their identity, whether intentionally or not (one of my friends whose ancestors come from Alsace told me that, when his father went to Alsace a couple of decades ago to take a look at the place, the only people who still spoke Alsatian were regular church goers. not sure if it’s really true–but I only report what I’d been told.)
The problem of nation building in places like Afghanistan–even if the process were taking place “naturally”–would be that the Pushtuns are too few in number and the existing tribal structure too strong to allow for forced imposition of Pushtun ways upon ethnic minorities–hostility from non-Pushtuns in reaction to such forced Pushtunization is probably one of the reasons Taliban failed as a central government long before US bombs fell, or so I heard. Of course, no outsider is going to try to force the ways of the dominant tribe on others–they’ll make up something and force it on everyone. (you gotta wonder how the different tribes in old France might have reacted if some invader tried to turn them all into English or something–roughly the equivalent.) One heck of a way to make enemies of everyone in the country, seems to me, and the reason why “nation-building” (the terms seemingly reserved these days for outsider-imposed variety–while the internally imposed one tends to be termed “ethnic cleansing”–are inevitably doomed to failure.)
Jonathan
I mention France as the most important example because it has succeeded: very few people in France dispute that they are French (Corsicans being a major exception–but even there, I get the impression that the separatist sentiment is much exaggerated). Turkey still has 10 million Kurds who hadn’t been quite assimilated into the “Turkish nation” and are kept down with substantial application of force. I have no clue how far the process has come along in Rwanda.
10 million Kurds who hadn’t been quite assimilated into the “Turkish nation” and are kept down with substantial application of force.
In 1977 I was in tourist tripe in Turkey/Istanbul, I heard that the Kurds there were not allowed to speak Kurdish. Under the Turkish law/forces if someone caught speaking Kurdish will be prosecuted with death penalty! While Kurds in Iraq at that time speaks freely also starting some schools using Kurdish language in leaning of primary and higher, but that not last because of stupidly of Saddam regime.
That did not suppresses me as we all know as Arab/Iraqis that Turkish Empire enforced Turkish language on all dominated Islamic land.
One of them Iraq Turks treated Iraqi as far as we know harshly if they don’t speak Turkish. All the official documents and correspondences at that time were in Turkish language apart of campaigning was called Turkrisation Polices in Arab Land.
Although at that time the letters of Turkish language very similar to Arabic letters but that changes after Ataturk Revolution when he choose the Latin latter for his Nation Building policy and he thought the problem with Turkey not developed to the level of the rest of the world at a time is the Arabic language.
Which really funny interpretation and the time approve that how much turkey different from the surrounding country apart of political system that ruled turkey although the power in the hand of elite small military group…
I mention France as the most important example because it has succeeded: very few people in France dispute that they are French (Corsicans being a major exception–but even there, I get the impression that the separatist sentiment is much exaggerated)
Well, there are the Bretons – also not very extreme, but stubborn enough to push through a constitutional amendment last month which recognized regional languages. That’s actually pretty big – even if it doesn’t confer full official status, it still reverses 200 years of French language policy. I’m not going to call this the beginning of French de-nationalization, because it isn’t, but even in a “successful” nation-building project, underlying regional identities can be stronger than people think.
Turkey still has 10 million Kurds who hadn’t been quite assimilated into the “Turkish nation” and are kept down with substantial application of force.
These top-down nationalization projects typically involve three options: adopt the dominant tribe’s ways, go someplace else, or die. In Turkey, the Greeks got option 2, and the Kurds option 3.
Yet, many top-down nationalization processes succeed to a substantial degree–provided that they are carried out by the locals. People have good reasons to adopt the ways of the dominant tribe, who, after all, are dominant for a reason (political, economic, etc.) and being like them offers opportunities for advancement. (West Briton may have been meant as a perjorative in Joyce’s days, but then, even today, how many people actually do speak Gaelic in Ireland?)
One reason places like Afghanistan fail to develop as a “nation,” besides the relative smallness of the dominant tribe and the tribal social structure, I wonder, is the lack of opportunities for advancement offered by becoming Pushtunlike. Of course, in some sense, the phenomenon is rather world-wide. A Korean in 1920s seeking socioeconomic advancement went to Japan and became a Japanese. An Afghan, regardless of his or her tribal background, is more likely to leave Afghanistan, go to US, and, well, become a de facto American, not an “Afghan.” (certainly, not an option open to most Afghans–but would anybody today support restructing Afghan society to transform the country into Pushtunistan?)
What makes me wonder as to whether outsiders can ever build a nation: why should anybody play along with what outsiders tell them, if they want to stick around even after the outsiders are gone?
kao_hsien_chih
One reason places like Afghanistan fail to develop as a “nation,”
If we can say the wars that this land had in the past which caused a lot of distractions of civil structures and service lead to this nation suffer setback to developed socially and also in politically.
We can add the interferences of other nations/Neighbours into internal affairs of afghani as a nation and Afghanistan as a state causing clashes that made problem to the nation to move forward, adding last thing is the poverty/lack of resources as such made this nation very slow to move forward.
HC wrote:
“Can a nation, as such, actually be built? Even more important: Can it ever be “built” by outsiders?
I’m dubious in the extreme.”
I have written a book about Media and Nation Building by this title based on anthropological fieldwork and historical research among the Iban, an indigenous people of Malaysian Borneo. I think a big part of the problem is that the notion of ‘nation’, like that of ‘commmunity’, refers to an ideal and not to an empirical reality (unlike, say the words ‘state’, ‘city’ or ‘district’ which are ideologically far more neutral and more firmly empirically grounded).
In my own study I conclude that the Malaysian state has been rather successful – in part through their deft use of a range of government-controlled media since independence from Britain in 1963 – in inculcating nationalist and nation-building ideals and practices among the Iban. I call this ‘sustainable propaganda’. More importantly, there has been in tandem with this work sustainable propaganda a continued process of cultural diffusion from West Malaysia to East Malaysia (Malaysian Borneo): fashion, language, music, sport, etc.
Is Malaysia in the process of becoming a nation? I think this is an unanswerable question for any country, for the reason I have just given: nations are ideal entities that exist largely in human minds and dreams (or nightmares) but do not refer to any tangible phenomenon in the world. Rather Malaysia (as I argue in Media and Nation Building) is in the process of becoming a thick ‘culture area’ distinct from neighbouring culture areas such as Indonesia or Singapore, something similar to what Bourdieu would call a ‘social space’ (eg France). A culture area is a territory – or set of territories – with a web of political, administrative, economic, linguistic, technological and other relations binding an internally differentiated (by region, class, ethnicity, etc.) population.
Spain (where I grew up) is an interesting culture area in that it has gone down the administrative and political autonomy road far more than most other European states, with key powers devolved to its regions, especially to the ‘nacionalidades historicas’ of Catalunya, Euskadi/Pais Vasco and Galicia. Whether Catalunya, Spain, Euskadi or La Rioja are truly nations is a bit of a red herring, as I think you point out in your post. And yet *politically* these are crucial questions with real consequences.
A more interesting question in my view is: what are the cultural implications of political-administrative autonomy and, further still, political independence? My hunch is that cultural diversity very often arises from, and is sustained by political autonomy or independence (Portugal is culturally distinct from Spain to a large extent because of its long history of political independence). Culture follows power. This is because the political field plays a huge role in designing and pursuing cultural policies, e.g. medium of instruction in schools, mass media languages, ‘affirmative action’ for a certain ethnic group, etc.
PS see also
http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/new-in-paperback-media-and-nation-building-j-postill/
John,
You’re talking about modern Spain–not the Spanish State under Franco. Catalan and Basque languages were banned. “Spanishization” was enforced from the top. The notion of a “Spanish nation” was glorified through state-monopolized media.
Of course, that pales in comparison to the modern French state–although, I suppose, in case of Elsass (yes, this too is deliberate), going back and forth between Germany and France a few times probably diluted the French propaganda a good bit.
Or, one could talk about Korea under Japanese rule–where, again, the state-monopolized media insisted on oneness of the “imperial” people. (One might have noticed the lack of political rights extended to Korea–but then, that applied to ethnic Koreans and Japanese alike, while ethnic Koreans in Japan did enjoy full political rights as Japanese by 1930s–although, one might then say, by then, Japan was a military dictatorship and there wasn’t much of political rights available….)
No, culture does NOT always follow power. It may follow power–but there are plenty of failed instances. Why they failed is the interesting question, not that there are probably more successes than failures.
Hi, Jonathan, John, Salah, and Kao (Gao/Go?)
Thank you for all your great contributions to this discussion, which has really enriched my thinking a lot. This question of the relationship between culture and power is fascinating, eh?
John, I’ll look for your book.
I’m just thinking back a bit to B. Anderson’s classic theory about the relationship between “print capitalism” and the ability to “imagine” and also construct the institutions for a “nation.” In what we might call the early-modern period– including the consolidation of different language-groups in Europe into different “nations”, and perhaps also the formation “nations” in other places, including Thailand which I believe was his main area of fieldwork–the print media played a huge role in both the conceptual and the institutional construction of the “nation.” Your work, John, on Malaysia sounds fascinating.
But how about the influence of “new”, easily boundary-hopping media like satellite TV, the blogosphere, etc? State authorities everywhere are losing their ability to control what media content the citizens have access to. What kind of new “nations” might the new media help to construct? Like, a global Queer Nation or how about a “Peace Nation”?
It’s important to remember, though, that “culture” as such, can’t be sustained without institutions…
Fwiw, we Quakers have long had a very ambivalent feeling about any form of national identity, maybe allied to our hatred of war…