Gravel in the Shoe: Nationalism and World of the Third

Abstract

This paper examines nationalism as the ‘modern idea of a collective’ or the ‘ideal of a modern collective’ that struts out universally and that ceaselessly tightens its footwear in the face of recalcitrant gravels, gravels that are representative of either extant or possible ideas of alternative collectivity. Against this background, we show how a new nationalism in India encapsulated by the economic Utopia of ‘inclusive development’ is emerging in the contemporary landscape of global capitalism under neoliberal conditions. This Utopia is shown to be marked by a fundamental split that helps secure and facilitate the reorganization of India's national cartography into the ‘expanding circuits of global capital’ and its constitutive outside: ‘world of the third’. Highlighted are the encounters with flashpoints of conflict emanating from nationalism's intricate encounter with the contemporary ‘gravel in the shoe’: world of the third.

Keywords:

• Nationalism
• Development
• Global Capital
• World of the Third
• Third World

Acknowledgments

We thank Serap Kayatekin and David Ruccio for their detailed comments, criticisms and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

¹In a Derridean sense, différance represents in one turn the moment of difference-differing-deferring. It represents a passive difference already in place as the condition of signification and an active act of differing, which produces-introduces differences as also deferral as silent, secret, discreet suspension.

²In the class-focused approach, capitalist class processes coexist with ‘what are not capitalist’ class processes—namely, independent, slave, feudal, communist, and communitic. For the sake of convenience, we denote the diverse ‘what are not capitalist’ class processes by the term ‘noncapitalist’ without in any way implying the latter to be a homogenous other of ‘capitalist’, which is usually the practice in conventional approaches, left and right.

³Nandy shows how the “faith in the absolute reality of the nation is constituted of three interrelated core fantasies: the fantasy of the nation as a suffering mother, the fantasy of the nation as omnipotent mother, and that of the nation as a projection of infantile narcissism” (1994, 85). We add a fourth: development (and now neoliberal globalization) as economic fantasy.

⁴See Chakrabarti and Dhar (2005, 2009) and Chakrabarti, Cullenberg, and Dhar (2011) for details.

⁵A local market is defined as exchange transpiring between two intranational entities, while a global market involves exchange between two entities across national boundaries. A local-global market takes shape when both kinds of market appear as connected in the materialization of a value chain. An example would be ‘informal’ enterprises producing goods for an Indian ancillary enterprise (local market exchange) which in turn uses these to produce and sell a product to, say, Tata Group of Companies (a local market exchange), only for the latter to use the product as means of production to produce a commodity sold to a firm in China (a global exchange). Markets of both global and local kind, in combination, enable the circuits of global capital to take shape.

⁶The Economic Survey of India is a Ministry of Finance document that is considered a mouthpiece of the Indian state's overall policy orientation.

⁷Roughly, the portion of surplus distributed for the purpose of directly reproducing the conditions of existence of class enterprises are subsumed payments/production surplus and surplus distributed beyond the point of these immediate class conditions constitute social surplus (Chakrabarti 2001; Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003, chap. 7; Chakrabarti, Cullenberg, and Dhar 2008).