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ABSTRACT
How to theorize the nation’s Janus-like form, its simultaneous modernity and antiquity? This paper provides an original answer to this longstanding question. It argues that nations arise from the interaction of ‘societal multiplicity’ and the expansionist tendency of historical capitalism. The emergence of capitalism super-adds a modern inflection to the inherently relational process of collective identity formation by generating modern sovereignty as an abstract form of rule. Crucially however, just like its emergence, capitalism’s expansion also refracts through societal multiplicity. Non-capitalist societies are therefore pressured into ‘nationalist’ projects of emulative self-preservation in which the nation’s political form (i.e. the sovereign state) is forged before its sociological content (i.e. primitive accumulation). Thus, the original site of this process, France, produced the modular nation-form that unlike Britain’s imperial nationhood could be globalized. The paper therefore shows that IR’s premise of multiplicity may be the key to one of social sciences’ most enduring puzzles.
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Notes
1 I am grateful to Karim Cubert who first sparked my critical interest in Benedict Anderson’s work many years ago. I would also like to thank the participants in the EISA’s 2018 EWIS workshop on ‘multiplicity’, and also Eren Duzgun and Jan Selby for their valuable extensive feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. I am particularly grateful to Beate Jahn, Justin Rosenberg and Yavuz Tuyloglu who greatly helped me through many fruitful conversations and detailed feedback on earlier drafts. I should also thank Fataneh Farahani, Maziar Samiee and two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their helpful comments.
2 See also other contributions to the special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (Volume 21, Issue 5) entitled ‘Escaping the Nation? Anti-colonial Imaginaries and Postcolonial Settlements’.
3 Rosenberg (Citation2006, Citation2016); Matin (Citation2007, Citation2013a). For an extensive list of primary and secondary writings on UCD visit www.unevenandcombined.com. For important critiques see inter alia Teschke (Citation2014), Ashman (Citation2006).
4 Imagined Communities has sold more than half a million copies excluding the sale of translations available in more than thirty languages (Breuilly, Citation2016, p. 626). I am grateful to Yavuz Tuyloglu for this reference.
5 The centrality of sovereignty to nationhood is also underlined by other key thinkers, e.g. Breuilly (Citation1993, p. 2); Gellner (Citation1983, p. 1); Greenfeld (Citation2012, pp. 1–2); Hobsbawm (Citation2000, pp. 9–10).
6 Here I use ‘pre-capitalist’ and ‘pre-national’ not in a linear-historical sense but in a relational-analytical sense.
7 I am grateful to Yavuz Tuyloglu for these sources.
8 Capitalist sovereignty and the imperial form of the British state are central to my account of the nation, and since the political consolidation of English capitalism (the Revolution of 1688) roughly coincided with the Acts of Union of 1707, I use ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ interchangeably.
9 The Avalon Project: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/rightsof.asp [accessed 23/09/2018].
10 Similar circumstances also mark states emerging from Britain’s settler-colonialism such as the United States where ‘constitutional nationalism’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ form the institutional and ideological forms of the nation.
11 This circumstance also explains early nationalisms’ tendency to seek ‘viable’ nation-states rather than the nation-state as such (Hobsbawm, Citation1977, p. 5).
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Kamran Matin
Kamran Matin is a senior lecturer in International Relations at Sussex University, UK. His research is in the fields of Marxist historical sociology, international theory, and Middle Eastern Studies. He is the author of Recasting Iranian Modernity: International Relations and Social Change (2013) and co-editor of Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée (2016). He is the chief editor of Palgrave's Minorities in West Asia and North Africa (MWANA) series.