Africa and the Middle East: Recolonisation and the Crisis of the Nation
State
by Prof. Ali Kadri
<
http://www.globalresearch.ca> Global Research, June 14, 2012
When colonialist forces created states in their own images, they re-founded
institutions that organise social structures in line with their strategies.
When, after decolonisation, many of these states in Africa and the Middle
East weakened under military or neoliberal assaults, they were dubbed
ill-governed or 'overdeveloped.' The 'or' between military and neoliberal is
inclusive. The neoliberal bent is imposed by shifting national class
structures to accept the imperialist terms of surrender via neoliberal
policies by power structures, foremost in which, is actual or potential
military power. As for overdeveloped, it is said that ex-colonies borrowed
over-fitted systems of government and administration from their Western
patrons. More recently, many of these ex-colonies have failed and many
others teeter on the brink of failure. Libya
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/03/libya-security-force-kidnapping
-surgeon> , Yemen and Syria can now be added to Lebanon, Afghanistan,
Somalia and Iraq. However, these failures are not a onetime occurrence after
which states resurrect in better shape or form. They have become states that
exist in a continual condition of violence and collapse.
After the destruction of their indigenous industry and national means for
the reproduction of life, they are relegated to a condition of insecurity,
dependency and the export of raw material. Imperialist forces ensure that
rent from resources are devolved in ways that entrench divisions across
social groups that, in turn, vie for raw material or geopolitical rents. In
this new breed of states, the state is neither an institution of all
institutions nor an institution in itself. It just administers rent
redistribution and protects vital raw material sources. Iraq recently, for
instance, bought drones
<
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-05-20/iraq-oil-drones/5509959
0/1> to protect its pipelines when more than one million
<
http://www.aljazeera.com/video/middleeast/2011/05/201151041017174884.html>
of its orphaned children are stranded in the street of Baghdad and daily car
bombs wreak havoc and destruction across its landscape.
This new breed of state is neither sovereign, in the sense it cannot provide
national, communal or individual security, nor does it exercise autonomy
over policy. It is simply there to ensure continued divisions so as not to
facilitative the aspirations of working people irrespective of sex, colour,
gender, sect etc., in a more resistant stance to imperialism. As models
engineered in response to the crisis of capital, they are instruments of
working class differentiation and control. And, the possibility exists that
there could be more of these states now. What occurred in Iraq and Libya can
engulf all of Africa. In the post-Soviet era, the old form of the sovereign
and nationally industrialising state no longer tallies with present-day
imperialist ambitions. In an organically set mode of capital accumulation
<
http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb8812/> , when some states break the
mould of underdevelopment, others will pay a heavy price of
underdevelopment.
At its peak in the eighteenth century, the state was ideally conceptualised.
The nation state was 'the realisation of the spirit' or 'the actuality of
the ethical idea (Hegel).' It was also '[a]n autonomous state, one in which
the authority of its laws is in the will of the people in that state
(Kant).' By the time class divisions deepened in the nineteenth century, the
state became 'the institution of organised violence which is used by the
ruling class to maintain the conditions of its rule (Marx) or, putatively,
'the organisation that monopolises legitimate violence over a given
territory (Weber).' In our age of colonialist intervention couched under
humanitarianism, the state became a social club modelled upon the fagging
system of English public schools. Late in the twentieth century, the concept
of the state had to annul the concept of class altogether from the
definition of state. The state became an association of persons, living in a
determinate part of the earth's surface, legally organised and personified,
and associated for their own government. This new breed of state, however,
fits none of the above definitions. It is a differentiated and degenerative
form of even the nation state defined as a social club. Individuals in these
on-the-brink states have no one government that they can call their own.
Ideally, for Hegel to have reached his definition of the state as the
actualisation of ethics, he followed the contradictory path of the
development of the spirit over time as it oscillated between the in-itself
mode to the for-itself mode embracing larger and more inclusive forms of
social organisations. In the despotic Orient, he thought one was not free
but all are free. In the slave age, some were free. In the Prussian state,
one and all were free. In this modern form of 'on-the-brink state', however,
neither one nor all can be said to be free.
Materially, from its very birth, the nation state was a constituent of
capital and armed with a welfare task, principally, the function of
reproducing, by more or less coercive and ideological means, a malleable and
acquiescent working class. The state became the mediation of the dominant
class in the political process. But in this new breed of state, social
disarticulation is profound on the material level, resulting from wealth
discrepancies and the fragmentation of the social order. On the level of
consciousness manifest in the schism separating social consciousness from
social being, it is even more profound. What I mean by the latter is that
although workers would stand to benefit from collaboration and unionism,
they adopt reconstructed identities bolstered by tainted rents that would
drive them apart. Thus, as ballot box elections bereft of social and
economic rights are organised, the citizen would not be voting in a state
encompassing the whole of the national territory, for that state does not
exist.
What exists is the social group, the sect and/or ethnicity for which the
personal vote is quasi mandatory because it handles the disbursement of
rents and, hence, livelihood. In no minor measure, the crisis of alternative
social ideology contributes to this fragmentation. This new breed of state,
furthermore, is no longer the institution by which the comprador class
organises and maintains a dependent mode of integration with global capital;
for a comprador class to exist, it must be set against the 'other' or the
national bourgeoisie. Here, there is no national bourgeoisie to speak of. In
Iraq, for example, two opposing militias guarding two different pipelines
are said to shoot at each other when luring tankers to their delivery
points. This is a stage in development where militias pitted against each
other with the premeditated support of various US military bases come to
represent a large part of the form of social organisation that make up the
state.
On the development side, it goes without saying that this new breed of state
not only engenders reverse development, it also debilitates man. Shorter
life expectancy, higher infant mortality
<
http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/06/11/220010.html> and
illiteracy abound. Equally important, fragmented, insecure and de-developing
states fall prey to drone politics and diplomacy. Their de-development
drastically shifts the balance of forces in favour of imperial powers. There
will of course be the isolated anti-imperialist violent incident, but it is
no more than the sting of a wasp in the armour of the charging knight
<
http://books.google.com.sg/books/about/Alchemists_of_revolution.html?id=uYv
mAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y> of empire. Capital wins when it controls and
under-develops raw material exporting states as was the case in Iraq.
Militarism and the encroachment side of accumulation can be said to have
flourished so far, further leveraging a market expansion side of
accumulation beset by the crisis of financialisation. But development is not
only combined and uneven
<
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/rp01.htm> , it is also
organically tied together. This means that the rate at which capital
metabolises man and nature will also rise in inverse proportion to the
crisis of capital under financialisation.
The growth process in middle income countries achieved so far as a
concession related to shifting balance of forces with imperialism, will
imply more dislocation wrought upon the poorer class countries. Many more
countries are poised to undergo this metamorphosis to a state, which is the
form of social organisation of militias plus American drones/military bases.
Iran is one possible target, which would expand the car bomb corridors from
the Fertile Crescent to Afghanistan. Capital successfully tested these new
forms of social organisation in the periphery. At the expense of the working
class, it has been nicely drawing the rewards of Afghanistan, Somalia and
Iraq for more than two decades. However, much like it tested other disasters
<
http://raceandhistory.com/selfnews/viewnews.cgi?newsid1005964774,9800,.shtm
l> before in the colonies and then applied them at home, in the defunctness
of present day social ideology replete with Eurocentricity, capital might
just as well bring these experiments closer to home.
Ali Kadri is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
<
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=listByAuthor&authorFirst=Ali
&authorName=Kadri> Global Research Articles by Ali Kadri
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Received on Thu Jun 14 2012 - 21:27:22 EDT
