The National Question. (redux)

[Maureen Therese Anderson]

Greg,

I've been gradually wading through the flood of Kosovo postings and have
jsut read your long post. Lots of thoughtful points there, so I'm sorry I'm
just focussing on what I most take issue with.

>But in a clan system there is,
>basically, equality for those in the clan (which is
>what was attractive to Engels).   The down side is that
>everyone outside of the clan is shit, and hence, our
>Chechens have little compunction about keeping a
>Dhagestani as a slave.  Or vice versa.  When we apply
>our late 20th c Marxist, state-based notions of
>citizenship and justice to the activities of clans, we
>are proposing a system of moral judgment which has
>little to do with the operating values of that system.

This characterization seems to carry a lot of weight in your analysis.
(And not just yours--its been the subtext of several other postings I've
skimmed through.)  So for what it's worth, and primordialist images
notwithstanding: descent groups aren't so egalitarian on the inside nor so
Hobbesian on the outside.

In fact given that they've taken thousands of diverse and dynamic forms,
it's impossible to say much at all about descent groups. Only the social
science that grew up in conjunction with the nation-state's own myths could
have beat down all of that diversity into one "type." Some were (past tense
because I'm talking here about autonomous ones) relatively egalitarian,
some hierarchical, some collectivist, some more individualist.  One trait
they all had in common is that by comparison to the modern nation-state,
their boundaries tended to be quite flexible and fluid.

As for your "everyone outside of the clan is total shit," that's just worse
than bizzare.  It gets mighty close to those congratulatory
inevitability-of-capitalism arguments that someone cited earlier this week.
(The old "it's not possible to have a socialist society except in
hunter/gatherer societies, so unless you want to go BACK TO THE STONE AGE,
you'd better become bourgeois.")  In point of fact, descent groups and
their members were almost always involved in wider alliances, and all sorts
of non-state networks that cross-cut political and linguistic boundaries.
A lot of these networks were very complex and heterogenous.  No
self-enclosed clans or villages anywhere.

>
>7.  But in other areas, such as Yugoslavia and the
>Caucasus, there were prolonged periods when the clans
>and mountain tribes coincided A) with feudalism and B)
>with capitalism.  Paradoxically the clans can be
>reinforced under such conditions.  [...] And a
>modern state is the ultimate resource which clans and
>tribes can co-opt, to their own benefit and to the
>detriment of others.  Those left out have little but
>the resources of their own clan to keep them going.

The dynamics of groups that are incorporated into state structures is
another issue entirely from their dynamics when they're autonomous.

There's a vast scholarship that's studied how colonial states control the
very context shaping group and individual interests. They control the
criteria of access to resources, and even the context in which ethnicity
either is or isn't salient. Formerly fluid group boundaries almost always
become much more sharply delineated. Then it's the state again that creates
the context which sets newly "primordial" entities in competition with each
other.

> Part of the problem here is not
>"capitalism" as such but rather an insufficiency of
>capitalism: the process has not been carried far enough
>to create true "citizens" who have little by way of
>"organic relations" than their nuclear family and who
>are all alike in the eyes of the state.

Insufficienct capitalism? In most of the world it's capitalism that came in
uninvited and _wanted_ an economy based on cheap labor and cash-cropping.
That's why they were there.  In eastern Europe, ethnic problems have arisen
_with_ free market capitalism and the erosion of safety nets.

>9.  The existence of outside capitalist powers can
>exacerbate these tendencies but the essential illogic
>of it all is seen by the fact that capitalists get
>blamed for intervening and causing massacres and also
>get blamed for not intervening and stopping
>massacres.

They aren't "outside" powers.  I'm not sure if you're disputing that
capitalism/the colonial state created the conditions that allowed
Rwanda-like situations to take place, or if you're saying something
narrower.

Traditioinally "capitalism" has "solved"
>this problem through the creation of states,
>elimination of some groups where warranted, and
>bourgeois citizinship, in which the citizen confronts
>the state garbed in nothing but his skin and, if lucky
>a lawyer.

Outside of Western Europe and North America, what countries are your role
models here for this auspicious tradition?

>10.  Thus I do not see the "solution" in Yugoslavia as
>Serb states, Croat states, Kosovar states, or
>whatever.  The only way *out* of this problem is
>*through*.  That means, in my view, capitalist
>development which erodes the basis of all these
>competing nationalities and their various smuggling
>gangs and extended family relationships.  And this
>process, historically, wherever it has occurred, has
>*always* been brutal.

Well you're sure right that capitalism has "always been brutal." That's why
it's always needed the force of a state to enforce it.

But again--can you say a bit more about how you envision the capitalist
development that's going to come in and fix this terrible situation?  It
seems to do the opposite.

Sure Western Europe and the US went "through it."  But your "development"
idea does make it sound like this is some natural maturation process that
everyone just goes through, like growing pains.  Modernization theory and
all the rest.  Europe/US did it via, among other things, really brutal wage
labor, empire, and lots of national protectionisms.  The latter two are not
available for poor countries.  The former I wouldn't wish on anyone.

You do seem to have quite a bit more faith in capitalism than most around here.

Maureen