Beyond a postnationalist imaginary: grounding an alternative ethic (1).

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Warburg, James Paul
• Date: 22 December 1999

In an understandable disillusion with the limitations of the national liberation movements, particularly as the movements harden into advocating conventional nation-state politics, critics are beginning to put their faith in the new possibilities of postnationalism. This form of subjectivity can be defined as a discursive 'attachment' to others who have been lifted out of the modern boundaries of national identification. (2) In this definition, postnationalism is a subjectivity abstracted from and therefore only residually beholden to imagined past forms of national identification such as ethnicity, felt common history or bounded territory. (3) It is the late-modern subjectivity of the mobile person in a world of traversed spaces. Some theorists go so far as to suggest that it is possible to discern the beginnings of a 'postnational imaginary'. These postmodern theorists find it in the messy configurations of modern migrant consciousness, transnational religious revivals of tradition, and movements of postmodern diasporic hybridity. It is treated as an incipient development: both good and bad in the short term, but with positive, almost utopian, possibilities in the long term as the nation-state ceases to enthral and enrage. For example, Arjun Appadurai writes that 'These elements for those who wish to hasten the demise of the nation-state, for all their contradictions, require both nurture and critique. In this way, transnational social forms may generate not only postnational yearnings, but also actually existing postnational movements, organizations, and spaces'. (4)

For all the sympathy we may spontaneously have with such a view, (5) this article argues as its core proposition that without a thorough-going exploration of the principles of solidarity and community, advocating postnationalism amounts to little more than a postmodern passion for mobile openness on the one hand, or an ideologically insensitive support for 'banal' official nationalism and global capitalism on the other. (6) The second part of that proposition is counterintuitive, but it refers to the way in which nation-states at the centre of the global order, such as the United States, increasingly present themselves as postnational. Even as they maintain a modern defence of the national projection of globalizing power, the leading proponents of global capitalism no longer proclaim 'my country, right or wrong'. Instead, they invoke variants on the postnational language of 'my country as exemplary of the new openness to global mobility'. In doing so they mask the iniquitous nature of structural conditions that frame such words. Postcolonial advocates of postnationalism fail to see that they walk in the shadow of these quite differently motivated advocates of global mobility.

That is my core argument expressed most bluntly, but it should not be taken to mean that I think postnationalism is damnable. What I will be criticizing is the tendency to look uncritically to postnationalism--much as some nineteenth-century philosophers looked to nationalism--as the way out of the problems of an earlier social formation. In this case it is the problems that we have created through the excesses of modernity, but it does not mean that a postmodern politics provides the answer. One such postmodern excess is the increasingly intensified and contradictory use of modern rationalized violence, projected in the name of either abstract peace or 'traditional' integrity. From above, it comes in the form of NATO bombers over Iraq or Kosovo. From below it is clothed in the language of re-traditionalization: including the modernist millenarianism of Saddam Hussein and the violent nationalism of the UCK, better known to English speakers by their acronym the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army.

It is clear that we need to develop new institutionalized forms of polity and community that go beyond the modern national state, but designating the way of the future as 'postnationalism' does little to achieve that purpose. Neither does emphasizing the virtues of deterritorialized mobility. This article takes as its central task the need for a critical exploration of the limits of postnationalism. It concludes by arguing that we need to put back into the centre of politics deliberations over the principles that frame how we are to live with each other. Unless this is given priority, current debates over postnationalism and cosmopolitanism, globalism and localism, are bound to end up repeating, in late-modern or postmodern terms, the dead-end modernist arguments over the relative merits of nationalism and internationalism.

Liberation Movements and the Politics of Modern Nationalism

Nationalist-inspired movements have inspired the best and worst of outcomes. At their best, national liberation movements have involved sustained and glorious passions of solidarity and commitment. However, without principles that go beyond 'liberation from oppression', as worthy as that aim may be, these movements have all too often involved desperate violence of the kind that rarely translates into sustainable, ethically driven polity-communities. In many cases, the best that we can hope for is the restoration of legitimate authority. (7) Whether it be the Fretilin East Timorese struggling against Indonesian imperialism, the KLA in Kosovo or the Irish Republican Army, the prospects for current movements only look a little brighter if you believe that instituting the procedures of liberal democracy is a laudable end in itself.

Even considered more narrowly, there have been few exceptions to the counterproductive retaliatory violence of liberatory nationalism. Examples such as Gandhi's salt march soon got lost in the prison-house of modern nationalism. The most recent positive instance is the Zapatista movement, whose moment of express violence was confined to a battle with the Mexican Army in early 1994. Relevant to our argument that positive (and non-violent) forms of postnationalism do not necessarily derive from deterritorialization and mobility, the uprising in Chiapas was initiated on 1 January 1994, the first day of the North American Free Trade Zone Agreement (NAFTA). The people of Chiapas were fighting to stabilize their relationship to place against a national government that had just signed a treaty to transnationalize their borders in the context of the intensified mobility of global capitalism. For all of the postmodern romanticism about the Zapatistas, the underlying strength of the movement is not its connections across cyberspace, but its attempt to bring together an on-the-ground commitment to place and embodied ways of life with a web-based means of communicating its politics to the outside world. (8)

In this sense, the counterposition to postnationalism is not to argue for an uncritical political defence of territorial place or integral community. One example of counterproductive attachment to territorialized place will suffice, the Kosovo Liberation Army, a group that for a time the western media lionized as freedom fighters. From the moment that a group of masked men carrying Kalashnikovs first proclaimed the need for an armed response to Slobodan Milosevic, the possibility of the Rugova non-violent alternative was closed off. Their response may have been understandable. The KLA proclamation came in the village of Llaushe just before Christmas 1997 as 20,000 Albanians met at the funeral of a school teacher who had been killed by Serb police. (9) However, the form of the response counterproductively hardened the actions of the ruling national government. Arjun Appadurai gets to the heart of the matter when he says that:

This incapacity of many deterritorialized groups to think their way out of the imaginary of the nation-state is itself the cause of much global violence because many movements of emancipation and identity are forced, in their struggles against existing nation-states, to embrace the very imaginary they seek to escape. Postnational or non-national movements are forced by the very logic of actually existing nation-states to become antinational or antistate and thus to inspire the very state power that forces them to respond in the language of counternationalism. (10) This is the second to last time in this article that I will agree politically with Appadurai, even if his descriptions of the world are brilliantly evocative. If we read the sentence that follows this insightful passage, the limitations of his proposed alternative become clear. 'This vicious circle', he says, 'can only be escaped when a language is found to capture complex, nonterritorial, postnational forms of allegiance.' (11) In my view, escaping the vicious circle of reactionary re-embedding of liberatory hopes in the proceduralism of the modern rationalizing state has very little to do with finding a language with which to express postnational forms of allegiance. It certainly need not fetishize mobility or the end of strong attachments to place. For Appadurai, postnationalism involves a kind of post-territorial sensibility of multiple belonging. What the analysis misses out on are the structures and subjectivities of change and the necessity to re-embed different levels of belonging. Polities and communities alike are being swept up in a race to leave behind the modern nation-state and to accommodate what has been described as the processes of 'deterritorialization'. (12) If reactionary violence can be the outcome of the radical loss of community, then effectively advocating the end of sustained community will not lead us to a post-violent world. The disturbing irony of this aporia of understanding is that some postcolonial writers thus advocate a process of liberation from a form of polity-community--the modern nation-state--that is already being reconstituted by processes that are bigger than both the nation-state and the transnational groupings that appear to be going beyond it. One...