Plurinational State Forms

Interview

From an interview of Boaventura de Sousa Santos by FABIOLA NAVARRO, and ROQUE URBIETA HERNANDEZ on 26 October 2016 for Democracia Abierta.

* E & R: Are we witnessing the end of the nation-State?

BDSS: I think that in the time we're living through in Latin America, there is a context that's necessary to keep in mind and that's related to the emergence of the concept of plurinationality. The idea of plurinationality is now consensual in many states of the world. There are many states that are plurinational. Canada is plurinational, Switzerland is plurinational, Belgium is plurinational. So, historically, there are two concepts of nation. The first concept of nation is the liberal concept that refers to the coincidence between nation and State; ie. nation as a set of individuals belonging to the geopolitical space of the state and therefore in modern states they are called nation-states: one nation, one state. But there is another concept, a non-liberal Community-based concept of nation, which does not necessarily carry with it the State.

For example, we know how the Germans were, in Central and Eastern Europe for a long time, a nation without a state because their identity was a cultural identity and not a political identity. Here we can see that this second tradition of nation, the community tradition, is the tradition that indigenous peoples have developed. This concept of nation implies a concept of self-determination, but not independence. Indigenous peoples have never claimed, not even in Canada, independence. They have demanded stronger or weaker forms of self-determination. So here is the idea that plurinationality obliges us, obviously, to refound the modern state, because the modern state is a state that has a single nation, and now you have to combine different concepts of nation within the same State.

* E & R: So claims of minority cultures respond to a weak state?

BDSS: First you have to know what a minority culture is. For a long time it was considered, for example in Bolivia, that the indigenous Bolivians were a minority culture when they were 62 percent of the population. What is a minority? Minority is a social construction. You can't say that African culture is a minority culture because 54 percent of the Brazilian population consider themselves black or mulatto.

I think that society, capitalism, have their origin in a very strong element of barbarism, of great destruction, which was domesticated some way through social struggles, and the liberal state and liberal democracy are contradictory. There are many things within the state, within democracy, that are in flux, like the one we're seeing today: neoliberalism trying to separate capital from political ties, that are all national. We do not have political ties that are transnational. There is international law, but is very weak; as we have seen in Afghanistan, in Iraq.

So, barbarism is the ever-increasing destruction of these political ties, which somehow restrain the power of the strongest people. When the power of the strongest has no brakes, we have barbarism. Barbarism is when we have an employment contract between a worker and a businessman, but there is no labour law to protect workers. I think this is a situation of barbarism that I call social fascism. We are moving towards societies that are politically democratic and socially fascist, because the strongest are increasingly able to dominate the weakest; they are moving beyond the previous rules. Therefore it is necessary to reinvent the state, democracy and social emancipation." (https://www.opendemocracy.net/democraciaabierta/boaventura-de-sousa-santos-fabiola-navarro-roque-urbieta-hernandez/democracy-in-di)