Sovereignty
Discussion
Sovereignty and Technology
Josu Jon Imaz:
“The concepts of nation and sovereignty seem to have always existed. However, they were born within a specific context that was determined by two technological advances that took place in the 16th and 17th centuries: the press and the steam engine.
The standardisation of linguistic and cultural spaces generated by the press spread the perception of belonging in broader spaces than those which human beings had previously been used to. In turn, the steam engine and the industrial revolution joined the latter phenomenon to form economic domains that merged with constituted cultural spaces, giving rise to the nation-State, the dominant political structure for two centuries. The response by the cultural and linguistic spaces which were not articulated by that economic and political reality was to promote 19th- and 20th-century European nationalisms, which finally constituted statal entities in some cases (Italy, Germany, Norway, Finland, Czech Republic, etc.), whereas other ones were left as cultural or national spaces lacking a state structure, or in some cases as unstable or unsolved problems.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)
Identity and Sovereignty
David de Ugarte et al.:
“The central thesis of this book is that the passage from a society with a decentralised economy and communications – the world of nations – to the world of distributed networks which arose from the internet and globalisation, makes it increasingly difficult for people to define their identities in national terms. That's why new identities and new values are appearing, which in the long run will surpass and subsume the national and statalist view of the world.
Identity springs from the need to materialise or at least imagine the
community in which our life is developed and produced. Nations appeared and
spread precisely because the old local collective identities linked to religion and
agrarian and artisan production no longer adequately represented the social
network that produced the bulk of the economic, social and political activity which
determined people's environment.
In the same way, for a growing number of people, national markets are
becoming an increasingly inadequate expression of all the social relationships that
shape their daily lives. The products they consume are not national, nor are the
news contexts which determined the great collective movements, or, necessarily,
most of those with whom they discuss the news and whose opinions interest them.
National identities are becoming both too small and too large. They are
becoming alien.
It's not a rapid collapse. We must not forget that nations arose from real
need, and, despite that, their universalisation took almost two centuries and was
quite difficult to say the least, as it met with all kinds of resistances. The
abandonment of real communities where everyone knew everyone else's faces and
names in order to embrace a homeland, an abstract community where the others
were not personally known, was a costly and difficult process.
And in fact it's quite likely that the national State and nationalities will stay
with us for a long time, in the same way as Christianity still exists and some royal
houses still reign, even though nowadays national identities are politically dominant
and determining, and the world is politically organised into national States, not on
the basis of dynastic relationships or faith communities.
Many historians, politologists and sociologists nowadays foresee and even advocate a privatisation of national identity, a process which would be similar to the passage of religion into the personal and private domain that characterised the rise of the national State. But the issue is that such a privatisation, such a surpassing, can only take place from a set of alternative collective identities. And what's really interesting is that identitarian communities and virtual networks that seem capable of bringing about such a process are not only defined by their being trans-national, but they also display a nature that is very different from the respective natures of the great imagined identities of Modernity, such as nation, race, or the Marxist historical class. Their members know each other even if they have never physically met. They are in a certain sense real communities, or, more precisely, imagined communities that fall into reality.” …
The nation is still presented as a "natural" fact that we unconsciously seek in every "complete" political unit: a unified language, a unitary map/territory, a media-defined public sphere, and ideologically defined political subjects.
The nation, as a form of political organisation and identity, was much more
powerful, encompassing and massive than any of its predecessors because its
symbols linked institutions and power to everyone's identity, to the extent of
sustaining the configurative and determining power of the nation.
In the end, what is essential about the nation is its exclusive claim over its
identity as configurative, as generating co-nationals. It is the nation that makes the
nationals, not the nationals that make the nation. People belong to the nation; they
are a construct, a product of the "national reality", not the other way round. The
nation reinterprets the past looking back on its own historiography, which goes far
beyond the time when it was first imagined. In fact, it is the nation that gives rise to
History as a supposedly scientific and detached narrative, with the explicit aim of
conferring unity through time to the units that emerged from contemporary maps.
From Thiers to Stalin, the first form of nationalist imperialism was exerted over the
past, as a way of grounding the conversion of people's identities – people who had
ceased to be the subjects of History in order to be considered the products of the
recently discovered national History. Culture was redefined by the nation and from
the coffee house: ceasing to be a personal symbolic sediment in order to become a
supposedly constituent political phenomenon. “
In conclusion:
“In this brief biography of the national imaginary, we have seen how it emerged from a real need to imagine the new production and socialisation community generated by the market, as well as from the increase in labour division that became more evident and spread practically all over the planet between the 17th and 20th centuries. We have seen how that imagination took shape and reached its materialisation in the form of the national State born in the French Revolution and the American wars of independence. And finally, how its conversion into a culture state, constituting personal identities and the framework for all conflicts, established it practically into our day.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/Nations.pdf)