• consumer

• labor

• capitalist

• nation-state

1. Why is the nation-state so important?

2. Current thinking, less than a nation-state is equated with backwardness -- think how we conceptualize about sectarian divisions in Iraq

3. States go back 6000-7000 years

   defined by have monopoly over the means of violence as well as a defined stratification system

4. Nation-state is defined as

   common territory; common culture; common language, or common race
   This is a 19th century creation

• Many theories from social contract of folks like Hobbes to Marx's theory of domination of nature; hard to say for sure but....

• Modern nation-state emerges 200-300 years ago,

• up until then, loyalties were not to such an omnipotent organizational structure

• The idea of a nation involves "an imagined political community."

  What does this mean?

• Is the nation part of nation-state purely ideological?

• Is the state apparatus the structural/practical aspect of Nation-State?

• What is nationalism or patriotism?

• Do you watch events like the Olympics? How are you suppose to feel?

"The modern state has the following tasks: to secure obedience and gain a monopoly on force with legitimate violence; to exert control over economic life to ensure the orderly circulation of goods and to take for itself a share of the national income to pay for its own expenditure, luxury, administration, or wars; and to participate in spiritual or religious life and derive additional strength by using religious values or establishing a state religion."

• Wallerstein points out; the state was a necessary player in the making of the world economy

• State faced two problems at start of 19th century
  1. It had to provide a foundation for it's own legitimacy. That is, divine right had disappeared. (Think, if the rational to go to war is WMD and they are not found, to continue on course you need a new set of motives that folks will accept to legitimize your actions again.) What vocabularies of motives will people be willing to accept as right and just?
     Natural Rights protected by a social contract?

  2. State must bring economic uniformity to all within it's boarders. Nationalism was yet in its infancy.

  3. People living within boarders often had little in common, including language (<3% of "Italians spoke Italian as native lang.)

  4. As Robbins points out:

     "Thus nations had to be created: Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, and Americans had to be manufactured by convincing them they had something in common, preferably loyalty and devotion to their respective states." (113)

• Traditions need to be constructed; through design, trickery, coercion, use of force, appeal to self-interest, rational arguments, a whole host of mechanisms, people are forced into a common heritage of culture, language, beliefs, etc. (think about adaptation and acculturation of incoming immigrants into the U.S. - the Polish Peasant)

• Creating the Other (here we can think about LOST with John Locke)
  • Uniting groups of diverse backgrounds against outsiders is one way to produce unity
    The "OTHER"

  • Creating the Church of England and forcing it on everyone creates a unified religion but it only worked because it pitted them against the Catholics and thus the arch enemy is born - Catholic France

  • Establishing colonies also generates "others"
    we are clearly better than they are (Do you think Martineaus's advice to travelers was in part based on this innate sense of superiority and paternalism?)

  • What "Other" does, outsiders, deviants, racial groups, gender (?), etc. is to help produce an common IDENTITY, a "we"
    do we not feel superior to our neighbors north and south of us?

  • More is needed however than just Nation (sense of collective identity)

  • also need structure to tie people together; the national, bureaucratic infrastructure

    {attitude and behavior change to get what is needed}

• Building infrastructure is crucial

• transportation to physically tie people together

• military conscription or at least presence

• education system (the great American melting pot)

• linguistic unity or a national language

• subverting local to national interests (why cover national news during local news broadcasts?)

  
  letting people converse in a different language encourages celebrating differences, can't have that!
  Now it gets tricky. How do you encourage learning new languages necessary of global market mentality and still maintain nationalistic control?

• Creation of National Holidays (When does this happen in the U.S.?)

• Doing away with local practices (destruction) or converting them to national rituals (conversion)

• In the end it may be that education has been the key tool (whether completely effective or not is debatable)

  the teaching of history, a common history, will imbue one with truth, justice, and the american way

• schools replaced state violence as the ultimate instrument of state power "monopoly on legitimate education became more important than the monopoly on legitimate violence to build a common national identity..."

• What might be the purpose, or at least one purpose, of no child left behind?

  who is left behind?

  Why are we worried about that now?

• use of violence to subdue all non-conformist, political (socialists, anarchists, etc), economic (labor organizers, etc.), those owing allegiances to different groups (racial, ethnic, etc. AIM, Black Panthers, etc.)

• Think about Rockefeller in Colorado, Wounded Knee, Homestead, Kent State, 1968 Democratic convention, on and on

• Use of violence outside of the borders, multiple wars fought in the name of nationalism or making the world safe for _____ fill in the blank

• What distinguishes state terrorism from what we accuse terrorist groups from doing?

  Robbins quotes Jeffery Sluka:

  "...if terrorism means political intimidation by violence or its threat, and if we allow the definition to include violence by states and agents of states, then we find that the major form of terrorism in the world today is practiced by states and their agents and allies, and that quantitatively, anti-state terrorism pales into relative insignificance in comparison to it."

Wouldn't it be funny, if in the end someone like Saint Simon was closer to the true vision of the future world?