Professor Craig Calhoun, Director of London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), visited Peking University (PKU) and delivered this speech on March 20th, 2013.
Professor Calhoun is a world-renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology to culture, communication, politics, philosophy and economics. He took up his post as LSE Director on September 1st, 2012, having left the United States where he was a professor at New York University and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge. From 1999 to 2012, he served as President of the Social Science Research Council in the USA. He is the author of several books including Nations Matter, Neither Gods Nor Emperors and most recently The Roots of Radicalism.
The modern world system has been organized largely in terms of nation states for about four hundred years. The nation state is not simply the same as any state. An empire, for example, is not a nation state. It brings together people of different nationalities. And indeed, becoming a nation state, in the history of China, involved a certain transformation in the way of thinking about how people belong to this society as a whole, linked to ideas like citizenship, membership. It was an important theme in the late period of imperial China continuing to 21st century. To say it was the theme of the transformation is to suggest that part of what the idea of nation meant is that, there was a new relationship between people of the society and its government, its state and such. So the notion of nation states connected the cultural identity of people, and also the political identity of people in the idea of participation in the nation state.
The form of the nation state grew up along with the international trade and international relations. So, there was never simply a first nation inside itself. This way of relating grew as an international connection often in warfares. It became the modern system of Capitalist Europe. Capitalist Europe was always organized in political terms mainly as a structure of nation states. It included overseas empires, so the European countries had imperial relations to the rest of the world. But inside Europe, empires never dominated. The nation state became the standard form, and gradually with the erection of the imperious relations around the world, nation states replaced empires. As nation states secured their independence, so did countries like India, which was previously not a nation state but secured its independence from British colonial rule, and which separated from Pakistan and became eternally integrated. The importance of seeing this is partly that it’s not the case that we always had nations, that nations are somehow an old and backward part of organization of human societies, and the new and modern is global relations. On the contrary, the nation developed in this new and modern context.
The new, modern and international context demanded changes. This wasn’t just a matter of technology and who had the superior technology. It was also a matter of the change in the character of the country. It meant strengthening the nation, encouraging new levels of education, new kinds of social participation to create a cohesive nation, because a cohesive nation could better compete with other nations internationally.
So nationalism isn’t the opposite of internationalism. It is partly produced by internationalism. The importance of this today is that is beccame very prominent in the west to regard the nationalist traditions as old against the new, as the inherited against the modern. And especially in the last thirty of forty years, in the era of globalisation, to suggest that nations would fade away. So it became a very widespread part of western political thoughts to expect a decline in nationalism, a decline of nations. This sometimes has a very positive account given to it, as for example, in the lauguage of cosmopolitism. It became widespread view that it was better to be cosmopolitan than national. But there was an illusion. It appears that a variety of issues and problems can only be resolved on national terms and require a sense of national belonging.
The globalism trend has produced a political theory of cosmopolitism, that we would have international human rights, international criminal court, and international organizastions to handle all matter of things. And there has been a fantastic growth in international organizations. But the world “international” is a clue that none of these international organizations operate autonomously from nation states. They exist as a result of treaties among nation states.
The way in which we build institutions remains overwhelmingly national. Now, that could change. That could be different way of organizing health care, social welfare and everything. We are here in part because we are building an international collaboration in higher education. So we have people who are doing joint degrees in Peking University, but the vast majority of education is still organized in national terms. So the need is for a new level of investment in nationally organized institutions.
In China, it is obvious that the nation still matters. It is a peculiar art of western theory to produce a vision of the fading away of nation states that flourished from the 1970s till the financial crisis. People expected global financial integration to bring a flow of people everywhere, and assumed institutions would serve everybody regardless of the nationality. But what has been brought home to us is the nations do still matter, and that only nations have an effective ability to deal with many of the most basic social issues. The nation won’t fade away. We will not simply have a world of individuals. Through our nations, we have to find ways to be effectively international if we are going to deal with a financial crisis or environmental crisis, or the threat of the war that we face in the world. The way forward then is to make nations better, not to imagine that we could live yet without nation states.
Edited by Liu Yiping and Lim Ruo Shuang
