Authors: Professor Michael Hardt,Antonio Negri
Tags: #Philosophy, #Political, #Political Science, #General, #American Government
carried the standard ofthe counterrevolutionary project on the
European continent. The continental conceptions ofthis spiritual
construction revived both the historical and the voluntarist traditions
ofthe nation and added to the conception ofhistorical development
S O V E R E I G N T Y O F T H E N A T I O N - S T A T E
105
a transcendental synthesis in national sovereignty. This synthesis is
always already accomplished in the identity ofthe nation and the
people. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, claims in more or less
mythological terms that the fatherland and the people are representa-
tives and gauges ofearthly eternity; they are what here on earth
can be immortal.24 The Romantic counterrevolution was in fact
more realistic than the Enlightenment revolution. It framed and
fixed what was already accomplished, celebrating it in the eternal
light ofhegemony. The Third Estate is power; the nation is its
totalizing representation; the people is its solid and natural founda-
tion; and national sovereignty is the apex ofhistory. Every historical
alternative to bourgeois hegemony had thus been definitively sur-
passed through the bourgeoisie’s own revolutionary history.25
This bourgeois formulation ofthe concept ofnational sover-
eignty surpassed by far all the previous formulations of modern
sovereignty. It consolidated a particular and hegemonic image of
modern sovereignty, the image ofthe victory ofthe bourgeoisie,
which it then both historicized and universalized. National particu-
larity is a potent universality. All the threads ofa long development
were woven together here. In the identity, that is, the spiritual
essence, ofthe people and the nation, there is a territory embedded
with cultural meanings, a shared history, and a linguistic community;
but moreover there is the consolidation ofa class victory, a stable
market, the potential for economic expansion, and new spaces to
invest and civilize. In short, the construction ofnational identity
guarantees a continually reinforced legitimation, and the right and
power ofa sacrosanct and irrepressible unity. This is a decisive shift
in the concept ofsovereignty. Married to the concepts ofnation
and people, the modern concept ofsovereignty shifts its epicenter
from the mediation of conflicts and crisis to the unitary experience
ofa nation-subject and its imagined community.
Subaltern Nationalism
We have been focusing our attention up to this point on the
development ofthe concept ofnation in Europe while Europe was
106
P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y
in the process ofachieving world dominance. Outside ofEurope,
however, the concept of nation has often functioned very differ-
ently. In some respects, in fact, one might even say that the function
ofthe concept ofnation is inverted when deployed among subordi-
nated rather than dominant groups. Stated most boldly, it appears
that
whereas the concept of nation promotes stasis and restoration in the
hands of the dominant, it is a weapon for change and revolution in the
hands of the subordinated.
The progressive nature ofsubaltern nationalism is defined by
two primary functions, each of which is highly ambiguous. Most
important, the nation appears as progressive insofar as it serves as
a line ofdefense against the domination ofmore powerful nations
and external economic, political, and ideological forces. The right
to self-determination of subaltern nations is really a right to secession
from the control of dominant powers.26 Anticolonial struggles thus
used the concept ofnation as a weapon to defeat and expel the
occupying enemy, and anti-imperialist policies similarly erected
national walls to obstruct the overpowering forces of foreign capital.
The concept ofnation also served as an ideological weapon to ward
off the dominant discourse that figured the dominated population
and culture as inferior; the claim to nationhood affirmed the dignity
ofthe people and legitimated the demand for independence and
equality. In each ofthese cases,
the nation is progressive strictly as a
fortified line of defense against more powerful external forces.
As much as those walls appear progressive in their protective function against
external domination, however, they can easily play an inverse role
with respect to the interior they protect. The flip side ofthe structure
that resists foreign powers is itself a dominating power that exerts an
equal and opposite internal oppression, repressing internal difference
and opposition in the name ofnational identity, unity, and security.
Protection and oppression can be hard to tell apart. This strategy
of‘‘national protection’’ is a double-edged sword that at times
appears necessary despite its destructiveness.
The nation appears progressive in the second place insofar as
it poses the commonality ofa potential community. Part ofthe
S O V E R E I G N T Y O F T H E N A T I O N - S T A T E
107
‘‘modernizing’’ effects of the nation in subordinated countries has
been the unification ofdiverse populations, breaking down reli-
gious, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic barriers. The unification of
countries such as Indonesia, China, and Brazil, for example, is
an ongoing process that involves overcoming innumerable such
barriers—and in many cases this national unification was prepared
by the European colonial power. In cases ofdiasporic populations,
too, the nation seems at times to be the only concept available
under which to imagine the community ofthe subaltern group—as,
for example, the Aztlań is imagined as the geographical homeland
of‘‘la Raza,’’ the spiritual Latino nation in North America. It
may be true, as Benedict Anderson says, that a nation should be
understood as an imagined community—but here we should recog-
nize that the claim is inverted so that
the nation becomes the only way
to imagine community!
Every imagination ofa community becomes
overcoded as a nation, and hence our conception ofcommunity
is severely impoverished. Just as in the context ofthe dominant
countries, here too the multiplicity and singularity ofthe multitude
are negated in the straitjacket ofthe identity and homogeneity of
the people. Once again, the unifying power of the subaltern nation
is a double-edged sword, at once progressive and reactionary.
Both ofthese simultaneously progressive and regressive aspects
ofsubaltern nationalism are present in all their ambiguity in the
tradition ofblack nationalism in the United States. Although de-
prived as it is ofany territorial definition (and thus undoubtedly
different from the majority of other subaltern nationalisms), it too
presents the two fundamental progressive functions—sometimes
by striving to pose itselfin an analogous position to the proper,
territorially defined nations. In the early 1960s, for example, after
the enormous impetus created by the Bandung Conference and the
emerging African and Latin American national liberation struggles,
Malcolm X attempted to redirect the focus ofdemands ofAfrican
American struggles from ‘‘civil rights’’ to ‘‘human rights’’ and thus
rhetorically shift the forum of appeal from the U.S. Congress to the
U.N. General Assembly.27 Malcolm X, like many African American
108
P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y
leaders at least since Marcus Garvey, clearly recognized the powerful
position ofspeaking as a nation and a people. The concept of
nation here configures a defensive position of
separation
from the hegemonic ‘‘external’’ power and at the same time represents the
autonomous power
ofthe unified community, the power ofthe people.
More important than any such theoretical and rhetorical prop-
ositions, however, are the actual practices ofblack nationalism, that
is, the wide variety ofactivities and phenomena that are conceived
by the actors themselves as expressions ofblack nationalism: from
community drill teams and parades to meal programs, separate
schools, and projects ofcommunity economic development and
self-sufficiency. As Wahneema Lubiano puts it, ‘‘Black nationalism
is significant for the ubiquity of its presence in black American
lives.’’28 In all these various activities and realms oflife, black nation-
alism names precisely the circuits ofself-valorization that constitute
the community and allow for its relative self-determination and
self-constitution. Despite the range of disparate phenomena called
black nationalism, then, we can still recognize in them the two
fundamental progressive functions of subaltern nationalism: the de-
fense and the unification of the community. Black nationalism can
name any expression ofthe separation and autonomous power of
the African American people.
In the case ofblack nationalism too, however, the progressive
elements are accompanied inevitably by their reactionary shadows.
The repressive forces of nation and people feed off the self-valoriza-
tion ofthe community and destroy its multiplicity. When black
nationalism poses the uniformity and homogeneity of the African
American people as its basis (eclipsing class differences, for example)
or when it designates one segment ofthe community (such as
African American men) as de facto representatives of the whole, the
profound ambiguity of subaltern nationalism’s progressive functions
emerges as clearly as ever.29 Precisely the structures that play a
defensive role with respect to the outside—in the interest of further-
ing the power, autonomy, and unity ofthe community—are the
same that play an oppressive role internally, negating the multiplicity
ofthe community itself.
S O V E R E I G N T Y O F T H E N A T I O N - S T A T E
109
We should emphasize, however, that these ambiguous progres-
sive functions ofthe concept ofnation exist primarily when nation
is not effectively linked to sovereignty, that is, when the imagined
nation does not (yet) exist, when the nation remains merely a
dream. As soon as the nation begins to form as a sovereign state,
its progressive functions all but vanish. Jean Genet was enchanted
by the revolutionary desire ofthe Black Panthers and the Palestin-
ians, but he recognized that becoming a sovereign nation would
be the end oftheir revolutionary qualities. ‘‘The day when the
Palestinians are institutionalized,’’ he said, ‘ I will no longer be at
their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like the other
nations, I will no longer be there.’’30 With national ‘‘liberation’’ and
the construction ofthe nation-state, all ofthe oppressive functions
of modern sovereignty inevitably blossom in full force.
Totalitarianism of theNation-State
When the nation-state does function as an institution of sovereignty,
does it finally manage to resolve the crisis ofmodernity? Does the
concept ofthe people and its biopolitical displacement ofsover-
eignty succeed in shifting the terms and the terrain of the synthesis
between constituent power and constituted power, and between
the dynamic ofproductive forces and relations ofproduction, in
such a way as to carry us beyond the crisis? A vast panorama of
authors, poets, and politicians (often emerging from progressive,
socialist, and anti-imperialist movements) have certainly thought
so. The conversion ofthe nineteenth-century Jacobin Left into a
national Left, the more and more intense adoption of national
programs in the Second and Third Internationals, and the nationalist
forms of liberation struggles in the colonial and postcolonial world
all the way up to today’s resistance ofnations to the processes of
globalization and the catastrophes they provoke: all this seems to
support the view that the nation-state does afford a new dynamic
beyond the historical and conceptual disaster ofthe modern sover-
eign state.31
We have a different perspective on the function of the nation,
however, and in our view the crisis ofmodernity remains resolutely
110
P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y
open under the rule ofthe nation and its people. When we take
up again our genealogy ofthe concept ofsovereignty in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Europe, it is clear that the state-form of
modernity first fell into the nation-state-form, then the nation-
state-form descended into a whole series of barbarisms. When class
struggle reopened the mystified synthesis ofmodernity in the early
decades ofthe twentieth century and demonstrated again the power-
ful antithesis between the state and the multitude and between
productive forces and relations of production, that antithesis led
directly to European civil war—a civil war that was nonetheless
cloaked in the guise ofconflicts among sovereign nation-states.32
In the Second World War, Nazi Germany, along with the various
European fascisms, stood opposed to socialist Russia. Nations were