In Defence of the Nation State: Part Three

Nations and nation states make up the international community. Globalisation and the development of supranational institutions such as the European Union affect the environment of Europe’s nation states but do not make them out of date.

Nationhood, shared membership of a national community, is the normal basis of democratic states in the modern world. This is shown by the advent of many new European nation states to the international community since 1989, and the likely advent of many more, in Europe and across the globe, as the 21st and 22nd centuries unfold. The following democratic principles are proposed as rational ways of approaching questions of nationhood, state sovereignty, internationalism and supranationalism. They are presented as expressing the classical approach of democrats to these issues.

Below we present the final chapters of this thought-provoking piece of work by an eminent, pro-Irexit, professor emeritus.

12) THE DOMINANCE OR ATTEMPTED DOMINANCE OF A PEOPLE BY THE GOVERNMENT AND POWER ELITES OF ANOTHER STATE IS IMPERIALISM AND AN AFFRONT TO DEMOCRACY

Imperialism can take the classical form of direct rule, in which a dominated people is openly treated as a colony, or the more modern form in which a people may have formal political independence but their resources and their external political and economic relations are largely under foreign control and are directed at continuing their dependence or subordination. Neo-colonial relations of this kind are common in the contemporary world between metropolitan powers and former colonies and are against the interests of the peoples of both. EU Commission President J.M. Barroso referred to the European Union as having a “dimension of empire”.

13) DEMOCRACY MEANS RIGHTS OF EQUALITY, WHICH PEOPLE AGREE TO ACCORD ONE ANOTHER AND WHICH THE STATE RECOGNISES

Democrats acknowledge the possession of equal rights by all citizens of a state, as well as equality of human rights between people of different sex, race, religion, age and nationality, based on their common humanity. Ethnic minorities are entitled to have their rights protected within a democratic state. Majority rights and minority rights are different from one another but are not in principle incompatible. The struggle against racism, sexism, ageism and national oppression are all democratic questions, concerned with equality.

By contrast, the traditional issues which divide political Right and Left in modern industrial societies, proponents of capitalism and socialism, are concerned with inequality – in ownership and control of society’s productive forces, in power, possessions, income and social function. The mass democracy that historically was first achieved under capitalism serves to legitimate and make more tolerable the inequalities of power, wealth and income of capitalist society.

Traditional left-wing thought holds that capitalism creates the material conditions for the application of the principle of democracy to the economic sphere, in the form of socialism, social democracy or a social market economy. Socialism, or indeed any other “-ism”, requires the prior attainment of national independence. The old adage holds: “Attain first the political kingdom and then all other values will be added unto one.”

Traditional right-wing thought extols the rights of the individual against the collective as embodied in the state and upholds the competitive market provision of goods and services as being more efficient than state provision. Traditional leftwing thought extols collective as against individual rights and champions public provision of essential goods and services. Sensible people acknowledge that both public and private provision are necessary in their respective spheres, that there needs to be a creative tension between the two and that their boundaries are ever shifting in line with technological development and the changing balance of class forces in society.

Political parties and movements of Right and Left tend to be divided between those that understand the importance of national independence and democracy and those that do not.

14) GLOBALIZATION CHANGES THE ENVIRONMENT OF NATION STATES, BUT DOES NOT MAKE THEM OUT OF DATE . . . INTERNATIONALISM, NOT GLOBALIZATION, IS THE WAY TO A HUMANE FUTURE

The notion that “globalization” makes the nation state out of date is an ideological one. Globalization is at once a description of fact and an ideology, a mixture of “is” and “ought”. It refers to important trends in the contemporary world: ease of travel, free trade, free movement of capital, the internet, the world-wide impact of man-made climate change and pandemics. The effect of these on the sovereignty of states is often exaggerated. States have always been interdependent to some extent. There was relatively more globalization, in the sense of freer movement of labour, capital and trade, in the late nineteenth century than there is today, although the volumes involved were much smaller. At that time also most states were on the gold standard, a form of international money. By contrast modern states do more for their citizens, are expected by them to do more, and impinge more intimately on peoples’ lives than at any time in history, most obviously in providing public services and redistributing the national income.

Globalization imposes new constraints on states, but constraints there always have been. States adapt to such changes, but they do not cause nation states to disappear or become less important. Globalization as an ideology refers to the interests of transnational capital, which wishes to be free of state control on capital movements and seeks minimal social constraints on private capital owners. The relation of transnational capital to sovereign states is ambivalent. On the one hand it seeks to erode the sovereignty of states in order to weaken their ability to impose constraints on private profitability and restrain “the furies of private interest”. On the other hand individual transnational businesses look to their own state, where the bulk of their share ownership is usually concentrated, to defend their political and economic interests internationally when these are threatened.

Liberal individualism is the creed of the opponents of national sovereignty and those whose income and lifestyle make them beneficiaries of globalization. This creed proposes to erode the solidarities of nation, community and family in the interest of creating a society of atomised consumers and homogenized producers, global in extent, where transnational capital decides fundamental policy and national sovereignty is abolished or weakened. This creed is anti-human and all decent people who understand the evils it gives rise to will reject it.

15) PEOPLE ON THE POLITICAL LEFT AND RIGHT HAVE A COMMON INTEREST IN ESTABLISHING AND MAINTAINING STATE SOVEREIGNTY AND IN UPHOLDING NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE AND DEMOCRACY

People on the political Right want the state to legislate right-wing measures, people on the political Left want left-wing ones; but neither can have either unless they are citizens of an independent state in the first place, which possesses the relevant legislative power and competence to decide. That is why people who are politically Right or Left have an objective common interest in establishing and maintaining an independent state and a government that represents and is responsible to the nation.

Likewise, within each state different social interests align themselves for and against the maintenance of state sovereignty, seeking either to uphold or to undermine national democracy. This is a central theme of the politics of our time. It is why democrats in every European country today, whether on the political Centre, Left or Right, are potentially part of an international movement in defence of the nation state and national democracy, and against the political and economic forces that seek to undermine these – most obviously the European Union in our part of the world.

16) STATES HAVE THE RIGHT TO PROTECT THEIR CIVIC OR ETHNIC COHESIVENESS, AND THEIR LABOUR STANDARDS, BY CONTROLLING IMMIGRATION, BUT NOT AT THE COST OF DISCRIMINATING AGAINST ETHNIC OR NATIONAL MINORITIES WITHIN THEIR BORDERS

There is no international, positive or natural legal right that entitles people to migrate to live and work in other peoples’ countries – apart from political asylum seekers, who are recognised as possessing such rights under international and natural law. Independent states have the right to decide who shall settle in their territories and how newcomers may acquire rights of citizenship. At the same time, once people of different national or ethnic origins have settled in a country, they have the right to be treated the same as everyone else.

It is evidence of how the European Union erodes the sovereignty of its member states that the government of each EU country must now extend such classical components of citizenship as rights to residence, work and social maintenance to the citizens of all other EU member states as a requirement of supranational EU law. The EU member states have surrendered the right to decide such matters, something that is a fundamental abandonment of their sovereignty and democracy by their europhile politicians. Two distinct democratic principles are involved in assessing international migration policy: the right of national communities to protect their social and cultural cohesiveness and integrity, and their labour standards, in face of uncontrolled or excessive immigration, and the right to equal treatment of all people within a country. Confusing these two rights impedes rational discussion of migration issues.

17) PROTECTING HUMAN RIGHTS IS A PRIME DUTY OF SOVEREIGN STATES

No one state or group of states has the right to constitute itself an international policeman over the domestic affairs of other states. International action to protect human rights should be grounded in respect for state sovereignty. This principle can be overborne only in accordance with the generally recognised principles of international law based on a broad consensus of the world community – the two recognised conditions for such international intervention nowadays being if one state violates the frontiers of another by force or if a state attempts genocide against an ethnic group within its borders.

18) DEMOCRATIC STATES WILL SEEK TO MINIMISE RENT-SEEKING BEHAVIOUR WHEREBY MONOPOLY OWNERSHIP OR CONTROL OF SCARCE ASSETS CONFERS A BENEFIT ON THEIR POSSESSORS REGARDLESS OF ANY EFFORT OR INVESTMENT ON THEIR PART

The classical example of rent-seeking that confers an unearned income is the ownership of land or other natural resources. In modern societies rentierism extends to monopoly control of intellectual property, digital platforms, financial assets, government licenses to private providers and public outsourcing contracts. Private monopoly or limited competition in such areas inhibits technological innovation, discourages economic development and aggravates income inequality. Democratic states will oppose rentierism and rent-seeking behaviour by means of anti-monopoly and competition policy, tax policy and public credit and investment policy.

19) MANKIND IS AS YET AT A RELATIVELY EARLY STAGE OF DEMOCRACY

The human race is some 1,000,000 years old, history some 4000 years, industrialism 400 or so, and political democracy, understood as provision of the universal franchise and the recognition that all men and women possess human rights regardless of where they live, has existed for little more than a century.

Over much of the world these rights are still denied and many nations that seek statehood are denied their right to self-determination. At the same time the universal franchise is only one dimension of democracy. It is of limited value in the absence of fair and proportional voting systems and controls on electoral spending to prevent the rich and powerful “buying” votes.

Other desirable dimensions of political democracy on the basis of the universal franchise, but which most states do not yet recognise, are direct legislation by citizens through referendums, the right of a specific number of citizens to initiate a referendum and rules for fairness in referendums, the institution of term-limits for holders of public office to encourage the circulation of political elites, provision for the recallability of public representatives who flout their election pledges by enabling voters to force a by-election if an agreed percentage demand it, and establishing an optimal balance of central and local government to encourage citizen participation in public administration and efficient provision of public services. People will be struggling to establish such democratic rights as these for centuries to come.

20) REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT CAN TAKE DIFFERENT FORMS

Every electoral system has its pros and cons. Proportional systems are more democratic than winner-take-all ones. While different proportional systems seek to ensure that the parliamentary representation of different parties is in proportion to the number of citizen-voters supporting them, the so-called “additional member” or “alternative vote top-up” system would seem to have most advantages and least disadvantages among these. Under this proportional system voters chose their parliamentary representatives in single-member constituencies by allocating their preferences among the various candidates, these preferences being then distributed so as to ensure that whoever it elected has at least half of the votes in each constituency. The disproportionality in the whole country that necessarily arises from having single-member constituencies is then compensated for by having the number of those elected in such seats “topped up” by representatives drawn from a party list – typically covering a quarter to a third of all the seats – so that the overall national result is proportional. A minimum quota of the national vote is required to get representation for the party list. Voters therefore have two votes in national elections, one for their local constituency representative and the other for the national party whose list of candidates they favour.

- By Anthony Coughlan, Emeritus Professor, Dublin

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