Re: Africa

Dear Hema:

I think you are right in trying to brush off the eurocentrism in the concept
of nation-state. For my part, I was using that concept in its most common
meaning, what you call Westphalian historiography, to express the idea that
conquerors imposed their own political culture and their own institutions to
the peoples they defeated. The new political organization was therefore, by
definition, alien to those peoples and to thier own social evolution.
In the other hand, I still think we need different words to define different
realities. The power structures in clans, tribes, fiefdoms, city-states,
kingdoms and empires are not equal. The feeling of pertaining to a tribe, to
a master or to a landlord is not the same as the feeling of nationality. The
allegiance to one person is not the same as the allegiance to a State, which
is an abstraction and can be explained only in terms of social and political
evolution.
The spanish and portuguese conquerors in Central and South America did not
bring parliamentary democracy -or any other form of democracy. But they did
brought their -very recently acquired and albeit incipient (after the union
of the kingdoms of Castilla and Aragon)- national identity and centralist
government . The subjects of the Inca empire had just been incorporated by
force to that empire, so they still had not developed a national identity.
They were not allowed to identify themselves with Spain or Portugal, but
they were forced to abandon their religion, their authorities -along with
all their social and political organization and values- and to work for the
international market of that time. Even though three centuries later they
became independent republics and adopted parliamentary
democracies -following european ideologies of the XVIII century- the lack of
national identity has been a patent problem until very recent times, and the
defeat of Mario Vargas Llosa in the 1990 elections in Peru or the
insurrection of the Zapatists in Mexico might be a sign that a cultural
fracture still exists in the region.
The concept of Nation-State is also very handy to try to explain some of the
upheaval of the post-cold war era. When we see what happens in ex-Yugoslavia
or ex-URSS, we know that they were, for a short moment in history,  one
state, but not one nation. When we heard about the single currency in
Europe, we can see that these nation-states are giving up their faculties in
an aspect that was previously thought to be crucial for sovereingty and,
therefore, for Statehood. Trading blocks,  regional groupings and
international courts tend to erase political boundaries that are already
overriden, anyway, by the global market.
So the Nation-State, with all its inconveniences, can serve as a political
unit of reference to describe a very important part of reality.
It also reminds us that the kind of political organization in which he live
now is not the only one possible; that there were many other forms of social
organization in the past, and that there will certainly be new forms in the
future. If we want to anticipate or understand what will happen in this
respect, we must be aware that history is a process of endless change, and
that we are now at a turning point. We need the words to say so.