Keyword: Nation

The following text is an unfinished computer translation from the website of Renate Dillmann, author of the book:

www.renatedillmann.de

Keyword:  nation

Nation is an elementary ideology of the bourgeois state with which the unity of state and people is asserted. The actual  relationship of power - the fact that the state subjugates its society by force, commits it to the validity of property, and thus sets it up as a class society - is reinterpreted into a community founded prior to the state, which the state power  serves and which it serves through the establishment of the national state.

Bourgeois states use power and means to subject their society to the validity of property and its increase. They productively manage the contradictions brought into being (–>  classes, welfare state, faux frais ) and work externally to promote the business opportunities of their entrepreneurs in order to initiate economic growth in which they participate.

Since the French Revolution, i.e. with the implementation of the bourgeois state, the  nation state has been the usual form of state formation. The external territorial demarcation corresponds internally to the constitution of the people of the state . On the one hand, it is based on the successful implementation of central government authority against all particular special interests (feudal, tribal, ethnic, religious, etc.) and the obligation of all citizens to the validity of property.

 However, it doesn't stop there. Civil rule demands more from its subjects than pure submission to the power of an authority and its laws: a relationship of obligation and solidarity based on will and consciousness that extends into the emotional world. “Italy is made, now we have to make Italians” (Massimo d'Azeglio, co-founder of the modern Italian nation state). In addition to the real declaration of responsibility that the state authorities practice towards its citizens by making them “its own” by means of a passport and subjection to its regulations (law) and claims (taxes, military service, etc.), It therefore attaches importance to a firmly anchored ideological interpretation of this power relationship. This is what the idea of ​​the nation or the creation of a national identity achieves.

In this construction , the state power, which otherwise  sets the law, refers to the nation as its obligatory  client . This fictition is a higher quality of law that is unavailable to the state itself. What the political class  wants becomes an  imperative that it raises. This imperative is said to have already existed with the existence of the state (in some cases even before). There are no justifiable detours about morality, demonstrable benefits for the subjects or other “irrelevant” considerations. The concept “Nation” introduces an absolute legal title for state action. The political actions that actually take place are mentally distinguished from this; they see themselves as a  service to this irrefutable overall purpose and are measured by it.

This is the content of the “national cause” with which every day-to-day political business receives its fundamental consecration.

“The people” is intended to be the ideal client of the sovereign. In this logic, the social characters of bourgeois society - workers, farmers, wholesale and small traders, manufacturers, bankers, rentiers and pensioners - who are in reality characterized by a series of differences and  conflicts, are turned into an ideal by combining them into a unity. It is not denied that the various “national comrades” enjoy and pay for their membership in the nation very differently; This is just interpreted differently: as a "differing" service that the social classes bring to the common “cause”.

Secondly, as a “national collective,” the  maneuvering mass of state power becomes a  subject whatever state rule does to it. Everything that happens to the state is attributed to the people as  its “history”. The results of political rule, which uses an entire group of people as its means, are thus reversed into the communal life process of a fictitious collective subject. Cause and effect are reversed.

These ideological reinterpretations of class society and its state support are not rejected. They are believed to be common property and an integral part of the civic self-image of a people.

The members of civil society pursue their interests as those of mutually exclusive private owners; their individual benefit only comes about as harm to others. When competing for money, they tend to disregard the freedom of their counterpart's property, which, conversely, appears to them as a threat to their property, their life, and their freedom from their fellow citizens. From this point of view, instead of “national togetherness” and “community”, they perceive the society on which they depend as punches and stabs (“bellum omnium contra omnes”, a war of all against all). In order to  protect  their interests as private owners, they  want society to  be subjugated to state authority, which also limits their personal interests legally and economically (laws and taxes), but thereby guarantees the general recognition and maintenance of person, property and society that they want to exploit to their advantage.

 In this way they calculatingly subordinate themselves to the power that has determined that they must pursue their own interests in their own way. They think egoistically of themselves - and thereby establish a relationship of fundamental loyalty to the authority that actually makes their “life” in the capitalist economy possible. And this applies across classes: even if only a minority of civil society gets their money's worth,  everyone actually needs the political violence of the state and its activities. Modern “social” capitalism has come to the point where those who are materially damaged are dependent on nothing more than on welfare state support for their poverty.

The  need of its citizens to forcefully look after their competition, enforced by the state through its property system, establishes the “insight” and effectiveness of the ideological interpretation that's offered. The citizens translate their practical dependence on state violence in their imagination into a unity of people and state in the idea of  "the nation", thus into the image of a serving, caring state power. They supplement the antagonistic relationship between competing private owners with the ideal of an inviolable national community: brotherhood.

 

Interim conclusion: “Nation” provides the necessary and appropriate  meaning compared to the shabby everyday life of competing interests in class society and its administration through political violence . All of this should be a service to the common and greater good -- so those who have been materially damaged should understand what is harming them and allow themselves to be encouraged to make further sacrifices. In this sense, “nation” functions like a secularized  religion .

The state and the people develop the need to give practical expression to the lie about unity, the national collective. A federal president, national days of remembrance, museums of national history, holidays of national culture offer and  demand the identification of the individual with “his” nation, just as the games of the national sports team do. The individual can and should experience themselves as part of a much more significant whole and be moved to deeply felt feelings by its successes, defeats and symbols of self-expression (flag, anthem).

In  citizenship law, the bourgeois state makes the ideology of a national identity that can be found in “its” people the practical guideline of its legislation. The state defines which individuals belong to it using biological (ius sanguinis) or territorial (ius soli) criteria. From these the state separates or sorts all others as subjects of foreign rule. If they want to stay in the state's territory, the state subjects them to its asylum or immigration law, thereby placing them under a general reservation and endowing them with inferior rights. They cannot become citizens of their own free will and decision - you cannot “join” a state like you can a sports club. However states regulate this in individual cases - such an act of approval is always based on the state's claim.

Externally, in the relationship between states, the appeal to the nation in the catalog of diplomatic instruments represents a high and therefore irrefutable legal title. Modern states enter into a relationship of calculating recognition among themselves in order to compete against one another economically (–> imperialism, diplomacy, world  market). This gives rise to a whole series of contradictions (in trade, money and capital movements, etc.) that states try to “regulate” to their advantage; To do this, they use the economic as well as political (and as a “last resort” military) (blackmail) means at their disposal. Modern states have a lot to negotiate diplomatically. In these negotiations, in addition to specific objects, the fundamental issue that is always discussed is the respect that the states as nations “generally” show each other – or refuse to do so. In the treatment of the ambassador who represents the nation, in the frequency of state visits, in cultural and youth exchanges, in the texts of school textbooks - everything shows or shows how one's own nation values ​​or disregards the foreign nation (and vice versa). National symbols are just as serious a topic as questions of war guilt that are still being raised decades later; and national legal titles such as the reference to a German minority that ended up somewhere in the Middle Ages are pulled out as needed - which sounds ridiculous, but it is not. The material substance lies in the fact that such childishness expresses the level of imperialist competition between states for superiority and subordination. When nations see “vital interests” being affected or national legal claims to territories and people are brought into play, all parties involved are responsible. The unconditionality of the claim presented is clear, which does not allow any compromises and which has the transition to violent conflict in sight or is approaching.

A nation's appearance in the world provides its citizens with material to prove themselves good patriots. They translate the real competition between states into an image of it; Depending on their worldview and taste, they compare balances of payments or sporting achievements, hard currencies or lifestyles. Normally, citizens are self-confident and proud members of their nation - and appear unpleasant abroad or towards foreigners; Critical minds are disappointed or ashamed (for example for past crimes) and in doing so only underline how excellent they actually think their nation is.

The  civil declaration of nation asserts a pre-state community of a group of people who create their own reality in the nation.

Language, history and culture are mentioned as criteria that connect these people or distinguish them from others - which is logically untenable. These moments do not necessarily result in nation states (see the various German-speaking state structures), nor are nation states necessarily dependent on their existence (see Switzerland as a trilingual state). On closer inspection, language, history and culture turn out to be  moments  created by the national state with which (among other things) it turns a number of people into its citizens  . For example, he sets a uniform language normally as a common standard language against all traditional dialects. Works by poets and thinkers are declared to be components of a national culture, regardless of whether or not they actually have this quality as a poem, piece of music, or thought. And people usually come to “their” common history when a state uses them as a means of its successes and defeats.

In this respect, language, history and culture have the value of  images that illustrate that the national connection between people is not based on the banal circumstance of their submission to a state power that makes them its subjects through a passport.

Modern considerations of the topic of the nation argue in  a functionalist manner . They note that the “nation myth” is a “construction” that a state puts into the world in order to create the necessary social cohesion in its society. Normally, however, this is neither intended as a criticism of “national identity” nor is it a prelude to the question of why the state and society need a lying “myth” as social “glue”.