David Graeber's reflections on money, debt, and violence

David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years has hit a chord with a lot of people who are concerned about rising inequalities in the United States and elsewhere.  Graeber is an economic anthropologist, a discipline that pays close attention to the ways that material arrangements worked in detail in pre-state societies. One of the great works in this field is Marshall Sahlins' book, Stone Age Economics, which paid very close ethnographic attention to how the social arrangements worked in hunter-gatherer societies when it came to gathering and consuming food and other necessities of life. (My main recollection is that Sahlins found that hunter-gatherers worked much shorter days than their successors, the farmers, and had much more time to enjoy the finer things of life, including stories and jokes.)  Graeber is also described as one of the intellectual sources of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and anti-globalization activism has been an important part of his life for a long time.  (Here is a story in Bloomberg that gives a lot of interesting background.)

The book is difficult to characterize.  It's about debt and money through history, but it's really not a work in economic history.  It offers a lot of ethnographic detail about borrowing, lending, gifting, and reciprocating, but it's not really a work of anthropology.  And it offers morally valenced language to describe debt and credit, but it's not really a polemical critique of the present financial system.  It is certainly an engaging, interesting, and thought-provoking book, and Graeber appears to know a great deal about the social and institutional histories of the main civilizations of Eurasia.

One line of thought is perfectly clear in the book: Graeber wants to demolish the myth of the truck-and-barter origins of money.  This is the standard story within classical and neoclassical economics. But Graeber thinks it is a complete fiction.  He regards this as a just-so story that doesn't make any sense ethnographically, and has never been observed in real pre-state societies.

The story, then, is everywhere. It is the founding myth of our system of economic relations. It is so deeply established in common sense, even in places like Madagascar, that most people on earth couldn't imagine any other way that money could possibly have come about.

The problem is there's no evidence that it ever happened, and an enormous amount of evidence suggesting that it did not. (28)

Graeber's case for this position seems to be a sound one.  But why exactly does it matter?  It seems to be a bit analogous to literal-minded social contract arguments: that the state is legitimate because it descends from a primordial agreement among all citizens to create its authority.  But discrediting the origins story doesn't really tell us anything about the functioning system.  We have an economic system today that coordinates activity through money and credit, and it doesn't really matter very much if we know exactly how it came about.  I think that Graeber is focused on the issue because he thinks the myth helps to convey the view that the contemporary economist's view of human activity -- self-serving actions designed to maximize one's own utility -- is in fact an historical universal, applying to pre-modern and non-western social settings as well as to the New Orleans cotton exchange.

It's money that had made it possible for us to imagine ourselves in the way economists encourage us to do: as a collection of individuals and nations whose main business is swapping things. (44)

Graeber's view, by contrast, is that most human activity doesn't conform to this model; that the gift relation and the practice of open-ended reciprocity are much more characteristic of the human condition.

There are many startling facts and descriptions that Graeber produces as he tells his story of the development of the ideologies of money, credit, and debt.  One of the most interesting to me has to do with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform -- vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. ... According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn't have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman was the industrial proletariat (who didn't have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn't have the courage to intervene). ... "Oz" is of course the standard abbreviation for "ounce." (52)

(This is roughly as startling to me as an interpretation of Star Wars as an extended allegory on Reaganism (intervention in Nicaragua, scary military officers in the background, etc.). This doesn't quite work, though, since Star Wars appeared in 1977, three years before Reagan's first election as president.)

One of Graeber's recurring themes is that money and debt are reciprocals of each other.  He tells many stories about IOU's being passed around within a community: John promises to give X to Alice; Alice passes on the IOU to Robbie in exchange for a beer; Robbie takes the IOU to the nail shop and exchanges it for a pound of nails from Bert; and Bert eventually comes back to John to redeem the IOU. In this circuit, the statement of debt serves as a basis for folk currency within a local society.  But Graeber argues that the establishment of Bank of England resulted in bank notes that were no more or less than IOU's from the state (49).

Another theme that comes into the book is the close connection that Graeber draws between money and currency, and violence and war.  He argues that trust and extended credit arrangements work very well during periods of peace; whereas a period of extended warfare puts a premium on the portability and anonymity of precious metals.  So warfare pushes societies (and monarchs) towards the use of currency made out of precious metals.  He goes further: monarchs needed to pay their armies, in Europe, central Asia, and East Asia; and precious metals (coins) work best for the heavily armed and footloose soldiers who made up those armies.

As a result, while credit systems tend to dominate in periods of relative social peace, or across networks of trust (whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions like merchant guilds or communities of faith), in periods characterized by widespread war and plunder, they tend to be replaced by precious metal. (213)

And:

The Atlantic Slave Trade as a whole was a gigantic network of credit arrangements. Ship-owners based in Liverpool or Bristol would acquire goods on easy credit terms from local wholesalers, expecting to make good by selling slaves (also on credit) to planters int he Antilles and America, with commission agents in the city of London ultimately financing the affair through the profits of the sugar and tobacco trade. (149)

Graeber has a preferred alternative to a society based on barter, market exchange, debt, warfare, slavery, and peonage.  It is what he calls a "human economy":

This is why I developed the concept of human economies: ones in which what is considered really important about human beings is the fact that they are each a unique nexus of relations with others -- therefore, that no one could ever be considered exactly equivalent to anything or anyone else.  In a human economy, money is not a way of buying or trading human beings, but a way of expressing just how much one cannot do so. (207)

An intriguing, and somewhat perplexing, part of Graeber's analysis is his effort to link the value systems of Eurasia's great civilizations to the social creation of money, credit, and debt.  A central thrust here is his analysis of the "Axial Age" -- the period from 800 bc to 600 ad when there was great creativity in the emergence of new spiritual leaders and movements.  There was, simultaneously, extensive warfare; and there was the simultaneous invention of currency in several widely separated places.  He illustrates this nexus with the case of China:

The golden age of Chinese philosophy was the period of chaos that preceded unification [during the Warring States period], and this followed the typical Axial Age pattern: the same fractured political landscape, the same rise of trained, professional armies and the creation of coined money largely in order to pay them. We also see the same government policies designed to encourage the development of markets, chattel slavery on a scale not seen before or since in Chinese history, the appearance of itinerant philosophers and religious visionaries, battling intellectual schools, and eventually, attempts by political leaders to transform the new philosophies into religions of state. (235)

So what is the connection he wants to draw between value systems, social violence, and money?  It is unclear to me; somehow Graeber weaves together a fascinating narrative involving each of these. He does think there is a connection, but it's difficult to see what is thought to be causal in the story.

In fact, some of the historical connections are so uncannily close that they are very hard to explain any other way. Let me give an example. After the first coins were minted around 600 bc in the kingdom of Lydia, the practice quickly spread to Ionia, the Greek cities of the adjacent coast. The greatest of these was the great walled metropolis of Miletus, which also appears to have been the first Greek city to strike its own coins.  It was Ionia, too, that provided the bulk of the Greek mercenaries active in the Mediterranean at the time, with Miletus their effective headquarters. Miletus was also the commercial center of the region, and perhaps, the first city in the world where everyday market transactions came to be carried out primarily in coins instead of credit. Greek philosophy, in turn, begins with three men: Thales, of Miletus (c. 624 bc- c546 bc), "Anaximander, of Miletus (c. 610 bc- c546 bc), and Anaximenes, of Miletus (c. 585 bc- c525 bc) -- in other words, men who were living in that city at exactly the time that coinage was first introduced. (244)

He pulls out "materialism" as a thread in the philosophical systems that emerged in the Axial Age -- China as well as Greece -- and suggests an analogy between the idea of an abstract fundamental physical substance that is the substrate of everything physical, and the idea of an abstract unit of measure of all commodities, money (245); but it's hard to see a consistent and compelling idea here about the intertwining development of philosophy and economics.  Here is the closest he comes to a statement of the nature of the connection he finds:

What we see then is a strange kind of back-and-forth, attack and riposte, whereby the market, the state, war, and religion all continually separate and merge with one another. (248)

Where does it all lead?  After a walk through the Middle Ages (major improvement in quality of life over the Axial Age, according to Graeber), we get to capitalism:

Starting from our baseline date of 1700, then, what we see at the dawn of modern capitalism is a gigantic financial apparatus of credit and debt that operates -- in practical effect -- to pump more and more labor out of just about everyone with whom it comes into contact, and as a result produces an endlessly expanding volume of material goods. (346)

Does he bring this parable to a practical piece of advice?  He does, actually:

In this book I have largely avoided making concrete proposals, but let me end with one. It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one's debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way. (390)

As I mentioned at the start, Graeber is also an activist who has been strongly involved in anti-globalization protests in the past fifteen years.  His Direct Action: An Ethnography is an interesting cross-over book bringing together his anthropologist's training and his activist experience; it is an ethnography of the anarchist activism movement as he has experienced it.  I'll discuss this work in a future post.

Here are two interviews with Graeber that give a pretty good idea of his style and critical views about the present (link, link).  Both are very interesting to listen to.

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,economic development

Is justice a security issue?

Most people would probably say they would prefer to live in a more just world to a less just one. There is a strong moral basis for preferring justice. But is this a consideration that states and large international organizations need to take into account as they design their strategies and plans for serving their present and future interests? Do national governments have good practical reasons to think about the consequences their policies and actions may have on the circumstances of justice in the world? What about policies and actions through which states attempt to secure their future economic wellbeing -- do policy makers need to pay attention to the social justice consequences of these actions?

There is a strong empirical and historical case for thinking that the answer to this question is "yes." Injustice is a source of resentment, indignation, and conflict. In the long run, the victims of injustice will not be ignored. Justice is a security issue for states and supra-national organizations, and simple prudence demands that policy makers take it into account. To put a simple label on this idea, justice is a security issue.

Here is a European Union statement about its longterm interests that makes this point fairly explicitly (link):

In the context of ever-increasing globalisation, the internal and external aspects of security are inextricably linked. Flows of trade and investment, the development of technology and the spread of democracy have brought prosperity and freedom to many people, while others have perceived globalisation as a cause of frustration and injustice. In much of the developing world, poverty and diseases such as AIDS give rise to security concerns, and in many cases economic failure is linked to political problems and violent conflict. Security is a precondition for development. Competition for natural resources is likely to create further turbulence. Energy dependence is a special concern for Europe.

What are the theoretical and historical arguments for this conclusion? Here are several.

On the side of theory, several points are well established. Chronic and unrelieved poverty leaves people with low attachment to their own societies and less for the global community. The frustration of very basic human needs is bound to fuel indignation and resistance. So poverty and deprivation are causes of resistance. But there is also evidence that inequality itself has negative consequences for a society's health; this is the central finding of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (link). Finally, the social psychology created by a system that is perceived to be unfair and exploitative is likely to breed resistance and lawless action. Barrington Moore, Jr. was right when in Injustice he wrote:

Without strong moral feelings and indignation human beings will not act against the social order. In this sense moral convictions become an equally necessary element for changing the social order, along with alterations in the economic structure. 469

Gareth Stedman-Jones summarizes Barrington Moore's conclusion in these terms: "His argument is that human beings in stratified societies accept hierarchies of authority, so long as these hierarchies are not merely imposed by force, but based upon an 'unwritten' social contract, which binds together dominant and subordinate groups in a set of mutual obligations" (link).

So there are good empirical reasons, based in social psychology and the study of contentious politics, for expecting that injustice breeds conflict.

Are there historical demonstrations of the consequences of injustice for disorder? There are. We have the examples of slave revolts throughout the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries; anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia following World War II; the sustained resistance of the Burmese and East Timor peoples to dictatorship; and the sustained struggle for equal rights in the United States by African Americans, sometimes punctuated by major urban riots. In each case a set of social institutions had been created that were profoundly unjust for a sizable population, and this population gathered resolve and courage in opposing those arrangements.

So the conclusion seems clear. If we want to have a world in which there is a sustainable level of the rule of law and a low level of social conflict, we need to invest in justice. We need to work to create a system in which all peoples can satisfy their most basic human needs; where everyone can feel that he/she is respected in her humanity; and where no one judges that the basic structure of social life is exploitative.

In other words, states are well advised to actively include the basic requirements of justice in their plans for the future. Otherwise they are simply creating the tinder for future conflict.

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,globalization,justice,labor rights,poverty

Civil society in a globalizing world

An important component of western political theory since Locke and Rousseau is the notion of civil society—the idea of a society in which members have a variety of cross-cutting activities and associations, and where the state is not the sole source of social power. On this conception, a civil society is one that is characterized by multiple associations, free activities and choices by individuals, and a framework of law that assures rights and liberties for all citizens. It is a society with multiple forms of power and influence, minimizing the potential for exploitation and domination by powerful elites or the state. And it is a society in which citizens have developed a sense of mutual respect and consideration for each other. The fact of civil association serves to enhance the strength of collective identities among citizens, by building new loyalties and affiliations. Citizenship and unity are built through association with other citizens and the knowledge that they can pursue their interests and values through their associations (Robert Putnam, Better Together: Restoring the American Community, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community). But we can emphasize as well the importance of civil associations as a counterweight to the power of the state. Citizens have greater security when they can be confident that the state cannot act against their interests with impunity.

What is involved in sustaining a civil society? What are the conditions that enhance civility within a community? There are several factors that are particularly important. There is solidarity—some degree of shared identity among the individuals who make up the society as groups with interests in common. There is a sense of justice—confidence that the basic institutions are fair to all. There is confidence in the future, that one’s children will have reasonable (and improved) life prospects. There is a sense of dignity—of being treated with human dignity, of being assigned equal human worth. And there is a need for stable, fair, and predictable institutions that give citizens the confidence that they can pursue activities, form associations, and engage in civil discourse without fear. When these conditions are satisfied we can have the greatest confidence in the stability and flourishing of a civil society.

Several of these features fall within the concept of what John Rawls calls a well-ordered society. Rawls introduced the concept of a well-ordered society in A Theory of Justice. It is the conception of society “as a fair system of cooperation over time from one generation to the next, where those engaged in cooperation are viewed as free and equal citizens and normal cooperating members of society over a complete life” (Justice as Fairness: A Restatement : 4). Citizens within a well-ordered society respect one another; they have confidence that their most basic interests are fairly treated; and they have confidence that the basic institutions of society permit them fair access and permit them to pursue their conceptions of the good. A well-ordered society is thus a powerful and pervasive foundation for a stable society, and justice is an important causal factor in sustaining and reproducing a society. The underlying hypothesis is that shared moral values, including particularly the values, that determine the terms of social interaction, create the grounds of stability in a society. And profound disagreement about these values creates the possibility of serious conflict. (Here are a few earlier postings on Rawls's views in this area; link, link).

These ideas find their most common application in the context of local or national communities. How does this concept pertain to the idea of a world society? Is there any meaning we can assign to the notion of a global civil society? Or does this concept apply only to connected populations engaged in face-to-face interactions with each other? Is a global civil society feasible? This would be a world in which all persons recognize and respect the human reality and worth of all others—near and far. It is a world in which people are tied together through cross-cutting civil associations—local, national, and international.  These may include labor organizations, women’s organizations, environmental organizations, or religious groups. It is a world in which persons share a sense of justice—they share a basic agreement on the essential fairness of the institutions that govern their lives. And it is a world in which all people have grounds for hope for the future—that there are opportunities for them to improve their lives, that they will have fair access to these opportunities, and that their children will have better lives than they themselves have had. Such a world has every prospect of sustaining stable, peaceful, and civil social life—both local and international.

How does a theory of global justice relate to this vision (The Paradox Of Wealth And Poverty: Mapping The Ethical Dilemmas Of Global Development)? The connections are profound. Justice requires an urgent commitment to ending poverty throughout the world. It requires a commitment to democracy and human rights—and the effective legal institutions that can secure both. It entails adherence to the values of fairness and human equality, and the importance of reshaping international institutions with these values in mind. And these are precisely the values that are needed to establish the basis of peaceful civil society. If these values are genuinely and deeply embedded in our planning for the future—and if the people of the developing world become convinced that these are real, guiding priorities for the people and governments of the wealthy world—then the potential bonds of international civility will be established. And at the country level the positive institutions of law, democracy, and economic opportunity will reinforce the values of civility and mutual respect.

So the important values that pertain to just global development are arguably critical to a decent future for humanity. A world order that is not grounded in a permanent commitment to human dignity and justice is not only disqualified from the perspective of morality. It is likely to be an increasingly unstable and violent arena for deep and desperate conflict. So for our own sakes and for the sake of future generations we need to commit ourselves in practical and enduring ways to the establishment of global justice, an end to poverty, and the extension of effective democratic and human rights to all persons in all countries.

Three specific points are particularly central. First, poverty is not simply a problem for the poor or for poor countries. Rather, it is a problem for the world, and one that we must confront with determination and resources. This means that we need to develop plans that have a likelihood of success for poverty alleviation; we need to work toward the political consensus that will be needed in order to carry these plans out; and we need to exercise our democratic rights and voices so as to bring about the large commitment of resources that will be needed.  The Millenium Development Goals place this as the first priority (link).

Second, the equality of worth of all persons is an essential moral fact. All persons are equally deserving of attention. And much follows from this fact. The extreme inequalities of life prospects between citizens of the north and the south are inconsistent with this principle. The persistence of anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes throughout the developing world is inconsistent with the equal rights and worth of the citizens who suffer under those regimes. And the inequalities of voice that are present in current international institutions represent an affront to the moral equality of all persons who are affected by those institutions.

Finally, democracy and human rights are critical. It is only through effective democratic institutions for government and decision-making that the interests and concerns of citizens will be aggregated into just policies and progressive social institutions. Democratic institutions permit all citizens to influence the policies that affect the terms of their lives, and they represent a meaningful obstacle to the emergence of exploitation and domination of the powerless by elites.

Are there examples of international settings that embody some of the features of a global civil society? The European Union, and the pan-European institutions and identities that the EU is in the process of forging, offer a promising example of a system that can bring about a just international order. Here we find fledgling experiments in the creation of solidarities that transcend language, religion, nation, or place. And we find an emerging discourse of solidarity that may provide the political basis that will be needed to bring about global justice (and the international transfer of resources and knowledge that this will require). There is a measure of “global thinking” among European citizens that offers a basis for optimism about the feasibility of an engaged world citizenry. OECD institutions have already gone a long way in the direction of giving meaningful priority to the needs of developing countries. The OECD and the Development Assistance Committee represent effective and broadly supported institutional agents of change within the processes of economic development. And surveys of European public opinion suggest an emerging and strengthening public support for global justice (link, link).

Finally, what does the concept of a global civil society imply for the durability of national or cultural identities? Can the Brazilian, Sikh, or Muslim at the same time be a member of a global civil society? This question can be posed at virtually every level of scale—village, region, nation, or global system. And the answer is everywhere the same. One can be both cosmopolitan and Muslim, both Brazilian Catholic and citizen of the world (Martha Nussbaum and Josh Cohen, For Love of Country?), (Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity). In other words, this conception of a just global civil society does not presuppose a process of homogenization of world cultures. Instead, it presumes the development of a cross-cultural consensus about the importance of civility as a necessary context for the many cultural, religious, or national differences that will persist and that constitute one of the positive engines of creativity that are available to the world’s people.

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,economic development,justice,labor rights

Food and water

It seems likely enough that one of the largest global security issues in the next fifty years will be food and water.  There is a brewing food crisis underway already, with prices for staple grains rising world wide, and poor countries are beginning to experience the consequences.  But a crisis in fresh water seems not too far in the future as well.  Both these necessities depend on inherently scarce resources: arable land and large sources of fresh water.  Along with energy, these goods are crucial to every person and every country in the world; and this in turn suggest the possibility of serious conflict over these resources in the future.

So what makes food and water a global security crisis? How does the possibility of dearth at the family level get transformed into the possibility of international conflict? Rising food prices create social unrest at the national level long before they lead to famine or malnutrition. International grain markets have been unstable over the past decade, with periodic upward spikes in prices. And grain riots have occurred as a consequence in a number of developing countries. This piece from DemocracyNow from 2008 documents demonstrations and riots across a range of African countries (link), with an interview with Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.  Here are some updates from the Christian Science Monitor (link) and Energy Bulletin (link), including riots in Algeria in 2011.

The bottom line of several of these reports is fairly simple: the international trade system for grains, including especially rice and wheat, periodically undergoes abrupt and prolonged price rises, and these price increases have dire consequences for urban poor and middle class people in the developing world.  When a large population mobilizes in protest against rising food prices, national governments are at risk. And this is where the security risk comes in: when countries like Algeria or Morocco suffer serious instability, this has the potential of leading to international instability in the region as well.

Here is another, more distant cause of international tension that comes from the food crisis.  Governments are interested in taking steps to provide greater food security for their own populations.  And this sometimes involves taking actions that are harmful for other countries or for other populations.  One symptom of the pressures mounting on the world food system is a widespread land grab of agricultural land around the developing world.  Here is a report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) on this issue (link) and a piece from the Guardian that describes the situation a few years ago (link), and here is a FastCompany story about China's land purchases (link). The FAO report documents a significant transfer of land ownership from developing countries to middle and upper income countries; this implies serious future constraints on the development possibilities available to those countries.  And it suggests a new form of colonialism -- not direct governance, but substantial absentee ownership.  This too has the potential for stimulating international conflict.

So what about water?  Here is a recent report by the Council for Foreign Relations on the interconnected consequences of fresh water shortages in different parts of the world (link).  In this piece the effects of China's water crisis are traced internationally.  Here is an inventory of resources by GlobalPolicy on international conflicts over water (link); it is a long list of potential conflicts.  Here is the introduction the editors offer:

As demand for water hits the limits of finite supply, potential conflicts are brewing between nations that share transboundary freshwater reserves. More than 50 countries on five continents might soon be caught up in water disputes unless they move quickly to establish agreements on how to share reservoirs, rivers, and underground water aquifers. The articles and analysis below examine international water disputes, civil disturbances caused by water shortages, and potential regulatory solutions to diffuse water conflict.

Chinese-financed dam projects in Burma and other parts of Southeast Asia indicate how high the stakes are. The great rivers of Southeast Asia now face a major of challenges as a result of plans for hydroelectric dams regulating flow to downriver users. Here is a piece from the Irrawaddy on the controversies surrounding the Myitsone Dam in northern Burma; link.  Similar issues arise on the Mekong River and other great rivers in the region; link.  The problems that have arisen with regard to dams in Southeast Asia include displacement of villages and towns, serious environmental damage, and significant lowering of water levels in many of the great rivers of the region.  Here is a background piece in Global Policy Forum on China's massive expansion of hydropower; link.

These sources of conflict over the most basic necessities of life suggest the need for serious international planning today to arrive at equitable and sustainable regimes for resolving conflicts over resources in the future.

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,environment

New ideas about taxes in France

The structure of the tax code in France is getting new attention these days. President Sarkozy has made fiscal reform a key issue in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2012. The Nouvel Obs has a very good section this week on a recent book by Camille Landais, Thomas Piketty, and Emmanuel Saez, economists with long expert knowledge of the French fiscal system. The book is Pour une révolution fiscale: Un impôt sur le revenu pour le XXIe siècle, and it offers a stringent critique of the existing system and a set of proposals for a reformed system. The book has a companion website here.

In a word, these experts conclude that the existing tax structure in France is seriously unjust because it is anti-progressive at the very high end of the income distribution -- the top 1 percent decline steeply in the percentage of their income that is collected in the form of the several tax vehicles.  Only 20% of the state' revenues derive from taxes that are truly progressive (Nouvel Obs, 2411, p. 18).

As we can see from the graph, the total tax burden of the top 1 percent of income earners declines sharply from 48% to about 32%. And the reason for this is the portion of the French tax system devoted to funding social services (Cotisations sociales et taxes sur les salaires). This assessment is roughly flat from the 30th percentile to the 99th percentile, and then it declines rapidly. (The other components of taxes represented here include the income tax, a tax on returns on capital, and taxes on consumption including the TVA.)

Here is what the distribution of tax burdens would look like on the basis of their proposals:

So what is their proposal? It is to significantly revamp the income tax and the cotisation. The cotisation needs to be progressive rather than regressive; and the income tax needs to be higher. Their proposal is revenue-neutral in this particular sense: the median tax payer today bears a 47% tax burden, and this remains the same under the reform.

Ce livre plaide pour une revolution fiscale précise et opérationnelle, dont tous les détails sont chiffrés au grand jour. Nous proposons en particulier la création d'un nouvel impôt sur le revenue, remplaçant un grand nombre de taxes existantes, notamment la contribution social généralisée (CSG), l'actuel impôt sur le revenu (qui, sou sa forme actuelle, serait purement et simplement supprimé), le prélèvement libératoire, la prime pour l'emploi et le  bouclier fiscal.  Ce nouvel impôt sur le revenu, payé par tous les Français et socialement adapté a la France du XXIe siecle, sera entièrement individualisé, prélevé directement a la source sur les revenus du travail et du capital. (18)

Also of interest are the summary graphs that the authors provide of the distribution of income and wealth in France:

Two things are particularly striking in this discussion. One is how significantly different the French fiscal system is from the U.S. system. Income tax is less than 10% of income for all income levels. And the cotisation is a substantially larger share of total taxes than the Social Security tax in the U.S.

But the other striking thing is the significantly different perspective that these authors take on taxes, compared to almost all discussions of taxes in the U.S. They are fundamentally concerned about the fairness of the tax burden; they care about progressivity; and they are concerned to prevent the ability of "les tres aisées" to exercise political influence in order to reduce their share. "Fiscal rigor" doesn't mean severe budget reductions and elimination of the social security net for French citizens; it means creating a tax system that is adequate to the spending commitments of the French state, and that is fair in its distribution of tax obligations across the whole of society.

I think most observers of French politics doubt that this kind of progressive and sweeping fiscal reform is in the cards in the coming decade. But it is at least encouraging that the issues are being raised.

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,France,justice

Thinking cities darkly

Image: frame from West of the Tracks

Cities capture much of what we mean by "modern," and have done so since Walter Benjamin's writings on Paris (link). But unlike the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, much of our imagining of cities since the early twentieth century has been dark and foreboding. A recent volume edited by Gyan Prakash, Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City, offers a collection of recent work in cultural studies that attempts to decode some of this dark imagery.

Several things are particularly interesting about the volume. Most basically, it represents an interesting conjunction of humanities perspectives and sociology. The articles are individually very good. And as a group they pose a series of important questions. How does a film set in Los Angeles or Shanghai serve to depict the city? Is there sociological content in a film that can contribute to a better sociology of the city? But also -- what can we say about the cultural currents that produce a particular vision of the city? Are there post-modern sensibilities and fears that lead filmmakers to turn the ambience dark?

The volume treats cities and their depictions in many parts of the world -- China, South Africa, Mexico, India, Europe, and the United States.  What is unusual about the volume is the fact that it is not a collection in "film studies" or in "urban studies", but rather a series of contributions taking seriously representation and the represented.  Moreover, there is no effort to force the perspectives taken into a common theory of "noir representation"; there are common themes that emerge, but each contributor brings forward a singular perspective, informed by the specifics of the region and genre that he/she studies. It is a project on the nexus between imaginative representation and existing social realities.

Prakash's excellent introduction begins with these observations:

As the world becomes increasingly urban, dire predictions of an impending crisis have reached a feverish pitch. Alarming statistics on the huge and unsustainable gap between the rates of urbanization and economic growth in the global South is seen to spell disaster.  The unprecedented agglomeration of the poor produces the specter of an unremittingly bleak "planet of slums." Monstrous megacities do not promise the pleasures of urbanity but the misery and strife of the Hobbesian jungle.  The medieval maxim that the city air makes you free appears quaint in view of the visions of an approaching urban anarchy.  Urbanists write about fortified "privatopias" erected by the privileged tow all themselves off from the imagined resentment and violence of the multitude. Instead of freedom, the unprecedented urbanization of poverty seems to promise only division and conflict.  The image of the modern city as a distinct and bounded entity lies shattered as market-led globalization and media saturation dissolve boundaries between town and countryside, center and periphery. From the ruins of the old ideal of the city as a space of urban citizens there emerges, sphinx-like, a "Generic City" of urban consumers.

As important as it is to assess the substance of these readings of contemporary trends in urbanization, it is equally necessary to examine their dark form as a mode of urban representation. This form is not new.  Since the turn of the twentieth century, dystopic images have figured prominently in literary, cinematic, and sociological representations of the modern city. In these portrayals, the city often appears as dark, insurgent (or forced into total obedience), dysfunctional (or forced into machine-like functioning), engulfed by ecological and social crises, seduced by capitalist consumption, paralyzed by crime, wars, class, gender, and racial conflicts, and subjected to excessive technological and technocratic control What characterizes such representations is not just their bleak mood but also their mode of interpretation, which ratchets up a critical reading of specific historical conditions to diagnose crisis and catastrophe. (1)

All the essays are interesting and insightful, but I was particularly interested in the Asian contributions -- India, China, and Japan.

First is Li Zhang's treatment of some current treatments of the dark side of Chinese cities (Shanghai and Shenyang) in "Postsocialist Urban Dystopia?".  She treats the Sixth Generation and New Documentaries movements in contemporary Chinese filmmaking, focusing on two recent works (Wang Bing's West of the Tracks, about the decline of a rust-belt city in the Northeast, and Lou Ye's Suzhou River, about the lives of poor and disaffected people in Shanghai).

Both works serve as powerful examples of "noir urbanism" in a Chinese context.  West of the Tracks is a nine-hour documentary capturing the lives and declining prospects of working class people in Shenyang following the reform of Chinese industry in the 1990s.  (C. K. Lee describes this process in Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt.) Here is a link to West of the Tracks, well worth viewing.  And Suzhou River captures some of the gritty, squalid aspects of life in contemporary Shanghai, but also dwells on the moral shift that China is undergoing, towards a consumerist, wealth-oriented corrupt society.  Here is a clip from Suzhou River:



Zhang combines her own anthropological fieldwork in Chinese cities with her reading of these films, giving her essay a multiple sense of authority.  Here is a brief description of West of the Tracks that illustrates the intersection of criticism and fieldwork:

While capturing the "raw and the real" experiences of workers, West of the Tracks offers a subtle yet powerful critique of the postsocialist state and its neoliberal turn.  What is so striking in the story told here is the lack of government help and the indifference of society toward workers' dilemmas. (137)

She refers to the bleak setting of the break room at the factory:

In their daily conversations in the break room, smelting workers frequently talk about how the managers and cadres of the factories steal public money to line their own pockets by taking kickbacks at the expense of the enterprise.  The management and bosses rarely appear in the film.  The longest presence is a banquet gathering at a local restaurant where factory managers and cadres talked about the imminent total privatization.  They are well dressed in leather and wool coats with fur collars. (137)

So there are several key themes here: First, there is a critical perspective on the rising inequalities and dispossession of ordinary people that have followed from China's growth policies; this is the documentary aspect of the films she discusses, and plainly reflects the filmmakers' interest in capturing an important and disturbing contemporary social reality in China.  And second, there is a critical vision of the moral dislocations that China has undergone, from Maoist egalitarianism to capitalist and consumerist pursuit of wealth.  Zhang captures this element of contemporary China in her discussion of both films, but especially in Suzhou River.  There is squalor and poverty, to be sure, but more pervasive is the sense of moral ungroundedness.

Moneymaking, market exchange, and pleasure-seeking are the dominant forces of everyday life.  For example, the power of money erodes Mardar's blossoming love for Mudan and eventually destroys her, the symbol of innocent, unpolluted love.  Human greediness corrupts souls and drives violent acts such as kidnaping and murder. (139)

Zhang's summary is explicit:

During market liberalization, Chinese society has irrevocably changed into a mass consumer society in which money increasingly controls people's lives and determines their lifestyles. (139)

Another fine contribution to the volume shifts focus to India's cities.  Ranjani Mazumdar's "Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema" focuses on the mental urban landscape -- the way in which an Indian city is perceived by its residents, and the ways in which the residents are impaired by the city.  Mazumdar discusses three "urban fringe" films, Dombivli Fast, Being Cyrus, and No Smoking.  Here is a clip from Dombivli Fast:



Dombivli Fast is quite different from the films discussed by Zhang. It is reflective of the current social realities of Mumbai -- meaningless work, endless commuting on super-crowded trains.  But it is more personal and introspective than the Chinese works, in that it focuses on one man and his family; it attempts to reveal his inner anxieties and thoughts.  The dystopia here is not crushing poverty -- Madhav Apte and his family live a middle-class life in Mumbai.  Here the dystopia is the pressure, stress, and callous injustice of society that drives Madhav to the breaking point.

Madhav Apte does not go back home for three days after he explodes. Armed with a cricket bat, Apte acquires a menacing persona as he moves through a city that is almost fated to collapse because of corruption, inequality, and indifference. In his journey across Bombay's deadly streets, Madhav becomes an active figure whose rage makes him see the city with a heightened perception. (159)  

(There are clips from Being Cyrus and No Smoking on Youtube as well.  This is one of the fascinating realities of reading the volume: it is possible for us non-specialists to view segments from most of the films that are discussed.)

David Ambaras takes up Tokyo in its cultural representations in "Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930." He too highlights the discrepancy between official, ideological expressions of the city, and the underlying grinding reality that modern cities often represent.

Yet despite this ebullience, to many contemporaries, urban modernity signaled the destruction of Japanese social values by Western materialism and individualistic hedonism, of which the modern girl served as the prime example. (188)

Ambaras doesn't work through cinema, but rather what he calls "slum discourse" and graphic pictorial representations of urban life.  He highlights the popular and journalistic literature of the 1870s through the early 1900s as a barometer of the anxieties Tokyo residents experienced about their changing city.  Stories of disease, child murder, beggars, and abject poverty permeate this literature.

These various forms of representation, ... had combined to produce in the Iwanosaka case a set of images that both shocked the sensibilities of readers and investigators and were necessary to their understanding of themselves as part of a modern metropolitan social formation. They reinforced the sense, common to many interpretations of the modern condition, that modernity was best apprehended through contrasts -- between, for example, utopian promise and dystopian reality -- or in terms of dark mysteries concealed beneath the surface of social relationships, and that the modern (urban) subject was compelled to navigate anxiously between these two positions, ever unsure as to which was the "truth" or in which direction he/she was being led. (210-11)

It is worth sorting out the different perspectives on social knowledge represented in this volume.  First, there is the question of knowledge of the object, the contemporary city.  Does cinema shed light on the current social realities of Shanghai or Mumbai?  Can cinema contribute to urban sociology?  Second is the question of the mentality of a place and time; the way that contemporary Mumbai-ers or Shanghai-ers think of themselves and their society.  Can cinema accurately capture some strands of social consciousness and anxiety that are real threads in the social landscape?  Is cinema a legitimate form of ethnography?  And third is the mentality and intentions of the creative class itself -- the filmmakers.  Can the critic discover threads in the filmmaker's work that sheds important light on the preoccupations of this slice of contemporary society?

Finally, we can ask the question of perspectivalism: how many Shanghai's are there?  Zhang refers to the Maoist preference for social realism or socialist romanticism; there are the entertainment-oriented Shanghai thrillers; there is the global Shanghai as an exotic backdrop to drama; and there is the noir representation of the social problems of the city.  Can we say that one depiction is more veridical than the other?  Or perhaps, can we say that several of these perspectives are compatible with the truth of Shanghai; and that optimism and pessimism are equally distorting frames for social perception?

(I note that several of the essays refer to Mike Davis's Planet of Slums; this is worth reading.)

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,China,city,India

Super-high-density Shanghai

Shanghai is a city approaching 20 million people, and it is arguably the most economically dynamic city in Asia.  This concentration of population and economic activity surely has important long-term consequences.  There was an interesting piece in the Shanghai Daily recently by Nate Stein, called "Sky's the limit for well planned city of Shanghai."  Stein makes a really intriguing point about the Shanghai metropolitan region that seems very important.  He argues that the "invisible boundary" of a city is a margin that is roughly 45 minutes from the city center; and that this boundary is moving out fast in the lower Yangtze River Delta.  Improvements in transportation have brought a handful of mid-sized cities into the 45-minute zone, with the result that Shanghai is fast becoming the most populous high-density metropolitan area in the world.

Here is the heart of Stein's view:

After building a subway in 1995 that has quickly grown to the world's longest and most traversed, Shanghai's invisible border moved outward significantly and drastically increased its growth potential. Instead of surrounding dense urban development with sprawling suburban homes, Shanghai's residents live in apartment buildings that do not restrict the growth of a city like stand-alone homes do.

Being built upon a backbone of compact flats and public transit, rather than homes on large lots and personal automobiles, means that the population has no upper boundary or, in a very literal sense, the sky is the limit, depending on how many people can fit in one building.

People are stacked on top of and below others as growth extends up, and not out. Concentrations of people make mass transit feasible and waste less fuel and energy. Efficiency greatly increases in compact cities and provide for the feasibility of small businesses staying in demand among residents without cars who need the convenience of small neighborhood shops.

The almost entirely urban design of Shanghai provides for impressively sustainable growth potential. The problem of overcrowding is on the horizon, but Shanghai has been effectively advancing its transit infrastructure. There is a two-level road tunnel under the Bund, the main portion of downtown, to prevent congestion and high-speed rail lines coming into existence that will further extend the reach of its invisible 45-minute boundary.

So Shanghai is a city with almost limitless density, in the sense that it can add population vertically rather than laterally and it can serve that population with a high-capacity rapid transit system.

Here is the Yangtze River Delta mega-region by night:

The transportation improvements that continue to transform the Shanghai urban landscape include both the subway system and the high-speed rail system connecting China's cities.  Here is what the Shanghai Metro system looks like today:

And here is the plan for 2020:

The system currently consists of twelve lines, with new track being added rapidly.  It handles something like five million passengers a day.

The other major improvement in transportation is the extension of the high-speed inter-city rail network.  High-speed trains now connect Shanghai to Hangzhou and Suzhou, bringing those cities comfortably within the 45-minute radius of Shanghai.  The high-speed train from Shanghai to Hangzhou takes only 25 minutes today.  In practical terms, this means that there can be a tight integration among firms, knowledge workers, and universities throughout this region with a total population approaching 90 million people in the Yangtze River Delta Region.  Professionals can live in Hangzhou or Souzhou and do their work in Shanghai.

Here is the intriguing question: does this development of a high-density, high-population metropolitan Shanghai have important implications for social and economic development?  Is this mega-city going to represent a qualitative change in the world's urban history?  Will Shanghai become a unique new kind of mega-urban place, with significantly higher growth potential than other world cities?

One reason for thinking that this may be true is the case that people like Richard Florida and Saskia Sassen have made for the synergies created by a densely interconnected urban area.  Florida talks about the concentration of talent afforded by a high-density city, and Sassen focuses on the economic and informational networks that are stimulated by high-density cities.  In each case there is the idea of non-linear interaction effects and positive feedback loops.  Sassen's concept of a global city captures her core idea; a global city is one that has a large volume of connections to other cities around the globe, in terms of trade, services, telephone calls, internet traffic, and financial transactions (The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.).

Shanghai is not the only large metropolitan area in the world, of course; but it appears to have features of urban system interconnectedness that take it out of the category of "sprawl" cities like Mexico City or Johannesburg.

Sassen puts some of her thinking into an interesting paper titled "Megaregions: Benefits Beyond Sharing Trains and Parking Lots?" (link). Here is how she frames her problem in the paper:

I have been asked to examine whether there are particular advantages to economic interactions at the megaregional scale and whether such interactions might play a role in enhancing the advantages of megaregions in today’s global economy. Familiar advantages of scales larger than that of the city, such as metropolitan and regional scales, are the benefits of sharing transport infrastructures for people and goods, enabling robust housing markets, and, possibly, supporting the development of office, science, and technology parks. Critical policy options identified by RPA in this regard would aim at strengthening the megaregional scale of economic interactions by investing in intercity and high speed regional rail, enhanced goods movement systems, and land use planning decisions.  More complex and elusive is whether the benefits of megaregional economic interaction can go beyond these familiar scale economies and, further, whether this would strengthen the position of such megaregions in the global economy. 

And here is part of her answer:

One central argument I develop in this paper is that the specific advantages of the megaregional scale consist of and arise from the co-existence within one regional space of multiple types of agglomeration economies. These types of agglomeration economies today are distributed accross diverse economic spaces and geographic scales: central business districts, office parks, science parks, the transportation and housing efficiencies derived from large (but not too large) commuter belts, low-cost manufacturing districts (today often offshore), tourism destinations, specialized branches of agriculture, such as horticulture or organically grown food, and the complex kinds evident in global cities. Each of these spaces evinces distinct agglomeration economies and empirically at least, is found in diverse types of geographic settings –from urban to rural, from local to global.  The thesis is that a megaregion is sufficiently large and diverse so as to accommodate a far broader range of types of agglomeration economies and geographic settings than it typically does today. This would take the advantages of megaregional location beyond the notion of urbanization economies. A megaregion can then be seen as a scale that can benefit from the fact that our complex economies need diverse types of agglomeration economies and geographic settings, from extremely high agglomeration economies evinced by the specialized advanced corporate services to the fairly modest economies evinced by suburban office parks and regional labor-intensive low-wage manufacturing. It can incorporate this diversity into a single economic megazone. Indeed, in principle, it could create conditions for the return of particular (not all) activities now outsourced to other regions or to foreign locations.

It would appear from a non-specialist's perspective, that Shanghai promises to have many of these multiple "agglomeration economy" dimensions, and from this we might expect that its economic growth will be accelerated with further densification.

Here is another interesting application of the idea of a global city to the case of Shanghai -- a conference paper by Professor Lin Ye, "Is Shanghai Really a 'Global City'?" (link).  Ye's test involves examining three factors:

1. Central place in the national economy
2. Concentration nodes for global capital
3. Agglomeration sites to provide professional services (5)

Does Shanghai rate highly enough in these three areas to qualify as a global city?

Ye concludes that the data support a "yes" in each area.  The Shanghai region represents a very significant percentage of the total Chinese GDP, and was increasing from 1992 to 2001 (7).  It represented 5.16% of total GDP in 2001, with only roughly 1.5% of population.  Second, Shanghai represented a significant concentration of China's foreign direct investment and exports during these years.  Shipping and air traffic were concentrated in the metropolitan region as well.  So Ye concludes that "Shanghai has become a strategic concentration node for global capital" (12).  Finally, Sassen's most important criterion has to do with being a key node in the global network of professional services.  He finds that here too, Shanghai measures up.  So-called "tertiary" industries amount to 45.8% of employment -- dramatically greater than China's overall 27.7% rate (14).  And the volume of financial services, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) business activity is very high as well.  "Shanghai is leading the way to transform to an information-based professional service concentration place" (15).  One important measure is the Globalization and World Cities Study Group assessment (link).  GaWC singles out a list of 46 global firms (accounting, financial services, architecture, ...), and then ranks cities according to how many offices they possess of these firms.  Ye notes that GaWC identified 55 global cities based on the concentration of global advanced producer service firms in each city, and Shanghai is on this list, with 27 offices out of the 46 global firms (compared to 105 offices in New York).  Ye concludes that Shanghai has "quickly adjusted from a traditional manufacturing center to a place that provides advanced professional services to the whole world" (17).  It isn't yet in the top rank; but it is increasing its global interconnectedness rapidly.

These transitions from primary sector to tertiary sector businesses that Ye documents indicate that Shanghai is already well on its way to being a knowledge-centered global city.  And the processes of densification described above should only amplify this process.

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,China,city,economic development

Toyota in Guangzhou

I got a chance to visit Guangdong this week, and it's a pretty amazing place.  You get a very vivid feeling for globalization when you see dozens of container ships lined up off Kowloon, preparing to off-load and reload in several container ports in eastern Guangdong and the lower Pearl River delta.  I visited the district of Nansha in an eastern area of Guangdong that was primarily agricultural only five years ago.  Now there has been extensive development, with the population going from 40,000 to 260,000 in just a few years.

One of the largest parts of the development in Nansha District is a large Toyota factory, opened in 2006 and now producing 360,000 cars a year.  This plant is a joint venture with Guangzhou Automobile Group. The factory employs about 7,000 workers in two shifts, and it embodies one of the most recent examples of the Toyota production system. A vehicle passes by every 68 seconds, so a new Toyota exits to the test track every 68 seconds as well. 1,000 cars a day roll of one of the production lines and another 500 exit the second line.  (Here is a 2004 news release on the venture from China Daily.)

But here is the first surprise. Every car produced in Nansha is headed for the domestic Chinese market -- along with the output of the other major Toyota factory near Beijing.  Toyota plans to sell more than half a million cars in the domestic Chinese market in the coming year.  Compare that to European and American production for China, and you get a sense of Toyota's worldwide ambition. Fiat just celebrated its millionth car sold in China. Toyota will exceed that number from just this factory every three years.

The factory is highly automated, with numerically controlled welding machines and other robotic assists, and it appears that the skill level of shop-level workers is low.  Training is brief for the regular line worker.  Workers are largely recruited from Guangdong Province, and the factory boasts of its conformance to the highest standards of worldwide vehicle quality. The company representative wasn't able to share information about workers' wages, but someone familiar with the local economy estimated a monthly wage somewhere around 3,000 RMB. That works out to an income of about $5,100 a year -- significantly higher than China's per capita income, but not a middle class lifestyle either.  That's about $2.33 per hour, and it works out to about $87 in direct assembly labor costs per vehicle.

This is a fairly good factory environment, though it's a bit Chaplin-esque to watch hundreds of workers rushing to return to their stations after a 10-minute break during which the line is turned off. But it's no sweatshop, and it appears that workers are likely to be grateful for their jobs. Safety, efficiency, and quality seem to be the guiding management goals. The recent strike at a Honda plant in Guangdong makes it plain, of course, that Chinese workers have important demands. But realistically, this plant is good for China's goals of improving the standard of living for poor people. It seems a bit analogous to GM or Ford in Detroit in the 40s and 50s.

At the same time, the numbers here document the challenge faced by manufacturing companies in the US and Europe.  A similar factory in Michigan would have direct labor costs per vehicle in the range of $450, and no amount of labor concessions can erase that difference. So to compete on price American producers need to find more efficient ways of handling the other cost components of the manufacturing process -- but those efficiencies are equally available to producers worldwide.

I suppose one way of reading the situation is to see Guangdong as one of the leading change points in a longterm evolution towards a common global wage for unskilled or semi-skilled labor. Wages and quality of life have certainly gone up for Chinese workers in Guangdong in the past 10 years -- just as they've gone down for industrial workers in the US.  And the living standard gap that existed between Hong Kong and Guangdong has substantially narrowed in the past decade as well, according to longterm observers. And this makes the point about education and talent in a very pointed way: the only thing that commands a premium in the world labor market is talent, skill, education, and innovative capability. We are certainly not doing nearly enough in the US to take the steps needed to prepare our population for this basic reality.

So what's next for Guangdong? Will the region be content to exploit its labor cost advantage and continue to gain market share as the world's low-cost manufacturer?  I don't think so. The economic development official I talked with in Guangdong was eager to discuss the region's plans for the expansion of universities, increasing support for research and development, and moving into the industries of the twenty-first century. She specifically cited growing knowledge capacity in sustainable energy and electric vehicles, advanced logistics systems, electric battery breakthroughs, and information technology enhancements in life sciences and healthcare. The province and the central government want to make the investments in education and research that will position the region for a talent-based economy of innovation. And the infrastructure investments you can observe in the region -- new sea-water port facilities, major apartment complexes, new university facilities, extension of passenger rail -- suggest the region is taking the long view about its economic future.

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,China

Methodological nationalism

Are there logical divisions within the global whole of social interactions and systems that permit us to focus on a limited, bounded social reality?  Is there a stable level of social aggregation that might provide an answer to the "units of analysis" question in the social sciences?  This is a question that has recurred several times in prior postings -- on regions (link), on levels of analysis (link), and on world systems (link). Here I'll focus on the nation-state as one such system of demarcation.

We can start with a very compelling recent critique of current definitions of the social sciences.  Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller offer an intriguing analysis of social science conceptual schemes in "Methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences" (link). (Wimmer's Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity is also of great interest.) The core idea is the notion that the social sciences have tended to conceptualize social phenomena around the boundaries of the nation-state.  And, these authors contend, this assumption creates a set of blinders for the social sciences that makes it difficult to capture some crucially important forms of social interaction and structure.

Wimmer and Schiller characterize the idea of methodological nationalism in three forms:

The epistemic structures and programmes of mainstream social sciences have been closely attached to, and shaped by, the experience of modern nation-state formation....  The social sciences were captured by the apparent naturalness and givenness of a world divided into societies along the lines of nation-states....  Because they were structured according to nation-state principles, these became so routinely assumed and 'banal', that they vanished from sight altogether. (303-4)

A second variant, typical of more empirically oriented social science practices, is taking national discourses, agendas, loyalties and histories for granted, without problematizing themor making them an object of an analysis in its own right.  Instead, nationally bounded societies are taken to be the naturally given entities to study. (304)

Let us  now address a third and last variant of methodological nationalism: the territorialization of social science imaginary and the reduction of the analytical focus to the boundaries of the nation-state. (307)

The three variants of methodological nationalism ... are thus ignorance, naturalization, and territorial limitation. (308)

Their view is a complex one. They think that the social sciences have been trapped behind a kind of conceptual blindness, according to which the concepts of nation and state structure our perception of social reality but disappear as objects of critical inquiry. Second, they argue that there were real processes of nation and state building that created this blindness -- from nineteenth century nation building to twentieth century colonialism. And third, they suggest that the framework of MN itself contributed to the concrete shaping of the history of nation and state building. So it is a three-way relationship between knowledge and the social world.

"Nationalism" has several different connotations.  First, it implies that peoples fall into "nations," and that "nations" are somewhat inevitable and compact social realities.  France is a nation.  But closer examination reveals that France is a social-historical construct, not a uniform or natural social whole. (Here is a discussion of Emmanuel Todd's version of this argument; link).  Alsatians, Bretons, and Basques are part of the French nation; and yet they are communities with distinct identities, histories, and affinities.  So forging France as a nation was a political effort, and it is an unfinished project.

Second, nationalism refers to movements based on mobilization of political identities.  Hindu nationalists have sought power in India through the BJP on the basis of a constructed, mobilized (and in various ways fictional) Hindu identity.  The struggle over the Babri Mosque, and the political use to which this symbol was put in BJP mobilization, illustrates this point.  But "nationalist politics" also possess a social reality; it is all too evident that even fictive "national identities" can be powerful sources of political motivation.  So nationalist politics in the twentieth century were a key part of many historical processes.  (Michael Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing illustrates this point.)  And, of course, there may be multiple national identities within a given region; so the "nation" consists of multiple "nationalist" groups.  Ben Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism provides an extensive development of the political and constructed nature of ethnic and national identities.

What about the other pole of the "nation-state" conjunction -- the state?  Here the idea is that the state is the seat of sovereign authority; the origin and enforcement of legal institutions; and the holder of a monopoly of coercive power in a region.  A state does not inevitably correspond to a nation; so when we hyphenate the conjunction we make a further substantive assumption -- that nations grow into states, and that states cultivate national identities.

The fundamental criticism that Wimmer and Schiller express -- the fundamental defect of methodological nationalism -- is that it limits the ability of social scientists and historians to perceive processes that are above or below the level of the nation-state.  Trans-national processes (they offer migration as an example) and sub-national processes (we might refer to the kinds of violent mobilization studied by Mann in the Dark Side of Democracy) are either invisible or unimportant, from the point of view of methodological nationalism.  So the methodology occludes social phenomena that are actually of great importance to understanding the contemporary world.  Here is how they suggest going beyond methodological nationalism in the field of migration studies:

Going beyond methodological nationalism in the study of current migration thus may require more than a focus on transnational communities instead of the nation and its immigrants.  In order to escape the magnetism of established methodologies, ways of defining the object of analysis and algorithms for generating questions, we may have to develop (or rediscover?) analytical tools and concepts not coloured by the self-evidence of a world ordered into nation-states.  This is what we perceive, together with many other current observers of the social sciences, as the major task lying ahead of us.  We are certainly not able to offer such a set of analytical tools here. (323-24)

Wimmer and Schiller seem to point in a direction that we find in Saskia Sassen's work as well: the idea that it is necessary for the social sciences to invent a new vocabulary that does a better job of capturing the idea of the interconnectedness of social activity and social systems (for example, in A Sociology of Globalization; link).  The old metaphors of "levels" of social life organized on an ascending spatial basis doesn't seem to work well today when we try to deal with topics like global cities, diasporic communities, or transnational protest movements. And each of these critiques makes a convincing case that these non-national phenomena are influential all the way down into the "national" orders singled out by traditional classification schemes.

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,identity,social groups