Country-Based Policies Best to Solve Poverty

Nation-State Key—Global Capitalism

Nation-state strategies are the center-piece of the resistance to global capitalism—all external strategies rely on a privileged and unsustainable politics of mobility

Cheah, Professor of Rhetoric at U. C. Berkeley, 1997 [Pheng, “Given Culture,” boundary 2 24.2, p. 170-173]

But perhaps it is asking too much from these hybrid cosmopolitan-isms to expect them to respond to the precarious necessity of postcolonial nationalism in neocolonial globalization. For is it not obvious, from the start, that the paradigm for these radical cosmopolitanisms is not really de-colonized space but the metropolitan scenario of migrancy and mobility? Notwithstanding Bhabha's copious sermonizing about postcoloniality, the occluded model for hybridity turns out to be the migrant "minority" subject who subverts metropolitan national space: "colonials, postcolonials, migrants, minorities—wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture . . . but are themselves [my emphasis] the marks of the shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation" (LC, 164). I should not, of course, be understood as dismissing the pain and suffering of migrants, political refugees, and exiles. However, my point is that they do not represent the whole picture of contemporary globalization. For even when Bhabha makes the rare reference to transnational capitalism, the focus is not on the exploitation of labor in free-trade zones in the South but instead on migrant workers who move to wealthier territory: "Transnational capitalism and the impoverishment of the Third World certainly create the chains of circumstance that incarcerate the Salvadorean and the Filipino/a. In their cultural passage, hither and thither, as migrant workers, part of the massive economic and political diaspora of the modern world, they embody . . . that moment blasted out of the continuum of history" (LC, 8; my emphasis).

Indeed, we discover that in essence, hybrid cultural agency consists of physical freedom from being tied to the earth. Such freedom is the phenomenal analogue and material condition of possibility for endless hybrid self-creation and autonomy from the given: "there is a return to the performance of identity as iteration, the re-creation of the self in the world of travel" (LC, 9). This is why Bhabha is not interested in those who do not migrate, those who cannot migrate and for whom coerced economic migration would be a plus, or in the vicissitudes of uneven economic development in the postcolonial South. Indeed, he cannot even be said to be very interested in those who leave the South temporarily, in order to return, or in the repatriation of funds by migrant workers to feed their kin in the Third World. In Bhabha's world, postcoloniality is the hybridity of metropolitan migrancy. Everything happens as if there are no postcolonials left in decolonized space. With the onset of decolonization, all the former colonial hybrids have become postcolonials. And it seems that to keep their hybrid powers and status intact, they have had to depart for the metropolis, following on the heels of their former colonizers, to torment them and enact moral retribution by subverting their cultural identity.

It is, therefore, at least tendentious to personify linguistic freedom and hybrid cultural flux in the diasporic subject and to celebrate these forms of cosmopolitanism, at the expense of nationalism, as the most progressive form of postcolonial transformative agency in contemporary globalization. Hence, even though Bhabha allegedly considers subalternity, his "postcolonial perspective" is devoid of any analytical specificity since hybrid freedom is an abstract theory of marginality general enough to accommodate experiences as diverse as slavery, diaspora, ethnic/racial minority experiences in constitutional democracies, queer sexuality, as well as subaltern resistance. This general postcolonial perspective effaces the unbridgeable divide between the migrant literary critic in the metropolis and the subaltern in decolonizing space. It elevates the time-lag-diagnosing postcolonial critic into the best resistant hybrid who is able to grasp the condition of possibility of resistance before it is realized in experience. My point here is that Bhabha's picture of contemporary globalization is virulently post-national because he pays scant attention to those postcolonials for whom postnationalism through mobility is not an alternative.

It is true that, unlike Bhabha, Clifford cautions that he is not offering a nomadology: "I'm not saying there are no locales or homes, that everyone is—or should be—traveling, or cosmopolitan, or deterritorialized" (TC, 108). He tries to reconsider dwelling in its dialectical relationship with traveling and gestures toward a redefinition of mobility beyond literal travel to include different modalities of inside-outside connection so that "displacement can involve forces that pass powerfully through—television, radio, tourists, commodities, armies" (TC, 103). Yet, the primary emphasis of his analysis of discrepant cosmopolitanisms still remains on physical mobility. When generalized into an account of hybrid resistance, it is inevitably confined to the scene of metropolitan migrancy, border transactions, and those subjects who have class access to globality. Limited to the viewpoints of translators, guides, suppliers of anthropologists, and migrant labor, Clifford's "cosmopolitan, radical, political culture" from below also leaves out the subaltern subjects in decolonizing space who have no access to globality and view coerced economic migration as a plus. The subaltern lies outside the circuit of the international division of labor and must bear the impact of global-systemic neocolonialism on food production, consumption, and superexploitation outside wage labor. Such actions of survival cannot easily be romanticized or recuperated as hybrid resistance.

My position on hybridity theory can be summed up as follows. First, as a paradigm of postcolonial agency in globalization, hybridity is a closet idealism. It is an anthropologistic culturalism, a theory of resistance that reduces the complex givenness of material reality to its symbolic dimensions and underplays the material institution of neocolonial oppression at a global-systemic level. Second, as a new internationalism or cosmopolitanism, it is only feasible to the extent that it remains confined to metropolitan migrancy and forecloses the necessity of the postcolonial nation-state as a precarious agent that defends against neocolonial global capitalist accumulation. Third, there is a fundamental link between this new cosmopolitanism and culturalism. Hybrid cosmopolitanisms can ignore the necessity of the nation-state precisely because they regard cultural agency as unmoored from, or relatively independent of, the field of material forces that engenders culture. They privilege migrancy as the most radical form of transformative agency in contemporary globalization because, for them, it is the phenomenal analogue of hybrid freedom from the given. As Bhabha puts it, "the great connective narratives of capitalism and class drive the engines of social reproduction, but do not, in themselves, provide a fundamental framework for those modes of cultural identification and political affect that form around issues of the lifeworld of refugees or migrants" (LC, 6).

However, as purported analyses of globalization, these accounts of transformative agency and cosmopolitanism sadly miss the mark. For although the meaning and symbols of neocolonial culture are unmotivated, their materialization via economic and political institutional structures in an unequal global order means that they cannot be translated, reinscribed, and read anew in the ways suggested by theories of hybridity. For thoroughgoing global transformation to occur, some recourse to the ambivalent agency of the postcolonial nation-state and, therefore, to nationalism and national culture seems crucial even as we acknowledge that this agency is not autarchical but inscribed within a global force field. Clifford is not entirely unaware of this, since he notes that he has not gone far enough in reconceiving practices of dwelling in a transnational context (TC, 115). My point is that in the current conjuncture, such practices of dwelling, if they are to be mass-based, necessarily engender a national consciousness rather than a cosmopolitanism, no matter how "discrepant." To comprehend the possibility of the national-in-the-cosmopolitical — and I use this awkward phrase to indicate a condition of globality that, in the current conjuncture, is short of a mass-based cosmopolitan consciousness—we need to understand postcolonial national culture in terms other than as an immutable organic substrate or as an ideological form imposed from above, a constraint to be transcended by the formation of an emancipatory cosmopolitan consciousness.

Third world nation-state is necessary check against imperialism—only nationally based challenges to global inequality are sustainable

Cheah, Professor of Rhetoric at UC-Berkeley, 2006 [Pheng, “Cosmopolitanism,” Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 486, sagepublications, p. 490-492]

Marx's proletarian cosmopolitanism is thus different from Kant's pre-nationalist cosmopolitanism. Kant missed the potential of popular nationalism as an emancipatory force against statism because he could not predict that the material interconnectedness brought about by capitalism would engender the bounded political community of the nation. Marx's socialist cosmopolitanism is an anti- and post-nationalism that reduces the nation to an ideological instrument of the state. He dismissed nationalism although he witnessed its rise. Identifying the nation too hastily with the bourgeois state, Marx reduced the nation to an ideological instrument of the state and saw nationalism as a tendentious invocation of anachronistic quasi-feudal forms of belonging in modernity. However, this antagonistic relation between socialist cosmopolitanism and nationalism has almost never been maintained from a historical-practical standpoint. The uneven character of capitalism as an actually existing global system implies an irreducible disparity between the working class in different parts of the world. This has repeatedly posed obstacles for the formation of a global proletarian consciousness or world community based on labor. The national question was most notably raised in response to anti-colonialist struggles in Asia and Africa. In the historical scene of decolonization, it is not only the material economic wealth that workers have produced that needs to be reappropriated. The nation's spiritual or cultural personality has been taken away by territorial imperialism and continues to be expropriated by neo-colonial forces. In Amilcar Cabral's exemplary reformulation, national liberation

[is] the phenomenon in which a socio-economic whole rejects the denial of its historical process . . . [T]he national liberation of a people is the regaining of the historical personality of that people, it is their return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination. (1979: 130)

The same challenges to the formation of cosmopolitan solidarity continue to be raised today by popular nationalist responses to neocolonialism and uneven development. Two central issues stand out here. First, in a world where the nation-state is the primary form of political organization, can socialist cosmopolitanism have an adequate institutional basis if it does not work through a form of popular nationalism that seeks to shape state actions in accordance with the interests of humanity? Second, does a postnationalist form of cosmopolitan solidarity leave peoples in the postcolonial South vulnerable to the unequal and predatory imperatives of capitalist globalization under its current neoliberal dispensation?

The Challenges of Contemporary Globalization: A New Cosmopolitanism?

Although visions of cosmopolitanism have mutated from an intellectual ethos to an institutionally grounded global political consciousness, this institutional grounding has been put into question by the uneven character of global capitalism. There is an inadequation or lack of fit between the material interconnectedness brought about by global capitalism and the degree of formation of global solidarities. In other words, we cannot automatically assume that experiences of a globalizing world where people, things, and events have become more and more connected necessarily lead to and form the substrate for a cosmopolitan form of politics that displaces that of the nation-state. In the past decade, various processes of contemporary globalization such as transcultural encounters, mass migration and population transfers between East and West, First and Third Worlds, North and South, the rise of global cities as central sites for the management of global financial and business networks, the formation of transnational advocacy networks, and the proliferation of transnational human rights instruments have led to greater hopes that this inadequation can be overcome and that feasible global forms of political consciousness have in fact arisen. It is suggested that whatever its shortcomings, contemporary transnationalism furnishes the material conditions for new radical cosmopolitanisms from below that can regulate the excesses of capitalist globalization. In comparison with older philosophical approaches, some of the proponents of new cosmopolitanism attempt to dissociate it from universal reason, arguing that cosmopolitanism is now a variety of actually existing practical stances that are provisional and can lead to strategic alliances and networks that cross territorial and political borders. However, these new cosmopolitanisms still contain a normative dimension. It is claimed that they are normatively superior to more parochial forms of solidarity such as nationalism and that they represent, however provisionally, the interests of humanity because they exhibit a degree of autonomy from the imperatives of economic globalization.

Theories of new cosmopolitanism are essentially syntheses of three different arguments, which can be found in different combinations. First, it is suggested that cultural and political solidarity and political agency can no longer be restricted to the sovereign nation-state as a unified spatio-temporal container because globalization has undermined many of the key functions from which the nation-state derives its legitimacy. Second, the various material networks of globalization are said to have formed a world that is interconnected enough to generate political institutions and non-governmental organizations that have a global reach in their regulatory functions as well as global forms of mass-based political consciousness or popular feelings of belonging to a shared world. Third, this new cosmopolitan consciousness is characterized as a more expansive form of solidarity that is attuned to democratic principles and human interests without the restriction of territorial borders. In some cases, it is also suggested that the new cosmopolitan consciousness is in a relation of mutual feedback with emerging global institutions, taking root and finding sustenance from these institutions and influencing their functioning in turn.

The thesis of the spatial-geographical destriation of the world economy is most clearly expressed in Saskia Sassen's work on global cities. Whereas the globalization of industrial production under post-Fordism created a hierarchical new international division of labor between center and periphery, Sassen argues that the outstripping of industrial capital by much more profitable non-industrial forms of capital such as international finance and the production of high-value specialized producer services crucial for the managing of global production networks (such as legal, accounting and business management services) have led to the rise of new geographical formations, global networks of interlinked cities, that no longer respect the center–periphery distinction. New York, London and Tokyo, the paradigmatic global cities, have become dislocated from their respective nation-states, and function instead as 'a surplus-extracting mechanism vis-à-vis a "transnational hinterland"', 'as a transterritorial marketplace' in which each plays a different complementary role (Sassen, 1991: 127, 327). These networks are a complex border-zone that facilitates the penetration of the nation-state by global forces.