Nationalism, Imperialism,

Economism: A Comment
on Habermas
Timothy Mitchell

T
T o embark on a postnationalist politics we must revisit the history of nation-
alism. But must we retell it as a history of the nation-state? Must we retell it
the way nationalism tells it, as the story of how nations became states and states
became nations? And must the history of the nation-state correspond to the his-
tory of national economies, so that the passing of such economies requires the
passing of such states?
It is a curious fact that the great age of modern nationalism, from the second
half of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, did not occur in a
world of nation-states. Most countries around the globe were held as colonial pos-
sessions of the great powers, for whom nationalism served to envision a future
world not of nation-states but empires. It was only with the eclipse of colonialism
that we entered the brief era of nation-states and national economies. With this
history in mind, there are three comments I wish to make in response to Jürgen
Habermas’s thought-provoking essay. First, imperialism was not incidental to
the histories of nationalism but was the context that shaped it. Given this context,
the political integration that nationalism enabled must be understood also as a
process of exclusion. The path toward supranationalism is likewise one of exclu-
sion as much as integration. Second, the short twentieth-century period of univer-
sal nation-states can be seen as a movement against global integration, indicating
that increasing globalization is not the only direction in which history can move.
Third, the relationship between state and economy that characterized the mid-
twentieth-century experience provides an inadequate model for imagining post-

Public Culture 10(2): 417–424

Copyright © 1998 by Duke University Press

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Public Culture national alternatives; yet his discourse theory of democracy, I shall argue, pre-
vents Habermas from abandoning this model.

Inclusion and Exclusion

In tracing the history of the nation-state, Habermas refers in passing to the sad
fact, as he calls it, that modern nationalism served the building of empires. He
attributes this to the misuse of the idea by political elites. The misuse reflects the
“ambivalent potential” of nationalism, whose dangers we must recognize and
renounce if we are to build political communities based on a discursive democ-
racy, to surpass and supersede the nation-state. Indeed such misuse should make
nationalism easier to renounce, Habermas argues, for it is a sign that there is no
essential connection between nationalism and democracy. It helps indicate that
nationalism played a purely contingent role in the emergence and consolidation
of modern democracies. But what if we read the relationship with imperialism
differently? What if it indicates not just an ambivalent potential within national-
ism but nationalism’s ambivalent origins?
It is now clear that the history of nationalism cannot be understood outside the
history of imperialism. Benedict Anderson’s well-known study has traced the rise
of modern nationalism to the creole communities of the Caribbean and South
America. Creoles were those “whites” who could never quite become Europeans,
yet feared the contamination of Indian, Negro, or mestizo identities. From such
mixing of populations emerged the desire to fix political identity in the racial cat-
egories of modern nationalism. Ann Stoler argues more strongly that Dutch set-
tlers in the East Indies, anxious to secure their identity in relation to both those of
mixed blood and poor whites, developed a racial sense of class and gender iden-
tity. This colonial racism was reimported into Europe and reinscribed in the
emergence of a bourgeois, nationalist sense of self. Rather than tools misused by
elites, imperialist nationalism and racism were essential to the way the bourgeois
European male negotiated the anxieties of his modern class and gender identity.
Habermas proposes that we can orient ourselves on the path toward suprana-
tional republics by understanding the earlier process of integration that nationalism
made possible. Taking seriously the imperial context in which it developed reminds
us that modern nationalism was not simply a process of integration. It was a ques-
tion of simultaneously integrating and establishing differences, of including and
excluding—in a manner that was surely never merely contingent.
Habermas’s essay refers to the role of nationalism in establishing one such
exclusion. Nationalism’s naturalistic image of the community could be used to

418
conceal the arbitrariness of the boundaries that divide one nation-state from its Nationalism,
neighbors. But was the distinction between, say, French and Germans the only kind Imperialism,
of difference that nationalism established, or even the major one? Nationalism was Economism
also a response to the mass movements of migration, settlement, dislocation, and
expulsion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that set populations in motion
and mixed communities together in new ways. These displacements and remix-
tures shaped the history of the overseas colonies, but also occurred in the West,
where the imperial upheavals in Central and Eastern Europe created new waves of
migration and apprehension. Nationalism established not just naturalized bound-
aries between neighbors but mobile and often ambiguous distinctions within
the community between those who belonged and those who might not. It distin-
guished the male citizen from the nonmale (only men could express the “repub-
lican virtue” of willingness to die for the nation), native from alien, white from
nonwhite, Aryan from Jewish, colonizer from colonized. Nationalism’s role was
not so much to mobilize a population unready for ideas of popular sovereignty
and human rights, as Habermas suggests, but to set limits to its movement, to the
definition of the people, and to which among them might claim rights as humans.
If we are to understand the development of supranational communities as the
continuation of this process on a larger scale, then the historical image of inte-
gration must give way to a more complex picture of inclusion and exclusion —
and one that continues today. Multiculturalism, for example, is not something
new but a continued struggle over inclusion. Communities of North African ori-
gin in France or of South Asian and Afro-Caribbean origin in Britain descend
from subjects of the empire, subjects whose partial inclusion and exclusion has
always played a role in defining French and British identity. The former subjects
have returned as a postcolonial presence, disrupting the neat, forgetful story of
its origins that nationalism tells. It is no accident, moreover, that since the
Schengen Accords of 1985 began eliminating internal controls over migration
and population movement within the European Union, increasingly tighter lim-
its have been placed on people entering from outside, especially from the for-
merly colonized regions (Geddes 1995). Supranationalism and increased exclu-
sion go hand in hand.

The Economy of Nationalism

Another issue arises when we place nationalism in its colonial and postcolonial
context. This concerns the important questions Habermas poses about the rela-
tionship between the nation-state and the economy. Since nationalism developed

419
Public Culture in the context of empire, it emerged out of economic and political networks that
were already global. Globalization in the nineteenth century, under its old name
of imperialism, encompassed relations of production as well as trade. In the non-
West, jobs were lost in manufacturing, especially textiles, as the industry was
relocated to the West. Rural populations were organized to produce cotton, silk,
sugar, rubber, and other industrial materials for the West. The rise of nationalism
in the non-West was often an attempt to disengage from this system of globaliza-
tion, or at least to subject it to local limits and controls. For much of the world,
establishing what became the twentieth-century structure of nation-states was,
once again, not primarily a process of integration. Indeed, one can see the middle
decades of the twentieth century, when the nation-state system was briefly uni-
versalized, not as the culmination of an integrative process but as a period of sig-
nificant resistance against it.
The resistance was characteristic of more than just the colonized regions. In
Europe, the intensification of nationalism in the interwar period signified a trend
toward more inward-looking and insular forms of politics. The trend was clear-
est in the economic realm, where the interwar crises of international trade and
finance, including the abandoning of gold as a global measure of the value of
money, produced new efforts to insulate the nation-state against the disruptive
threats of international markets and financial flows. The development of state plan-
ning, in its Leninist, fascist, and Keynesian forms, represented a novel attempt to
delimit a specifically national sphere of economic management.
Indeed, one of the major and, today, unnoticed innovations of this period was
the invention of the very idea of “the economy.” The concept is usually traced to
the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As I have argued elsewhere, how-
ever, it was only in the 1930s that economists replaced ideas of markets and busi-
ness cycles, which are less enclosed and carry no specific reference to the nation-
state, with the notion of the economy—a total, self-enclosed mechanism, subject
to external shocks and adjustments, yet driven by an internal energy and subject
to its own precise mechanical logic (Mitchell 1995). The economy was imagined
by definition as coterminous with the new, postimperial form of the nation-state.
It replaced earlier representations—the population, the country’s wealth, and its
imperial ambition—as the object around which the nation-state defined its scope,
its power, and its political purpose. (Although there was a different history of
these ideas in Germany, Friedrich List’s [1856] conception of “national econ-
omy” should not be read as the equivalent of the twentieth-century idea. The
terms Nationalökonomie and Volkswirtschaft referred to the institutions, laws,
and arrangements that ought to govern the economic conditions of the citizenry.

420
“Economy” was a process of government or regulation, not, as in the twentieth Nationalism,
century, a free-standing object to be governed.) Imperialism,
Two conclusions follow from this history for thinking about contemporary Economism
questions of globalization and the future of the nation-state. First, we need to be
careful not to treat globalization (or neo-imperialism) as a teleology. Not all
recent history has been a process of increasing integration. Historically, the path
between more local and more global forms of political and economic organization
does not lead in only one direction. The spread of nationalism and the generaliza-
tion of the nation-state in the twentieth century represent a movement against
globalization, in response to crises in an earlier, colonial system of integration.
The current, late-twentieth-century reglobalization shows many symptoms of cri-
sis. It represents a great narrowing of postnational political alternatives to assume
that the only appropriate political response is to “follow the lead of the markets”
and build political orders as ambitious, unmanageable, and unequal as the move-
ment of global finance and commodities.
Second, the idea that the geographical limits of the state should coincide with
what we think of as the geographical limits of the economy is, as the history of the
idea of the economy indicates, a peculiar invention of mid-twentieth-century poli-
tics. Rather than assuming that the expanded borders of the economy require us to
expand the borders of the state, in order to be able to manage this ever-growing
object, we need to examine more critically the ways in which the distinction
between what we call state and economy has been produced historically and is
now being transformed (Mitchell, in press). Despite the intelligence of its analy-
sis of contemporary politics, Habermas’s essay retains unusually narrow defini-
tions of state and economy. The state “limits itself to essentially administrative
tasks,” he argues, while market economies, although regulated by the state, occupy
a separate sphere and “obey a logic of their own.” Indeed, it is this very separation
that leaves politics no alternative but to follow the lead of the markets and con-
struct supranational political agencies. I want to make clearer the problems with
this way of thinking and then suggest why it is that Habermas retains it.

Representing the Economy

Curiously, the emergence of the idea of the national economy as a sealed mecha-
nism, distinct from the state and subject to its management, coincided with devel-
opments that in practice made economic processes and institutions increasingly
difficult to distinguish from those of the state. On the one hand, during the interwar
and postwar period, government and quasi-government agencies became increas-

421
Public Culture ingly imbricated in economic processes. In most countries this process transformed
the state into the largest single employer, spender, borrower, and saver and gave it
a new role in determining even the quantity and value of money. On the other hand,
the very idea of the national economy was made possible only by the role the state
played in inventing new representations of economic processes and defining how
they should be measured and portrayed. A series of developments in statistical
methods, the collection of data, and mathematical modeling made it possible to
imagine what came to be called the state’s national income or product, to present
measures of growth, investment, savings, and price levels as national aggregates,
and in general to picture the national economy as a self-contained machine.
These new forms of representation were devised and published by agencies of the
state, working closely with the new profession of economics.
The state did not have the power to control the economy, despite the claims
and even the successes of wartime and postwar national planning. But it did have
the power to represent it. The state elaborated the new distinction between itself
and the economy that provided the object and essential purpose of its power. In
picturing the economy, the state pictured its own power — and thereby helped
produce that power. In practice, however, the multiple involvements of state
agencies in defining, measuring, and imagining the flows of the national econ-
omy, and at the same time in providing many of the sources and conduits for those
imagined flows, rendered this apparent separation of state and economy increas-
ingly elusive. Moreover, the postwar period saw a number of changes that made
it increasingly difficult to represent the apparent size and movement of the econ-
omy and to mark its national boundaries, changes that have intensified during the
last two decades. The shift from the production of goods to the production of the
less countable, more image-based processes we call services, the increasing rate
of technological innovation, and the more fluid circulation and value of money,
have all contributed to the growing elusiveness of the economy as an object of
representation.
This analysis suggests a different understanding of what so-called globaliza-
tion involves. It is not simply a loss of influence by the national state over eco-
nomic processes, although this is part of what has occurred. It is, at the same
time, the collapse or weakening of an order of representation—weakened in part
by more rapid transnational flows, but also by the processes of imbrication, inno-
vation, and imagination I have just mentioned. As a result, the nation-state can
less and less represent its purpose and define its power as the managing of a mea-
surable, self-enclosed machine called the economy.
Why, then, does Habermas retain the image of state and economy as essen-

422
tially separate spheres, each a self-sealed system obeying its own logic, so that the Nationalism,
only imaginable response to the logic of a transnational economy is a correspond- Imperialism,
ing expansion of the logic of politics into a transnational structure? The answer, I Economism
believe, is that this is the only way to retain his discourse theory of democracy.
Habermas has acknowledged elsewhere that the penetrative power of economic
processes and state practices leaves little room for a discursive conception of the
democratic process, based on the idea of a free realm of rational individuals whose
unconstrained debate is the basis for political decision making. Indeed these eco-
nomic and political forces “explode the model of a polity that determines itself
through the shared practice of the citizens themselves” (Habermas 1996, 501).
However, by arguing that the economy and state administration remain self-
regulating spheres, closed off from one another and their environments, he can
posit the separate existence of a third kind of sphere, that of lawmaking and
political debate. Since it is based on debate and rational discourse, this sphere is
structurally prevented from becoming in the same way a closed system. It remains
in principle open to influence by the informal discourses and political demands of
the citizenry. At the same time, Habermas acknowledges that these informal
demands and debates among wider publics tend to influence political decision
making only in times of crisis, and even then have the power only to place issues
on the table, not to determine their resolution.
A theory of democracy that must take for granted the mid-twentieth-century
idea of the economy as a self-sealed and measurable mechanism may not be ade-
quate for confronting the question of globalization. Before proceeding further
with the construction of superstates, we may want to consider how far the nation-
state has lost control of economic processes and how far it has simply lost the abil-
ity to represent those processes—alternatives that can never quite be separated—
and thus to define its purpose as their management. Before building states to rival
the reach of global banking organizations and transnational corporations, we
may want to ask how far the apparent coherence and power of transnational eco-
nomic forces is given to them by our own failure to question the idea that such
forces form a self-enclosed and rational system.

Timothy Mitchell teaches politics and is director of the Kevorkian Center for Near
Eastern Studies at New York University. He recently edited the volume Questions
of Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

423
Public Culture Works Cited
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Geddes, Andrew. 1995. “Immigrant and Ethnic Minorities and the EU’s ‘Demo-
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Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. “Citizenship and National Identity.” In Between Facts
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List, Friedrich. 1856. National System of Political Economy. First published in
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———. In press. “Society, Economy, and the State Effect.” In State/Culture: The
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