by Mindy Clegg
The popular TV horror-drama The Walking Dead followed an evolving cast of characters in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. The comic on which it was based called it “a continuing tale of survival.” And that it is. Time after time, the survivors settle into some particular situation, only to be met by some new threat that upends their safety and sends them out into a dangerous world time and again. The real danger is other people, not the zombies who become a manageable threat. By the end of the series (SPOILER ALERT) some of the original core group manage to find a community large enough to ensure some peace and normalcy, even as the apocalypse grinds on outside their gates. Many read the show/comic as a warning about humanities’ propensity for unbridled violence in the absence of civilization. Without the threat of the state monopoly on violence, most humans will turn to some sort of violent primitivism, goes the argument. But different messages can come from the show and comic.
Rather than being evidence of man’s Hobbsian state of nature, I’d argue that it’s evidence of what happens when the structures of neo-liberalism begin to crack, but not the underlying ideology of neo-liberal individualism. This precisely describes what we’re seeing under the second Trump administration and in other authoritarian regimes around the world. Since the emergence of capitalist modernity and especially in the wake of two global wars, the world has been organized into nation-states in the international rules-based order. Authoritarians of the postmodern right tell us that these systems are the problem, and destroying them will fix it. But they seek to tear apart systems in order to benefit themselves, not to replace it with anything beneficial for humanity. But can these systems now under attack be employed for more democratic ends? I’d argue yes, they can. Systems are tools and tools can be used in multiple ways, for good or ill. We can turn these systems for good.
The nation-state is the building block of the modern international rules-based order. Modern nationalism, a modern understanding of political belonging, was deployed during the 19th century against eastern empires that western empires sought to destabilize. The Ottoman Empire was one such target of this process of destabilization. Nationalist activist from the Balkans, often educated in Paris or London, brought back new-fangled ideas about an immortal national body being suppressed and abused by an illegitimate imperial (orientalist) power.1 Such ideological machinations would not just disrupt the peace of the Ottomans, but would soon boomerang back on the French and British empires, such as with the Irish rebellion against British colonialism or Vietnamese and Algerian uprisings against the French, among others. By the time the Second World War ended, a war which some have described as imperial rule coming home to roost, a new system was emerging that favored the nation-state over empires, the US and Soviet-led interstate system.
The nation-state system built on nationalist ideology and imagined a generally ethnically homogeneous population belonging to a particular land with particular borders, that would be represented by a modern state.2 Ideally, nation-states would be independent, representative, democratic (sometimes), their borders inviolable and respected. Each people of the earth would benefit in these homogeneous states where they “belonged.” All of this would be backed up by international institutions where these nation-states would work out various disputes peacefully—the United Nations in the postwar period. No one benefited from this as much as the United States and the Soviet Union (neither of which were ever ethnically homogeneous, it should be noted, representing a different conceptualization of the nation-state and what it could be). Arguable both powers maintained a kind of imperial hegemony over large swaths of the world. But new states emerged especially in the still colonized global south, embracing claims to nationhood, demanding autonomy and freedom from the global north. Both the US and Soviets saw these demands as both a threat and a mechanism of control of decolonization movements. They flooded these new nation-states with money and material aid, including at times weapons and military expertise. This unsurprisingly led to instability that still wracks some states in the global south today. These decades of interventionism contributed directly to circumstances of the War on Terror or as Spencer Ackerman has called it, the Forever Wars.3 These ongoing conflicts illustrate the failures of the interstate system as colonial exploitation continued into the postwar era. As such, there are plenty of reasons to be critical of the rules based order associated with the nation-state era.
These ongoing conflicts are also evidence of this interstate system dissolving around us, with nothing progressive and substantive to replace it. This state of affairs did not start with Trump or other modern authoritarians, but has been building due to the exploitative aspects of globalization. Guilluame Duval argued that the west, and the ideals it claimed to stand for, is gone or nearly so. Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis believes that capitalist modernity is over and has been replaced by “technofeudalism.” Writer Cory Doctorow showed that the unleashing of capital after the end of the Soviet Union has torn away any guardrails that had been baked into the system. Oligarchic power, Doctorow argued, is “the natural end state of the market economy” that is leading to a tipping point. We can all feel the impending sense of doom. Authoritarians exploit that sense to gain power, claiming to be the only ones who can “fix it.” In place of building up society, they offer two minutes of hate of marginalized groups in order to strip the state for parts to enrich their buddies and themselves. If a certain configuration of the capitalism economy can serve as an engine of social mobility, the natural endpoint of the capitalist system shorn of regulation destroys that mobility, allowing for the ever greater concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands. Inevitably, this transcends national borders. The rightward, oligarchic turn in Russia, Hungary, and Poland impacted the entirety of the west. They provided inspiration and a road map to the far right parties elsewhere. Intolerance and us-them group think became a rallying cry, creating tensions within nation-states. The rise of the far right within the nation-state, who turn to saber-rattling to make economic demands, makes actual warfare between powerful nations more likely, not less.
None of this is to fully defend the nation-state and the interstate, rules based order. It was (to put it mildly) a highly imperfect means of organizing an increasingly globalized planet. Globalization was built on colonial violence that wrecked the planet and its inhabitants. The far right proffered alternatives in the midst of the Second World War, as they do today. We never exorcised the demons of a hierarchical world of empires and the nation-state was built on that foundation. As a result, the ideas that tore apart the world in the 30s—that violent boomerang of colonial violence back on the metropole—threaten our world today. But glimmers of a kind of balance existed in the Cold War in the tensions between the First and Second world. Often imagined as a corrective, the Soviet-led second world was just the other side of the capitalist coin, not a true alternative. They moderated each other. As capitalist and socialist modernity morphed and took over the world, it dragged regulatory and democratic institutions along with it, reluctantly, unwillingly, creating space for democratic practices. The conflict between the US and Soviets demanded it, in fact. People around the world demanded institutions that could temper the extremes of capitalism or authoritarian socialism, sometimes even those embedded within institutions meant to serve capital. US Agency for International Development, or USAID, was created specifically to maintain American empire. Yet it provided services that undoubtedly saved lives. It provided an economic outlet for American producers, too. Unilaterally ending the programs under the USAID umbrella might be a blow against American empire, but it’s also a blow to beneficiaries both at home and abroad. Rather than ripping out these programs root and stem, we should rethink such programs along more democratic lines. A people-centered approach to international aid could help curb global inequalities, increase social mobility, and save lives. But this is only true if we finally disconnect these programs from American imperial ends and the incessant desires of the capitalist class.
Returning back to The Walking Dead, in season eight the character Maggie received a gift of a binder full of plans for physically rebuilding society. The woman who shared the plans, Georgie, did not demand much in return (some vinyl records, some food). She understood that a well-functioning society, local or global, needs solidarity and the easy flow of information and goods. Much negative can be said of our international order. The current right wing attack on “globalism” (an antisemitic dog whistle if ever there was one) comes out of a very lopsided version of globalization. Tearing it down, as authoritarians seem wont to do, will not fix the problems already caused by neoliberal globalization. Democratizing globalization instead could be a more effective means of shaping the world going forward. This means ending exploitation of labor, racism, and misogyny in our national and global institutions, protecting the environment, allowing the free flow of people, not just capital. Such ideals drove the non-aligned movement during the Cold War. The path from here to there is not straightforward. As a first step, we must stop seeing each other as the enemy and start demanding those with their hands on the levers of power actually listen to us, not pretend to do so. What Trump and other authoritarians have in mind is not democratizing our global institutions, it’s tearing them down and selling them off for parts in order to line their pockets and impoverish the rest of us. These are not populists and never have been. We stand on the brink of a serious global catastrophe. Let’s hope that we can take a different, more democratic direction into the future together. We should look to a variety of places, not just “western civilization” for possible solutions and for the betterment of all living things on earth, not just a powerful few. Let’s hope we can find that path without another massive wave of pointless destruction of our world.
Footnotes
1 For a discussion of this dynamic with regards to the Balkans, check out books such as Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, (Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 1983).
3 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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