NATIONS AND ETHNIC GROUPS

Study of a social formation necessarily leads to consideration of the problem of the nation, of how to define the precisely out­lined social group that constitutes a particular social formation.

I shall define two concepts: that of the “ethnic group” and that of the “nation.” The former presupposes linguistic and cul­tural community and homogeneity of geographical territory; also, and above all, there is consciousness of this cultural homogeneity, even if this be imperfect, with dialects or religious cults differing between one “province” and another. The nation presupposes the ethnic group but goes beyond this. According to Saad Zahran₁ the nation appears when, over.and above the features mentioned, a social class, controlling the central state machinery, ensures eco­nomic unity of the community’s life —^; that is, when the organiza­tion by this dominant class of the generation, the circulation, and the distribution of the surplus, welds together into one the fates of the various provinces.

Thus in regions where control of irrigation necessitates admin­istrative centralization and planning of production on a country­wide scale, the dominant state-class transforms an empire into a nation if it is already homogeneous. The case of China (despite that country’s pronounced regional variations) and, even better, that ofEgypt are the most cogent.

This state-class is not the only precapitalist class present at the origin of the national phenomenon. The class of merchants in tribute-paying and trading formations, or slaveowning and trading ones, may fulfill the same function. Unity is brought about in these cases through circulation of the surplus that this class con­trols. Ancient Greece or the Arab world constitute examples of nations of this type. In Greece we see a nation despite the lack of a central political authority, which existed only embryonically, ex­pressed in the confederacies and alliances between the Greek cities. In the Arab world, ethnic homogeneity, that is, common language and. culture (though with some minority enclaves inside the na­tional empire), was reinforced by economic unity, manifested in the great days of that world through the circulation of goods, ideas,

, and men, under the leadership of the ruling class of merchants i and the military courts, which formed a single class of merchant- ' warriors. An Arab nation did indeed come into existence.

Nations founded in this way upon the merchant class are un­stable when the tribute-paying substratum is unstable. This is why it can be said that if the nation is a social phenomenon that can appear at any stage of history and is not necessarily associated with the capitalist mode of production, the national phenomenon is reversible; it can flourish or it can disappear, depending on whether the unifying class strengthens its power or loses it. In the latter case the given society regresses to become a conglomeration of ethnic groups that may become increasingly differentiated. Here, too, the case of the Arab world is illuminating. Because the bulk of the surplus came from the profits of long-distance trade and was not generated inside the society itself, the vicissitudes of this surplus proved to be those also of Arab civilization and the Arab nation.

Similar phenomena are found in Black Africa. Throughout the savannah country along the southern edge of the Sahara, tribute­paying and trading formations underlay the great historical states of Ghana, Mali and Songhay, and the Hausa cities. Here was at least an embryonic stage of national development. But all of these formations were soon undone by the ending of trans-Sahara trade and the growth of the slave trade across the Atlantic.

The disappearance of the Arab nation gave back life to the nation that was able to live exclusively by the internal generation of a substantial surplus, namely, the eternal Egyptian nation. The social class in.control of the rebirth of the Egyptian nation was the bureau­cratic landowning aristocracy. In the eighteenth century, with Ali Bey, but especially in the nineteenth, with Mehemet Ali, this state­class resumed the functions of directing and planning the economy and'organizing the circulation of the surplus it levied; in other words, it renewed its control over the forms of the nation’s eco­nomic unity.

Elsewhere in the Arab world — in Morocco and Tunisia from the fifteenth century onward, in Algeria with Abdel Kader, in the nineteenth in the Sudan with Mahdism, in the Yemen or in the Lebanon — attempts to form nations did not get very far, in some cases because they fell beneath the blows of foreign intervention (in Algeria and the Sudan, for example), but mainly because the level of development of the local productive forces did not make possible the extraction of a surplus adequate to support a class that might undertake the constituting of a nation.

The same reason prevented the African states lying south of the Sahara from surviving, even as embryonic nations, after the disappearance of the Saharan trade.

The formations of feudal Europe did not become nations either. Here the internal surplus was relatively large, but it hardly circu­lated at all outside the limits of the fief where it originated, at least during the early Middle Ages. From the thirteenth century onward, however, and especially in and after the sixteenth cen­tury, in Atlantic Europe (England, France, Spain, and Portugal), long-distance trade increased the amount of the surplus by adding to it transferred values of external origin. Rent in kind yielded place to money rent, and this stimulated a prosperous simple commodity production by craftsmen, which added its effects to those of long-distance trade. The absolute monarchies of the four countries mentioned centralized an increasing proportion of the surplus, ensured its circulation with the aid of the merchants of the mercantilist era, and gathered together the lands of their realms to form nations.

While the nation is certainly older than capitalism, the cap­italist mode of production thus plays, nevertheless, a considerable role in its development. The degree of economic centralization is brought, under this mode of production, to a level higher than before, as all production, and no longer merely the surplus, be­comes commodity production. Labor power itself becomes a com­modity, and this, through internal migration, causes the popula­tion to become more closely integrated. Capital in commodity !form brings about integration of the market, with a centralized currency system and the circulation of wealth.

The existence of a nation thus implies that the dominant class can aspire to national hegemony within the given society, that it has taken shape as a class integrated on the national scale, with organization and hierarchy at that level, in contrast to those dom­inant classes that are made up of independent equals in juxta­position. This integration has been seen in history as the state­class of the rich tribute-paying systems; in exceptional cases it has occurred in the merchant class in periods of great prosperity of the societies it has dominated; and, above all, it has happened to The bourgeoisie — at least in the central formations of capitalism.

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