Modernisation and the nation

It has been emphasized that nations are essentially modern creations although some of their building blocks may not be entirely modern. It is time to explain what modernisation precisely entails and the effects this complex process of social transformation had in the emergence of societies politically organized as Nation-States before discussing how modernisation affected nation-building in Spain in chapter three. Giddens (1990) defines

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modernity in connection with the modes of social organization which emerged in Europe from the 17th century onwards and which subsequently became widespread in their influence throughout the world as they developed and consolidated. In his view, modernity radically altered all traditional forms of social order in unprecedented ways. On the one hand, the transformations brought by modernity have resulted in forms of social interconnection which span the globe. On the other hand, such transformations have altered in many ways some of the most intimate and personal aspects of our life. For Giddens, some of the defining characteristics of modernity have been the accelerated pace of social change and the broad scope of such change, together with the emergence of radically new forms of social life such as “the political system of the Nation-State, the wholesale dependence of production upon inanimate power sources or the thoroughgoing commodification of products and wage labour”

(Giddens, 1990. p. 6).

For Wallerstein (1991; 2004) modernity is associated with the emergence of capitalism around the 16th century in Europe and its subsequent expansion worldwide. He also argues that the Nation-State, which has traditionally been the main focus of inquiry in the social sciences, should be abandoned in favour of a larger analytical unit called “world-system” because in his view, the Nation-State does not constitute an autonomous society that develops over time. A similar conclusion is reached by Giddens (1990). He contends that the concept of society as a bounded system -the traditional focus in sociology in the era of Nation-States- should be replaced by the analysis of social life across larger spans of time and space. For different reasons, Laclau and Mouffe (2002) propose substituting society as a basic unit of analysis for a notion of the social as discursive space. They argue that social practices cannot be articulated within any fixed self-defined totality but that they are better

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A world-system is defined as “a spatial/temporal zone which cuts across many political and cultural units, one that represents an integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules” (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 17). Insofar as they are systemic,

world-systems are constantly being reproduced through the cyclical processes governing them. But world-systems should also be understood as historical phenomena in that they are also constantly evolving, they have beginnings as well as ends. This is due to the fact that all geohistorical social systems carry contradictions which at some point will lead to their demise according to Wallerstein.

A defining structure of modernity has to do with how time and space are organized in modern societies as opposed to how these parameters operated in pre-modern forms of social organization, such as European medieval agricultural communities (Karsten, 2013). Theories of spatial politics in the field of social geography speak of “the territorialization of political power”, understood as the production and transformation of State space where State

spatiality is conceived in dynamic terms, not as a pre-given and fixed geographically- bounded realm for the enactment of social relations but as one of the constitutive dimensions of these social relations. As Brenner et al argue:

States are not simply located ‘upon’ or ‘within’ a space. Rather, they are dynamically evolving spatial entities that continually mold and reshape the geographies of the very social relations they aspire to regulate, control, and/or restructure (Brenner et al, 2003 p. 11).

This dynamic reorganization of time-space is also at the center of Giddens’s theorization of modernity and is equally emphasized in Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, where it is

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argued that the analysis of time-space has been conspicuously absent from social theory, as if time-spaces were invariable external realities within whose frames social reality resides. On the contrary, as Wallerstein argues, time-spaces should be understood as “constantly evolving constructed realities whose construction is part and parcel of the social reality we are analyzing (Wallerstein, 2004, p. 22).

A key concept in theorizing this historical transformation of State space is that of geographical scale, considered to be socially constructed as both a platform and a container of all collective social action. It is argued that the scalar organization of State space is never fixed forever. Rather, it has been redesigned and restructured throughout history as societies undergo complex processes of transformation (Smith, 2003). Before Nation-States emerged as the preferred locus of social activity alongside capitalist expansion and industrialization, there had existed other forms of territorialization such as city-States, empires, the medieval State system and Absolutism. Social activity in these pre-national forms of territorialization was predominantly enacted at the local and regional scales: although time calculation in the form of calendars was already a common feature in traditional societies, time- usually perceived in imprecise and variable terms- was always linked with space in people’s minds. Furthermore, space was practically undistinguishable from place: both space and place were necessarily understood as the physical setting of all social activity given that humans had not yet made sufficient progress in controlling nature and overcoming the space barrier (Braudel, 1981). That in turn meant that all social interaction in pre-modern times usually required the co-presence of social actors as opposed to what occurs in post-modern societies. That was still the time of the “here” and “now” in a society alien to telecommunications, advanced

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was a world in which the idea of the “absent” was hardly conceivable, where communities

like nations were basically unimaginable (Anderson, 1991).

Giddens uses the term “distanciation” to refer to this re-ordering of time-space characteristic of modern times while Harvey (1989) and McGrew (1996), call it “time-space compression”.

These two terms in fact refer to the same phenomenon: a progressive conquest of space which has torn down all spatial barriers, where space has been annihilated through time. Giddens argues that one of the key events which marked the beginning of this distanciation -or compression- of time and space was the invention of the mechanical clock and its diffusion towards the late 18th century: “The clock expressed a uniform dimension of ‘empty’ time, quantified in such a way as to permit the precise designation of ‘zones’ of the day (e.g. the working day)” (Giddens, 1990. p.17.). Similarly, as Harvey (1989) and Escolar (2003) indicate, this gradual transformation of space can be appreciated in how map-making evolved from the fantastic allegorical depictions of the medieval times to the increasingly objective descriptions during the Renaissance era of explorations and the far more accurate drawings found in the era of the Enlightenment, not to mention the effect instruments like GPS have had in the re-organization of time-space recently. In fact, maps from the Enlightenment onwards became essential tools in the re-ordering of space as they came to define land property rights, established territorial boundaries, domains of administration and social control and showed communication routes with growing accuracy. More importantly for the purposes of this research, the rationalization of space through maps allowed for a certain conception of “the other” to emerge in connection to space:

[Maps] also allowed the whole population of the earth, for the first time in human history, to be located within a single spatial frame […]. It was within the confines of such a totalizing vision of the globe that environmental determinism and a certain conception of ‘otherness’ could be admitted, even flourish. The diversity of peoples

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could be appreciated and analyzed in the secure knowledge that their ‘place’ in the spatial order was unambiguously known (Harvey, 1989. 249-250).

A progressive rural exodus leading to growing urbanization together with the development of increasingly sophisticated communication systems and transportation networks constituted key factors in this radical re-ordering of time-space. All this has led in modern times to a gradual lifting of social relations from local contexts of interaction requiring the physical co-presence of social actors and their restructuring across larger spans of time-space, a process Giddens calls “disembedding”. Typical disembedding mechanisms are the creation

of symbolic tokens such as money:

Money is a mode of deferral, providing the means of connecting credit and liability in circumstances where immediate exchange of products is impossible. Money, we can say, is a means of bracketing time and so of lifting transactions out of a particular milieu of exchange. More accurately put, in terms introduced earlier, money is a means of time-space distanciation. Money provides for the enactment of transactions between agents widely separated in time and space (Giddens, 1990 p. 24).

Another disembedding mechanism was the establishment of expert systems supporting broad areas of the material and social environment in modern societies, closely associated with the spread of literacy among the masses and State-building during modern times. These are defined by Giddens as “systems of technical accomplishment or professional expertise that

organize large areas of the material and social environments in which we live today” (ibid, p. 27). Expert systems play a decisive role in what Giddens calls “the reflexive appropriation of knowledge”, that is the process by which “the production of systematic knowledge about

social life becomes integral to system reproduction, rolling social life away from the fixities of tradition” (ibid, p. 53). Trust plays an essential role in how all these disembedding

mechanisms operate. Such trust is not vested in individuals but in abstract capacities according to Giddens: when people use money tokens in lieu of payment, it is considered

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acceptable not because of the trustworthiness of the individual who made the payment but because money as a system of payment is trusted as a result of public confidence in the issuing government. Similarly, one could argue that the main function of expert system groups such as notaries public and other kinds of State bureaucrats is to institutionalize trust as an abstract capacity so that any social action, from the making of a will to the purchase of a property can be entrusted.

In his theorization of modernity, Wallerstein (2004) distinguishes two types of historical world-systems: world-empires and world-economies. He argues that what characterises our modern life has been the capitalist world-economy, a system not bounded by a unitary political structure whose raison d’etre is the endless accumulation of capital. For the first time in history, an economic world-system has prevailed over alternative systemic forms such as world-empires, which in the past had always ended up absorbing world-economies manu militari. Thus, capitalism began to emerge as the sole dominating historical system on earth towards the end of the 19th century when capitalists achieved State-societal power in key States across the world. Some of the key institutions in the capitalist world-system are the markets, the firms producing goods and services which compete with each other in those markets as well as the households, the social classes and the various identity groups of many sorts. Another important institution has been the Nation-State and the interstate system, comprising States situated at the core of the system as well as in its periphery.

Capitalist expansion has had a dual dimension for Wallerstein. On the one hand, there has been a geographical spread from the core of the capitalist world-system towards those regions originally situated in the periphery of capitalism. The defining factor in this

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dichotomy of core-periphery is none other than the degree of profitability of the production process, something directly related to the extent to which the markets are controlled by quasi-monopolies. This idea of monopolization at the core end of the capitalist world-system may sound strange to some, for it goes against the free market principle, considered by Wallerstein one of the most deeply-rooted myths in modern societies. In fact, capitalist producers always prefer monopolies because they are far more conducive to profit that free markets, for in a totally free market the buyers would be able to bargain down the sellers to lesser profit and that would render impossible the endless accumulation of capital. Quasi-monopolies however always dry up in the end and what today is a core product or service will eventually become a peripheral one in the future. There have been numerous examples of this transfer in recent years: from ship-building to call services or car making. On the other hand, capitalist expansion has also been the result of the increasing commodification of products and processes which once were situated outside the realm of the capitalist way of doing things. The development of new financial products and accounting practices in the context of emerging disciplines like financial engineering (Beder & Marshall, 2001) and the growing commodification in areas such a biotechnology and education constitute examples of this (Hanson, 1999; Prudham, 2007; Hendrickson & Heffernan, 2002; Shumar, 1997).

As this process of capitalist expansion was chiefly structured at the geographical scale of the Nation-State during the early stages of the internationalization of commercial capital (Hobsbawm, 1990; Nairn, 1977; Arrighi, 2010), the Nation-State became towards the 18th century a key institution within the capitalist world-economy, where “national capitals and their attendant political frameworks in the Nation-State emerged as a vital geographical

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means for coordinating and arbitrating economic competition between capitals at the global scale” (Smith, 2003 p. 229). The extent to which capitalist expansion led to the emergence of

a fully-fledged national mode of organization in Spain characterized by the predominance of the national scale in the regulation of social action during the 19th and 20th centuries will be a central theme in chapter three.

However, this restructuring of social relations, then being increasingly centered at the national scale, did not eliminate prior scalar levels of social structuration, due to the fact that “scales do not exist in mutual isolation, but they are always interconnected in a broader,

often-changing inter-scalar ensemble (Brenner et al, 2003 p. 16). This is a common pattern in many processes of structural change where previous structures seldom disappear altogether. Rather, they survive embedded or latent within newly emerging structures to even re-emerge and play again a significant role in locating social action if required by the new socio-political conditions. Thus, many daily reproduction activities in the form of face-to-face transactions continued to operate at the local scale while the regional scale also remained latent, often as a residual subnational expression within the geographical scale system to re-emerge once more as an alternative platform for social action in the form of a new regionalism, as many of the processes previously regulated at the national scale become organized at a supra-national level (Lipietz, 2003; Keating, 2003) and new forms of governance which emphasize multi-scalar networks and partnerships at the expense of nationally rooted bureaucracies sprout (Goodwin and Painter, 1996; Jessop, 1998). The Spanish Autonomies and the European Union Committee of Regions constitute good examples of these re-emerging regionalizing trends at various scalar levels (Aja, 1999; Loughlin et al, 2001).

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Capitalism and industrialism constitute two separate and yet related organizational dimensions which have played a decisive role in conforming modernity according to Giddens. The former is defined as a “system of commodity production centered upon the relationship between private ownership of capital and propertyless wage labour” (Giddens,

1990 p. 55). Capitalism, which relies on production for competitive markets, constitutes the main axis of the class-based societies prototypical of modern times. Industrialism, on the other hand, is chiefly characterized by “the use of inanimate sources of material power in the

production of goods, coupled to the central role of machinery in the production process” (ibid, p. 56). These phenomena of capitalist expansion and industrial development have been linked to the consolidation of the Nation-State system in the theories of Gellner (1983; 1997) and Hobsbawm (1990), among others, as we have seen before. One of the central arguments in Gellner’s theory of nationalism is that the shift from the modes of production typical of

agrarian societies to those of modern industrial societies required a novel form of social organization, the Nation-State, where homogeneity of culture constituted the basic social bond.

Due to their inherently expansionist character, however, capitalism and industrialism are globalizing forces in essence and cannot be confined to bounded social systems like the Nation-State, at least not over extended periods of time. On the contrary, it can be argued that from their early origins, capitalism and industrialism have aimed at being international in scope. Certainly, these two phenomena did once align closely with the social and administrative system of the State at earlier stages in history in conforming what Recalde (1982) calls “the national mode of organization”, thus making some territories more viable as

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Nation-States than others according to Hobsbawm (1990). But in spite of these close connections, capitalism, industrialism and the Nation-State should in principle be explained and analyzed separately in Giddens’s view.

Wallerstein (2004) conceives the network of sovereign States as a key institution of the capitalist world-system. He argues that States have contributed to structuring the world-capitalist system in a number of ways. States have been largely responsible for setting the rules for the transfer of commodities, capital and labour across international borders as well as the rules regarding property rights, employment and employee compensation within their respective territories. States have decided on the kinds of economic processes that should be monopolized, the extent of this monopolization and the regulation of taxation. Also, States have determined the costs firms must internalize when doing business in their territory and may lobby in favour of companies established in their territory before other States.

Elaborating on the idea of the State as a territorially-bounded “power container” for the enactment of social relations, coined by Giddens (1985), Taylor (2003) distinguishes four basic functions of States corresponding to four different phases of development. First, the establishment of the Westphalian order in 1648 consolidated the State as power container, increasingly unrivalled within its territory in virtue of the principle of non-interference in other State’s affairs. This not only contributed to weaken other rival powers within the State’s territory, chiefly the aristocracy and the church, but also accentuated the centralizing and homogenizing trend already present since the emergence of Absolutism where the State began to act “ like a vortex sucking social relations to mould them through its territoriality”

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(Taylor, 2003 p. 102). Good examples of this trend in the Spanish context are the attempts by Olivares, as early as 1624, to establish a more centralized State largely inspired in the