In the midst of the internal struggles unleashed in his country around the national question, President Donald Trump faces an assortment of opposition among his former allies in Europe. Recently, Trump declared himself a nationalist. His affirmation caused a huge rejection from dominant groups of the US establishment that are advocates of globalization. At the same time, recalling the centenary of the end of the Great War, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, assured in Paris that to be a nationalist is the antithesis of being a patriot.

There is in fact a third position in the face of the national question: they are oppressed nations that face dominant nations. In the former, there are movements of national liberation or popular wars that are repressed by governments financed by oppressive nations. Obviously, an explanation must be found for these divergences with respect to the definition of the nation. What is a nation?

An oppressed nation is not the same as an oppressor nation. Nor is the nation the same for a dominant social group as for another dominated group. In fact, there are nations that compete with each other for the domination of markets, territories and cheap labor force of other nations. The English historian, John Hobson, called it imperialism. Imperialism led humanity to a permanent state of war to this day.

To simplify matters, we can say that every social group, articulated to a form of organization of the production of wealth (the economy), can have a project of nation. Businessmen want to consolidate their national market. Peasant farmers want a nation that ensures their access to land. The workers aspire to a nation that fulfills their aspirations to equity and freedom. How can a society assimilate so many projects? There is also a territorial definition of the nation. It is a fragile definition but it can serve under special conditions. The Poles employed it in their struggle to emerge as a nation in the XX century. The Catalans have employed it in the XXI century. In Latin America, social groups have come together – with greater or lesser success – in Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico, among others – to face up to the United States in their defence of their project of nation.

Currently, in the US, President Trump has raised the flag of nationalism to defend a project that was legitimized in the nineteenth century. The 'barons' of big industry, after the conquest of the entire territory between Mexico and Canada, created one of the most successful nation projects in history. At the end of that century and the beginnings of the XX century, the United States became involved in the imperialist wars of the European powers. Their national project was replaced by open imperial competition with the Europeans in Latin America, Africa, Asia and other regions.

After a century of imperialism, the European nations/powers have exhausted their capacity to continue exploiting their periphery. Forty years ago, the United States organized the Trilateral Commission with the proposal of coordinating their policies with those of Europe (the so-called “centre”) in its relation with the periphery. It was presumed that in order to do this, they would strengthen the economic entities (IMF, WB), increase their military forces (NATO) and create new political institutions (G-7, G-20). The United States would control the whole mechanism, while supporting the other partners. Something that Barak Obama called “leading from the rearguard”.

The plan conceived of a world without borders, coordinated military units and increasingly integrated economies: globalization. In other words, it was goodbye to the nations that arose in the heat of the industrial revolution and capitalism, as well as imperialism. This version of “the end of history” was rejected by significant sectors of big US capital that found their champion in the figure of Trump. The proposal of this group is quite simple: the United States is and will be the first and only nation with the capacity to be the leader of the world.

What alternative does Latin America have? The proposal of globalization or of a single leadership centred in Washington is not new. It is more of the same. Both plans imply that the 35 nations of Latin America and the Caribbean will continue to be exporters of low value-added goods and importers of products of high value-added ones. The nations of the region have only one alternative, to break with the dependency and seek a new path.

November 15, 2018

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

– Marco A. Gandásegui, Jr., professor of Sociology with the University of Panama and associate researcher with the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Justo Arosemena (CELA)

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