Q. In your new book, you explore the formation of political identities based on religion. As you note, this phenomenon is by no means restricted to South Asia. Where does the current global rise of identity politics - whether based on religion, race, nationality or culture - come from? How can they be opposed?
A. This phenomenon belongs to the fourth quarter of this century, the period of the long downturn. It is a response not to the failure of modernity as such, as post- and anti-modernists claim, but to specific patterns of modernity. It calls for critiques of advanced capitalism, actually existing socialism and "third world" capitalist developmentalism. Being the reaction to a many-sided failure - growing inadequacies in socio-economic development, problems in institutionalising and sustaining political democratisation, greater ideological disarray - it must be countered by a many-sided politics.
Regarding my book's specific focus on religious exclusivisms, it's worth bearing in mind that the religious map of the world will no longer change. The Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian parts of the world will remain so. Certainly there can be intra-religious shifts like the greater Protes-tantisation of Latin America and shifts in Europe and North America brought about by changing migration and demographic patterns. But the era when any particular religious system could make dramatic mass conversions or incursions is over for good.
What this worldwide "resurgence" of religion means is that people responding to perceived secular failures turn to whatever religious system already exists at hand to cope with growing material and psychological dilemmas. Not "religious dynamism" but "secular failure" is the defining characteristic of our times! Rectifying this secular failure constitutes our principal task. But not by stitching together positive forms of identity politics to counter its negative forms - identity politics is inescapably sectoral and a universal politics of common appeal is not the sum of sectoral appeals.
There is no escape from establishing a universal vision (in which sectoral needs are partially addressed) and building an organisational and political vehicle carrying that vision and popularly mobilising around it. Genuine socialist transformation in the long term is a necessity. However, given today's mass disillusionment with socialism, another kind of vision and politics capable of resurrecting that project is more immediately required. For all the limitations of nationalism (the obstacle to a true cosmopolitan internationalism) the nation is still the collective entity in which most people live and feel some strong sense of loyalty to. Even as it talks of globalisation, the right (witness Thatcherism) understands this very well. A national-popular politics of democratic empowerment overlaps with, but is not the same as, an explicitly socialist politics and cannot replace it. But by providing a politics of general and common appeal which makes a significant positive change it can be more than a halfway house to it, the more so if it takes the form of a movement. Demanding the extension of basic citizenship rights (rights related to the specific roles that most people occupy as workers, consumers, voters, taxpayers, patients, as the aged and as children) could be one way to generate such a broad democratic movement and politics. This would focus not just on the state and its policies but legitimise, empower and promote structures of self-organisation in civil society.
Q. Amid all the talk of globalisation, many on the left and right seem ready to write off the nation-state. Do you agree with this tendency? If not, what is the role of the nation-state in the global economy?
A. In the latest phase of the international political economy of capitalism there has been an important shift in power and authority from states to markets and their key organising institutions, which now operate transnationally if not quite globally. But writing off nation-states is absurd. They will continue to be very much around. Indeed, as long as no alternative political arrangement can more adequately incorporate citizenship rights or enable governing institutions to be held accountable to the public, it is the form of political authority which enjoys most legitimacy - and therefore remains a crucial site in the struggle among contending social forces.
Leftists who write off the capacity of the nation-state to intervene effectively in the world economy are implicitly subscribing to a particular view of capitalism - global convergence to a neo-liberal order. In reality there have been, past and present, various forms of capitalist accumulation and regional development (West Europe, East Asia, North America) and national development (Sweden-Britain, Japan-Malaysia, USA-Canada).This is precisely because of the differential insertion of states into the world economy and variant state roles regarding ownership and regulation of capital and welfare functions, thus creating variant socialist possibilities.
Certainly, globalisation has made it more difficult to carry out these regulatory and welfare functions but the responses to this pressure have varied. Neo-liberalism's claim that globalisation imposes a uniform and inescapable logic everywhere is simply a con. It is the political direction taken by a national society or wider framework like the EU that still determines the economic direction that entity takes, not the other way around. Who governs, how they come to govern, and what they do, makes a big difference.
Q. What then is the role of nationalism in the Third World?
A. In advanced countries, states are well developed and their expenditure and activity accounts for so significant a proportion of national income, their relevance is inescapable. In the Third World actual state capacities vary more. What India can do to resist unwanted globalising pressures is much more than what a weak African state can do. But everywhere, to dismiss the relevance of state power is effectively to forfeit a major part of the struggle against multinationals and structures like the IMF or World Bank that seek to institutionalise a specifically neo-liberal global order. However, the expansion of an "internal bourgeoisie" seeking association with foreign capital implies that a progressive nationalism has to be directed against them as much as against outsiders.
There is also another dimension. Third world anti-colonial nationalisms were essentially defined by what they opposed. Infusing a democratic cultural and political content remains very much on the agenda. When so many countries (not just India) face exclusivist religious nationalist pressures, to abandon the struggle for alternative, secular, democratic and progressive nationalisms in the name of a globalisation that has supposedly rendered nationalism irrelevant is a recipe for disaster.
Q. You have talked about the crisis of the socialist alternative. What do you see as the main Qs socialists have to A about their alternative and where do you think we should look for the As?
A. We cannot escape paying the price of a Stalinism that lived and died - the crisis of credibility in the idea of a socialist alternative. For most, opposing capitalism's effects no longer leads so easily to opposing capitalism itself or to committing to socialism. We must make the socialist project feasible and attainable again. The latter is more difficult and important. In reaching closer to the project we will necessarily resolve many of the problems about how it will work.
The working class remains central to any strategic mobilisation - no other force has comparable positioning or weight vis-a-vis the capitalist class. But objective changes in the structures of everyday life (not just subjective failings of working class organisations) render the claim that this class represents the universal interest less convincing than it once was. Certainly it is a claim that cannot be promoted in the old way. There is no escape from the more prolonged process of people coming to a common and universal commitment to socialism not just as workers but through multiple roles, through their lived experience.
I am not talking of establishing pre-figurative forms of socialist life and structures within capitalist society, but of something more modest and realisable. The great tragedy of post-1989 was the enormous strengthening of a public sentiment of "no more experiments". This has to be overcome. Socialism will be the creative and ongoing construction of ordinary people or it will not exist.
Particularly important is advancing the theory and practice of a socialist economy. Current debates about market socialism or other socialist models come in here. The best of them try to combine economic efficiency through real markets, qualitatively greater income/wealth equality, socialised control over investment, maximum workplace democracy, and participatory planning. None of them is fully coherent, nor provides the "basic structure" of what a socialist economy will be like. But insofar as their limited implementation succeeds in fulfilling their promise genuinely to promote self-organisation, collective responsibility and better functioning, they can significantly strengthen the will to "experiment" further. It is through pushing this process forward that we will become clearer about how best decisively to defeat our main class opponents.