The political economy of the nation form

Abstract

ABSTRACT This is an edited transcript of a lecture to the Vega Symposium on Resurgent Nationalisms and Populist Politics in the Neoliberal Age, held at the Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, in April 2018. It is part of a Special Issue of Geografiska Annaler, Series B which also includes an Introduction by Gillian Hart, and articles by Kanishka Goonewardena, Gillian Hart and Tova Höjdestrand based on their contributions to the Symposium. My engagement with the political economy of the nation form falls into two sections. The first addresses questions of comparison in debates over nations and nationalism, pointing to how the concept of relational comparison helped break the impasse that became evident in the 1990s and 2000s between problematic universalizing models and strong claims about incommensurability and incomparability. With reference to India, the second section develops the argument that there is no way of reckoning with the extraordinary transposability of the nation form without focusing on transformations within the political economy of capitalism. The transformation from empire to the nation form emerged from the extraordinary systemic crisis of capitalism in the conjuncture of the 1930s; and the crisis of 1970s was another key moment for understanding the political economy of the nation form in India. Reflecting on the current conjunctural crisis, I warn against efforts to set up a straight chain of equivalence between Modi, Trump, Putin, Orbán and others, as well as the political arithmetic of left populism.