Peripheral Justice:
The Marxist Tradition of Public Hegemony and Its Implications in the Age of Globalization
Weigang Chen
The Issue: Culture and Peripheral Justice
How do we explain the intriguing fact that precisely at the moment when the West scores a decisive victory over all political and economic alternatives, when capitalism is universally accepted as the only feasible way to rationally organize a modern economy, and when third-world industrialization tears down the traditional north-south structure marking the beginning of an age of capitalist globalization, there has emerged across non-Western societies an ever more powerful anti-Western backlash and an ever stronger aspiration for cultural assertiveness? To address these crucial issues, it will be necessary to take a step back and examine how the relationship of culture and modern transformation has become a dominant concern in social analysis. [End Page 329]
The Paradox of Peripheral Capitalism
The rise of liberal modernity in western Europe and North America more than two hundred years ago, as Ernest Laclau and ChantelMouffe have forcefully put it, marked a momentous mutation in the social imagination of Western societies: the logic of equivalence displaced the logic of differentiation and imposed itself as a fundamental nodal point in the construction of the social. In the matrix of the new social imaginary, subordination was constructed as oppression. This effectively delegitimated older, hierarchic and inequalitarian views of social organization.1
The Kantian tradition conceptualizes this radical break as the replacement of the primacy of the good life by the primacy of justice. No social order can persist without appearing (i.e., being perceived by people in it) to be just. Indeed, our intuitive conviction that each person should be rendered his or her due is so fundamental now that it forecloses any possibility that sacrifices imposed on a few might accrue advantages that many, even society as a whole, could enjoy or benefit from collectively.2 However, this does not mean that every social order is equally just or should even be considered as just. In traditional or illiberal societies, the notion of justice presupposes that the basic principles of justice are derived from what Hegel termed Sittlichkeit, that is, the customs, norms, and expectations inherent in the conception of the good life of a given society. According to John Rawls, it is in this relationship between justice and the basic structure for society that the most distinctive feature of liberal society can be discerned. What is characteristic of liberal democracy is precisely its claim to social justice, or more specifically, the claim that "the primary subject of justice is the basic structure of society" per se.3 Thus, for the first time in human history, there emerged a political-social order within which each person possesses an initial position of unconditional equality and any unequal distribution of social advantages among individuals is made on the basis of principles and procedures that equal and rational persons would accept and regard as fair and just.
This new structure is liberal modernity. The emancipatory implications of liberal modernity help explain why both classical liberalism and classical Marxism have shared a common belief in the effectiveness of capitalism in raising growth, alleviating poverty, and promoting equality and civil liberties everywhere, including the third world.4[End Page 330]
However, what these classical paradigms did not anticipate and certainly cannot explain is what Tom Nairn termed "the most brutally and hopelessly material side" of modern world history—the persistent uneven development between Western core countries and the peripheral world.5 Since the nineteenth century, social analysts have been haunted by this puzzling fact: that the imposition of basic ideas and institutions of liberal modernity (individualism, constitutionalism, human rights, free markets, the rule of law), which presumably has contributed to the vitality and prosperity of the advanced capitalist centers in the West, has produced in the peripheral world exactly the opposite effects, a direct descent into social decay and economic stagnation.6 Following SamirAmin, I shall refer to this "brutally and hopelessly" violent crisis either as the paradox of peripheral capitalism or as peripheral liberal deformation.7
Nowhere has this paradox asserted itself in a more glaring manner than in the post-communist world today. Contrary to the neoliberal views of the "end of history," the eager turn of former communist and developing nations to free-market economy and liberal democracy has not ushered in an unequivocal flowering of capitalism. Instead, the attempt has only been repaid with bitter disappointments: regional and ethnic conflicts, rampant corruption, glaring inequality between the rich and poor, and flagrant lawlessness.8 The rapid social disintegration of Russia since the early 1990s provides a compelling case in point.
Western social scientists and third-world intellectuals have sought to understand the origins and effects of peripheral deformation. Two factors currently stand as eminently responsible: nation-states and the bourgeois class. The institutional framework provided by a modern nation-state, sine qua non for modern economic transformation, has exclusive power over territory and the means of internal and external violence.9 Thus the nation-state is defined as the political body representing national sovereignty. This constitutes a sharp contrast to traditional forms of states—empires and kingdoms—in which social control rests on a division of labor and a coordination of effort between a semibureaucratic state and a landed upper class, which retains considerable local and regional authority over the peasant majority of the population.10 The European, post-Reformation, modern nation-state was historically a product of aspirant middle classes, who typically play a decisive [End Page 331] role in creating a popular national identity11 or Benedict Anderson's "new form of imagined communities."12 The resulting bourgeois voluntaristic nationalism defines the nation as a rational association of free and equal individuals in a given territory.
It is precisely this voluntaristic, bourgeoisie-centered model of state building, which, when imposed on, applied to, or introduced into non-Western countries, has become a standard recipe for social and political disaster. Instead of a national consciousness or an imagined community, the whole society has fragmented into regional, linguistic, and religious assertions, or tribal or ethnic loyalties, leading subsequently to amoral familism, clientelism, lawlessness, ineffective government, and economic stagnation.13
The typicality of peripheral liberal deformation, to say nothing of its ubiquity, is central to understanding the modern world system. Nearly a century ago, it was precisely the convergence of a weak native bourgeoisie and the social disintegration in Russia that forced Lenin, Trotsky, and other Russian revolutionaries to give up Marxist orthodoxy regarding the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie and propose the idea of hegemony. Their point was that peripheral nation building could not work except by carrying out a nonbourgeois democratic revolution on the basis of a popular national identity organized by a revolutionary vanguard party.14 A similar crisis of bourgeois liberalism in China and in many other peripheral countries pushed these nations to follow the Russian route. The result is what Anderson called "official nationalism," which is characterized by a mixture of modern nationalism and the dynastic intention of old empires, forged and led by intellectuals and political elites.15 I shall term this type of nationalism—which swept across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the mid twentieth century—peripheral cultural nationalism or hegemonic nationalism to highlight its illiberal, nonbourgeois character.
Virtually all successful third-world industrialization projects have taken place in countries that have grounded state building on hegemonic nationalism and adopted a deliberately illiberal or de-Western strategy of development. The so-called East Asia miracle, notably the gigantic economic growth of China, is the best illustration.16 Unlike other former socialist regimes, China still remains a single-party state. But its economic power, which constitutes such a sharp contrast to the ineffective struggles taking [End Page 332] place in Russia and other former socialist and developing countries, forces us to reach a near-paradoxical conclusion: given the persistence of peripheral liberal deformation, deliberalization or de-Westernization is almost a logical prerequisite for the upward mobility of a peripheral nation within the capitalist world system that is controlled and dominated by the Western core countries.
Only against this background can we understand why there is currently a widespread resentment of so-called human-rights imperialism across the peripheral world, why peripheral nations insist on the primacy of national sovereignty over democratization, and why it is "in the realm of culture that emerging market nations in Asia and Latin America now feel most threatened and in which they are most insistently demanding independence and freedom from Western domination."17
The Logic of Eurocentricism
The experience of the peripheral world fits the diagnosis of the crises of bourgeois modernity that Hegel and other communitarian philosophers and social theorists made. This fit brings the problem of peripheral capitalism to the center of current controversies over the nature of liberal modernity among proponents of liberalism and neo-Aristotelianism or neo-Hegelianism.18
As a theory of social construction, the whole edifice of the liberal tradition hinges on the Kantian notion of moral autonomy, which sets the unsituated self against both the Sittlichkeit, or the ethical way of life of society, and the individual's inclinations, desires, and interests. JurgenHabermas's idea of modern structures of consciousness and Rawls's assumption about the individual's capacity to have an effective sense of justice are both contemporary reconstructions of the same central notion.19 All these conceptual constructs have been formulated to demonstrate how a popular national identity or consensus could be generated from within a civil society where "the pursuit of material interests were emancipated from moral passions and became in fact the ruling passion,"20 or, to put it bluntly, how private vices could become public virtues in the modern marketplace. The question is how can this be done without presupposing an Enlightenment notion of the rational subject, who is said to occupy a neutral, ahistorical position and is always [End Page 333] capable of subjecting passions to the control of reason, or a Kantian notion of the noumenal self, a disposition of rational beings to act in accordance with what ought to be rather than with what is?
The essence of the critique, to use Hegel's terminology, lies precisely in the problem concerning the possibility of the "second nature."21 Viewed from this perspective, the idea of public use of reason by private people is self-contradictory. Public reasoning cannot but presuppose a sharp distinction between the private self and the public self, a distinction that stands at the heart of any form of Sittlichkeit—the traditional teleological scheme of the good life. Hegel accordingly predicted that the bourgeoisie as private people were by nature incapable of building up any meaningful social order—needless to say, an imagined community—and that no construction of a modern nation-state would be possible without the determinant role of the ethical state, which alone could serve as the ultimate locus of the general will of the nation or the ethical life in and for itself.22
The prevalence of capitalist deformation in the peripheral world has certainly brought into sharp focus the conceptual force of the Hegelian perspective as well as its current relevance. It demonstrates that those rational egoists collectively called the bourgeoisie are normally neither rational nor autonomous nor socialized; that a free-market economy without effective political-legal regulation is normally a system of cheats; that the liberal state, which is supposed to be separated from the ethical life of any historical community, is normally not operating for the interests of the public; that since no power can ensure that the state will act for the interests of the public and nothing can prevent those who control the coercive force of the state from using that force as their private capital, there normally exists "the unholy marriage of political and economic power, whereby money buys influence, and power attracts money"23; and, as a result of all this, that a capitalist society based on the principles of market economy and liberal politics is normally a society of rampant corruption.
What is really at issue in the paradox of peripheral liberal deformation is not so much the question of why liberal modernity has failed in the periphery as the question of how it could ever have succeeded in the West in the first place. [End Page 334]
Eurocentricism and Cultural Nationalism in the Current Age of Globalization
Just as peripheral nations insistently demand that human rights must be considered in the context of national and regional particularities and various historical, religious, and cultural backgrounds, many Western culturalist analysts and communitarian philosophers appeal to values they see as rooted in inherited national, religious, or ethnic identities and promote as the inescapable framework within which all issues of justice and modern transformation should be addressed. This paradoxical convergence illustrates why the developmental state model cannot be an alternative to liberal modernity. As Edward Said, Bryan S. Turner, and others have rightly observed, this line of analysis is closely associated with the orientalist legacy in the Western social sciences.24 It carries the central implication that non-Western societies, for lack of various desirable cultural traits, simply deserve to be caught in the dilemma between social disintegration and authoritarianism.
Here lies an apparent dilemma that any peripheral nationalist or multiculturalist position has to face. It certainly could be argued that the moral point of view advocated by prominent thinkers of the liberal tradition like Kant, Habermas, and Rawls is nothing but an occidental discourse about reason, which is a mere contingent product of linguistically socialized, finite, and embodied creatures. In making such an argument, however, one is actually asserting that only some specific groups of homo sapiens deserve or can afford "to reason about general rules governing their mutual existence from the standpoint of a hypothetical questioning: under what conditions can we say that these general rules of action are valid not simply because they are what you and I have been brought up to believe or because my parents, my synagogue, my neighbors, my tribe say so, but because they are fair, just, impartial, in the mutual interest of all?"25
This is more than a normative issue. It has tremendous practical implications in the present age of globalization. Third-world industrialization, especially the rapid rise of East Asian countries into the epicenter of global capital accumulation and transnational production, marks the beginning of a new phase of the historical development of capitalism within which the capitalist mode of production has become, for the first time in modern history, "an authentically global abstraction, divorced from its historically specific origins [End Page 335] in Europe."26 Keeping in mind the decisive role of hegemonic nationalism and the developmental state in peripheral modernization, it can be said that globalization, defined as the expansion of capitalism to non-Western regions and the emergence of a highly integrated world economy, presupposes a structural differentiation between Western voluntaristic nationalism and peripheral cultural nationalism, that is, between liberal nation-states and peripheral developmental states.
Moreover, this new global structure is not only differential but also hierarchical. Because of the persistent effects of peripheral liberal deformation and the juxtaposition between liberal and hegemonic nation-states, the third world today consists of territories of peripheral capitalist deformation, where "the state infrastructure and monopoly of the means of violence are so weakly developed (Somalia) or have disintegrated to such an extent (the former Yugoslavia)" that indirect violence of a Mafia-like or fundamentalist variety disrupts internal order.27 By contrast, the second world consists of those nation-states in the periphery that seek to compensate for instabilities through authoritarian constitutions and native values. As a result, some of them have achieved remarkable success in industrialization. Only the states of the first world, most of them in Europe and North America, can afford to harmonize their national interests with the norms that define the universalistic, cosmopolitan aspirations of the United Nations.
It is in this pattern of globalization by hierarchical differentiation that some of the most profound contradictions of the present world system can be clearly discerned. Globalization, as so many analysts have pointed out, is by nature supranational or transnational. It inevitably intrudes on national economic sovereignty and, accordingly, undermines national sovereignty from within by fragmenting the national economy.28 The erosion of nation-states, in turn, necessitates a political, social, and cultural framework at the world level that can give coherence to the overall management of the system.29