I would like to start with a reference to the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, which contains a remarkable and prophetic diagnostic of capitalist globalization The capitalist system, insisted the two young authors, is embarking upon a process of cultural and economic unification of the world : « By exploiting the world market, the bourgeoisie has made production and consumption a cosmopolitan concern for every country. To the great regret of reactionaries, it has removed industry’s national base (...). The self-sufficiency and regional and national isolation of the old days have been replaced by a widespread circulation and a widespread interdependency between nations. This is as much the case for material production as for intellection production ».

It is not just a question of expansion, but also of domination : the bourgeoisie « compels all nations, if they do not want to head for their own undoing, to adopt the bourgeoisie’s mode of production ; it compels them to introduce in their own countries what is considered to be civilization - that is to become bourgeois. In a word, it has created a world in its own image » (3).

In the discussion of the future of nation states there are two mistakes that must be avoided : the first is to consider nation states as institutions that are in decline or disappearing, or that they are losing all political or economic power as a consequence of the process of capitalist globalisation ; and the second is to believe that the defense of a nation and of national sovereignty is the only, or the principle, line of defence against the catastrophes brought on by the globalised market.

Let us start with the first point : contrary to what is often said, nation states continue to play a decisive role in political and economic fields. Nicos Poulantzas was correct in writing that in imperialist countries, « the national state... is undergoing important modifications in order to take over the internationalization of capital. On the other hand, the current phase of imperialism and this internationalization removes nothing (we often wrongly think this however) of the pertinence of the role of the national state in this process » (4).

Let us remind ourselves that it is the governments of dominant capitalist countries that, through their representatives, determine the neoliberal politics of the G-7, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. It is these same states that, through the use of their military instruments such as in particular NATO, impose their order on a world scale, as demonstrated by the wars of imperial intervention in the Gulf and in Yugoslavia. Finally, the North American nation state, unique super-power in today’s world, practices an undoubted economic, political and military hegemony (5)

As far as southern hemisphere countries are concerned, nation states have never stopped playing an important role : allowing for exceptions, they tend to function as a driving belt for the system of imperial domination. They submit themselves unhesitatingly to the demands of financial capital and to the dictates of the IMF, make the payment of the exterior debt a priority for the national budget, and put into practice - with zeal - the neoliberal policies of ‘structural adjustment’.

How are we to put up a resistance against capitalist globalization, with its neoliberal policies that produce brutal social inequalities, ecological disasters, social regression, ‘economic horror’, and an aggravation of debt and dependency for third world countries ? It is obvious that the nation state has a role to play in this resistance, and the first requirement for any anti-systemic movement - to use the pertinent terminology of Immanuel Wallerstein - is that a country’s government should break away from the orientations imposed upon it by the IMF, declare a moratorium on its external debt, and re-direct production towards the needs of the interior market. However it would be a dangerous illusion to believe that salvation lies in purely ‘national’ resistance. It is, insists Nicos Poulantzas, above all important not to fall into the trap of «the line of defence of one’s ‘own’ national state against ‘cosmopolitan institutions’ » (6). An efficient combat against the empire of multi-national capital cannot limit itself to the nation state, and this for several reasons :

1) Victories obtained on a national level are limited, precarious and constantly menaced by the powers of the world capital market and its institutions.

2) A narrow national perspective does not allow for the formation of alliances or for the constitution of an alternative world focus of attention. Only a coalition of international forces is capable of affronting and forcing a retreat upon global capital and its instruments such as the IMFand the WTO.

3) The nation state is not a homogenous social space. Class contradictions, social conflicts and the fracture between an oligarchy and the working masses, between the privileged élite and the multitude of the poor and excluded, cut across national barriers.

4) The legitimacy of progressive and emancipating national movements such as those of the Kurds, the Palestinians and the inhabitants of East Timor cannot be denied, neither can it be denied that nationalism, in today’s world, tends to take on essentially supremacist forms. Inter-community massacres, national or religious wars, ‘ethnic purification’ and even genocides, have become characteristic of the last decade of the 20^th century.

5) The most urgent problems of our era are international. The third world debt, the imminent threat of ecological disaster, the necessity of controling financial speculation and suppressing tax havens, are all global problems that demand global solutions.

In order to fight the system efficiently, it is necessary to act simultaneously upon three levels : local, national and global. The Zapatist movement is a good example of this dialectic : deeply rooted within the indigenous communities of the Chiapas and in their demand for autonomy, it is at the same time fighting the world hegemony of neoliberalism. This is also the case for the peasants’ land rights movement (MST) in Brazil, which has its social base in a local mobilization and land occupation, and offers a project for alternative development for their country, but without neglecting to participate in all the international mobilizations that exist against liberal globalization.

It is not a question of fighting ‘globalization’ as such, in the name of some retrograde defence of ‘national sovereignty’, of the nation state, or of (capitalist) national industry, but more a question of opposing the imperialist globalization that ‘really exists’ with another global project of emancipation, democracy, equality and freedom. This does not mean that the movement for radical social change should not begin on the level of one or several nations, nor that movements for national liberation are not legitimate. But contemporary struggles are, to a degree without precedent, interdependent and linked from one end of the planet to the other.

In reaction to the ravages of globalization, we observe here and there the appearance of the first seeds of a new internationalism, independent of states and of particularized groups of interest. These are the bases of what will one day become the ‘Resistance Internationale’ against the neoliberal capitalist offensive.

This renewal of internationalism has not just come to be through the most radical trade union and political forces of the socialist and workers’ movement (grouping all constituents from marxists to libertarians). New internationalist leanings also appear in the social movements that have a planetary vocation such as feminism and ecology, in anti-racist movements, in the theology of liberation, in the associations for the defence of human rights or for solidarity with third world countries, and, more recently, in the teeming network of movements fighting the ‘merchandizing of the world’ Not to speak of well-known intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu or Jacques Derrida, who consider the foundation of a Resistance Internationale as today’s most urgent tasks.

If certain international NGO’s function simply as ‘lobbies’, adapting themselves to the dominant neoliberal framework and limiting themselves to giving ‘advice’ to the IMF and to the World Bank, others such as the committee for the abolition of the third world debt (Comité pour l’Abolition de la Dette du Tiers-Monde), in Brussels ; the alternative economic Forum launched on an initiative taken out by Samir Amin ; the People’s Conference against free-exchange and the WTO, in Geneva ; or the international association ATTAC (association pour la taxation des transactions financières et l’aide aux citoyens : the association for the taxation of financial transactions for aid towards citizens), have a clearly anti-imperialist vocation.

Radical christians are an essential component, be it those making up third world social movements - often inspired, notably in Latin America, by the theology of liberation - be it European associations aiming at solidarity with the struggles of poor countries. Inspired by a humanist and ecumenical christian ethic, they offer an important contribution to the elaboration of a new internationalist culture.

The new movement of farming communities, organized on a world scale in the case of the association Via Campesina, also occupies a strategic position in the process of international resistance in the sense that it is the hinge between agrarian struggles, ecological struggles and the battle against the WTO. The organizations such as the landless rural workers movement (MST) in Brazil and the Confédération Paysanne in France are at the avant-garde of the resistance against the huge capitalist agricultural industry that threatens the planet with its pesticides and its genetically modified organisms, and destroys forests - the guardians of the planet’s ecological equilibrium - with its policy of ‘profitability’.

A selection of the most active representatives of these various tendencies, from both the north and the south of the planet, from the radical left or from modern social movements, joined in a united and fraternal spirit in July 1996 in order to attend the Intergalactic Conference for Humanity and against Neoliberalism in the Chiapas mountains of Mexico, called together by the Zapatist National Liberation Army. It was a first step, modest, but in the right direction : towards the reconstruction of an international solidarity.

The events in Seattle in 1999 saw an impressive rallying of trade union, ecological and anti-capitalist forces that succeeded in thwarting the plans of the World Trade Organization - the number one instrument of neoliberal globalization - and revealed the potential in North America for fighting against the merchandization of the planet. In Europe, also, the movements of resistance to neoliberalism are far from negligible, as demonstrated by the recent mobilizations in Millau in the year 2000, in which 100,000 people assembled in solidarity with José Bové and his combat against the WTO ; or in Prague during the meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The International Meeting in Paris, in December 2000, and the World Social Forum which took place in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, are the most recent high points of this planetary mobilization which - above and beyond necessary protest - is searching for radical alternatives to the existing order.

Three constituents participate in the construction of this ‘Resistance Internationale’ : I) the renovation of the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist tradition of proletarian internationalism, rid of the authoritarian scoria of the past (the Stalinist inheritance of blind submission to a state or a ‘camp’) ; II) the humanist, libertarian, ecological, feminist and democratic aspirations of the new social movements and III) the new networks fighting neoliberal globalization, which mobilize not only critical researchers but young people who wish to do battle with the institutions of the international commercial and financial system.

In the mobilizations of the last few years we are witness to a joining of these forces. This is not just a question of a juxtapostion of social actors with very different traditions and political cultures, but of the beginning of a reciprocal apprenticeship in the face of a whole series of questions. We see, for example, trade unionists beginning to take an interest in ecology, and the defenders of the environment taking into consideration workers’ struggles ; Marxists who learn from the feminists, and vice-versa. It is from the convergence of and the interaction between these different positions that a universalist and liberating internationalism will spring in the 21^st century.

Notes

[1] K. Marx, F. Engels, Manifeste du Parti communiste, Paris, Livre de Poche, 1973, pp. 10-11.

[2] N. Poulantzas, L’Etat, le pouvoir, le socialisme, Paris, PUF, 1978, p. 118.[3]Je reprend à mon compte les analyses de Daniel Bensaïd dans son remarquable livre Le Pari melancolique, Paris, Fayard, 1997.

[4] N. Poulantzas, « Les transformations actuelles de l’Etat, la crise politique et la crise de l’Etat », in La crise de l’Etat, Paris, PUF, 1976, p. 48

[5] Nicos Poulantzas avait eu raison, dans les années 70, de rejetter les prévisions, assez diffusées à l’époque, d’un « déclin » de l’hégémonie mondiale nord-américaine. Cf. Les classes sociales dans le capitalisme aujourd’hui, Paris, Seuil, 1974, pp. 94-95

[6] N. Poulantzas, Les classes sociales dans le capitalisme aujourd’hui, p. 89.