Degrowth JG Neg - DDI 2023 TT

Neg – Degrowth JG
NOTES
2NRs
a-strat – gnd jg cp + growth good
b-start – inflation da / gnd jg cp + inflation da
c-strat – k of labor/productivity
misc. – heg, dollar heg, and t-fiscal redistribution can all be gone for as independent 2NRs
dollar heg / heg can be net benefits to the adv cp & gnd jg cp
OFF
K – Cosmo
2NC – FW – Behavior Modification DA
Behavior Modification DA. Debates presuming that security regards interactions between states as the unit of analysis obscures nation-states’ violent tactics pursued to fortify rigid borders and boundaries, and trains debaters to pledge allegiance to the flag.
Flora B. Adamson 16, Professor of International Relations, SOAS, University of London, “Spaces of Global Security: Beyond Methodological Nationalism,” Journal of Global Security Studies, Volume 1, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 19–35; https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogv003
Methodological Nationalism and Security Studies
In two important pieces, Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller have made the case that the contemporary social sciences are biased by their reliance on the assumptions of “methodological nationalism.” Although their argument was aimed primarily at scholars of migration and transnationalism, it is also helpful for illuminating an underlying bias in security studies. Methodological nationalism may be defined as “the naturalization of the nation-state by the social sciences” and “the assumption that the state/nation/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002, 301; 2003, 576). Methodological nationalism, they argue, has resulted in three types of bias that are widespread in the social sciences: “(1) ignoring or disregarding the fundamental importance of nationalism for modern societies… (2) naturalization, that is, taking for granted that the boundaries of the nation-state delimit and define the unit of analysis, and (3) territorial limitation, which confines the study of social processes to the political and geographic boundaries of a particular nation-state.” These three biases interact to form “a coherent epistemic structure, a self-reinforcing way of looking at and describing the social world” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003, 577–78). Furthermore, “[s]cholars who share this intellectual orientation assume that countries are the natural units for comparative studies, equate society with the nation-state, and conflate national interest with the purposes of social science. Methodological nationalism reflects and reinforces the identification that many scholars maintain with their own nation-states” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003, 576).
Methodological nationalism, or the naturalization and reification of the nation-state as a sociological form, is arguably what allows security scholars and others to think of a world of nation-states as the starting point for analysis. States are either conceptualized as “actors” (corporate agents) or “arenas” (territorial spaces). Indeed, these two aspects of “stateness” are often conflated in the literature, leading to methodological imprecision and confusion—“China” sometimes refers to a geographic place, and sometimes refers to an actor or agent. This is arguably because nationalism—an ideology that binds an identity to a particular territorial structure—suggests that political identity and territory are coterminous.
Nationalism is still largely ignored or left undertheorized as a constitutive element of state corporate agency in world politics. Taken to its logical end, this leads to claims of anthropomorphism in which “states are people, too” (Wendt 1999, 2004; Mitzen 2006, 2013; Berenskoetter 2014). Moreover, there are few fields of study in which scholars are as identified with their own state’s interests as security studies, especially in approaches that combine analysis with policy recommendations. One is hard-pressed to imagine an article in a contemporary English language security studies journal ending with policy recommendations for how al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (IS) could more effectively mobilize support, or with advice as to how Russia or China could best contain American power.
Paradoxically, realists such as Kenneth Waltz, in his earlier work, were more cognizant of the important role played by nationalism in producing the unitary state. Waltz recognized the importance of nationalism as a constitutive element of corporate agency in Man, the State and War (1954, 175–76) (although this element was later dropped in Theory of International Politics; Waltz 1979) and noted that “it does violence to one’s common sense to speak of the state, which is after all an abstraction and consequently inanimate, as acting.” He justified his treatment of the state as a unitary actor by taking what was essentially a constructivist position—focusing on the importance of the strength and nature of group sentiment or collective identity, specifically the group sentiment that is produced historically through a combination of modern technology and the emergence of nationalism as a unifying political ideology:
The existence of group patriotism has no special meaning for our analysis until…it becomes infused with the idea of nationality. Then we have the immensely important fact of modern nationalism…the growth of nationalism is synonymous with the integration of the masses into a common political form…With the development of modern technology, especially as applied to the means of transportation and communication, it has become possible for the interests of individuals to be thought of as tightly complementary…The centripetal force of nationalism may itself explain why states can be thought of as units.
States could, therefore, be understood as “units” because they were held together by a collective identity, expressing that common identity and purpose in such a way that “the state appears to other states as a unit” (Waltz 1954, 178). Ultimately, this is an argument about how a particular historical configuration of communications technology allows states to be conceptualized as territorially defined corporate agents.
When the assumptions of methodological nationalism are brought together with insights from the literature on state-building, we can elucidate the underlying relationship that has historically existed between nationalism and security practices in contemporary states. Contemporary nation-states are the historical products of the use of large measures of violence to set and maintain state borders, to produce and reproduce national identities, and to define and control populations, who become understood as “nationals” (Weber 1978; Tilly 1990; Torpey 1998, 241). The emergence of modern nation-states has been accompanied, in many cases, by ethnic cleansing, population exchanges, genocide, and programs of assimilation and homogenization (Arendt 1948 [1973]; Zolberg 1983; Rae 2002; Mann 2005). Furthermore, the project of national state-building itself was motivated in large part by the need to mobilize resources and human capital to support large-scale warfare (Tilly 1990; Spruyt 1994).
The deployment of high levels of violence continues to undergird state practices and identities, with states reproducing their identities and borders via the use of coercive practices. “States dispose of a large arsenal of coercive tools to force their version of society on the population,” writes Wimmer (2013, 70). Citing Appadurai (1998), he adds, “violence makes clear, in a complex situation of overlapping group membership, on whose loyalty one can rely. Violence marks ‘them’ off ‘from us’,” demarcating the dangerous tumor from the healthy flesh of the nation’s body” (Wimmer 2013, 71). Violence thus operates as a way of reifying and maintaining symbolic boundaries and collective identities, but also as a way of disrupting them. Weak actors, as well as strong actors, use violence to define and solidify identity boundaries. In fact, the use of violence is arguably one of the most effective ways to transform “blurred” (i.e., porous and negotiable) boundaries into “bright” (i.e., fixed and nonnegotiable) ones (Alba 2005).
This understanding of the relationship between violence and collective identities suggests some serious weaknesses and blind spots in some of the traditional state-centric approaches to security studies. Much of the scholarship in security studies has viewed “security” as being largely about the policies and practice of one “unit” or “actor” responding to threats or violence from another “unit” or “actor.” This, however, misses the role that security and violence themselves have played in boundary making, and how they structure discourses and practices that contribute to the production and maintenance of collective identities. Indeed, national security discourses routinely contain language and rhetoric that is intended to delineate the “other” or create an enemy image—in other words, discourses designed to define and enforce “bright” and nonnegotiable boundaries. This demarcation of the “other” plays a key role in producing and maintaining identities that form the basis for security strategies (Campbell 1992; Neumann 1996). For example, one need only think of US President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 “with us or against us” rhetoric or Barack Obama’s labeling of IS as a “cancer” that needs to be eliminated.4
Within the context of the nation-state, violence, collective identity, and territory come together in a particular spatial configuration in which a political unit can be conceived of as a territorially defined corporate agent. This historical convergence allows for the emergence of particular forms of theorizing in which questions of spatiality, identity, and the construction and maintenance of collective “actorhood” (stateness) fall by the wayside. The constitutive dimension of corporate agency can be left untheorized, resulting in a particular spatial ontology of nation-states as units and actors.
What is the significance of this for security studies? First, methodological nationalism has the effect of structuring the field of security studies in particular ways, from how war itself is defined to how quantitative datasets, such as The Correlates of War Project (COW), are produced. Wars are spatialized and coded as either taking place “between” states or “within” states—thus disregarding the socio-spatial dimensions of how wars are actually fought. Contemporary drone warfare, for example, leads to the complete physical separation of the combatant from the battlefield, the battlefield from a war, and the combatant from civil society (Wilcox 2015). Counterinsurgency strategies and equipment used in distant locales can return “home” and be applied to domestic populations via the militarization of policing, where social protest is likened to a nascent insurgency.5These connections between battlefield strategies and domestic surveillance and policing are lost in traditional approaches to security.
Similarly, a methodological nationalist bias renders invisible cases in which the center of gravity (Clausewitz 1989) of a “civil war” actually exists external to a state. The spatial dimensions of civil wars in states such as Kosovo, Sri Lanka, and Turkey have all shifted over time, with external actors, such as diaspora populations in Europe or North America, playing a more or less significant role in providing resources and support for the conflicts (Brun and Van Hear 2012; Koinova 2013). The “external” dimensions of “internal” conflicts are obscured in traditional nation-state models of security. Similarly, a “local conflict” that would be more accurately analyzed as a manifestation of larger structural and systemic factors (Hironaka 2005) may be misunderstood due to a dominant spatial imaginary that treats the state as the space where civil wars take place (i.e., within state boundaries).
Quantitative studies of “the democratic peace” are similarly spatialized, treating states as autonomous units that exist in a fictional reality disembedded from larger global forces—and which ignore spatially “inconvenient” dynamics such as covert and proxy wars (Barkawi and Laffey 1999). Much of the literatures on foreign policy, rational bargaining, deterrence, and compellence are also undergirded by a methodological bias that obscures processes of internal state mobilization, cohesion, and repression—a point that was made early on by security scholars who studied “third world” states (David 1991; Ayoob 1997).
A focus on security practices, discourses, and relations, rather than spatially predefined actors and units, allows for the possibility of bringing alternative “spaces of security” into the mainstream of security studies. A socio-spatial approach to security studies understands territorial nation-states to be only one of many “spaces” that are constituted through practices of violence, and thus directs us to look at the relationship between “boundary-making” and security as it occurs in a wider variety of (non-national) spaces. Taking a lead from history, geography, anthropology, and other disciplines, it is time for security studies to “go global.” Scholars need to rethink how the field orients itself to fundamental questions about how physical and social spaces are constructed and imagined, and the concomitant implications of this for theorizing security.
2NC – !!
The nation-state is inevitably unsustainable. Nationalist pressures break down decision-making and economic wellbeing within the Imperial Core while increasing instability and discontent in the Global South. Imagining alternatives is necessary even if they seem impossible.
Dasgupta 18 (Rana Dasgupta, "The demise of the nation state", Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/05/demise-of-the-nation-state-rana-dasgupta, 4-1-2018, Accessed 7-19-2023)//ILake🪐
What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.
But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian “solutions” are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).
What is the relationship between these various upheavals? We tend to regard them as entirely separate – for, in political life, national solipsism is the rule. In each country, the tendency is to blame “our” history, “our” populists, “our” media, “our” institutions, “our” lousy politicians. And this is understandable, since the organs of modern political consciousness – public education and mass media – emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies. When we discuss “politics”, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is “foreign affairs” or “international relations” – even in this era of global financial and technological integration. We may buy the same products in every country of the world, we may all use Google and Facebook, but political life, curiously, is made of separate stuff and keeps the antique faith of borders.
Yes, there is awareness that similar varieties of populism are erupting in many countries. Several have noted the parallels in style and substance between leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. There is a sense that something is in the air – some coincidence of feeling between places. But this does not get close enough. For there is no coincidence. All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere. And their effect is quite the opposite – despite the desperate flag-waving – of the oft-remarked “resurgence of the nation state”.
The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration – these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.
Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.
The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.
More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps. Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 millio

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