peripheries they are bound to be compradore trans-mission belts of domination of the first. Therefore, thenational question remains on the agenda; it continuesto be a real challenge. What can be said in that respectis that the change marks the end of an epoch which inthe case of Asia, Africa and, Latin America can becalled the century of the national bourgeoisie, in thesense that it has precisively been marked by successivenational bourgeoisie edification attempts. The ThirdWorld bourgeoisie now finally sees its own devel-opment in terms of the comprador subordinationimposed upon it by the expansion of transnationalcapitalism. A new wave of NLMs should therefore beexpected, different in their social targets and methodsfrom the previous ones. The crystallization of thealternative new national popular (not bourgeois)strategy involves a merging of three conditions. First,delinking in the sense of a strict submission of externalrelations in all areas to the logic of internal choicestaken without consideration of criteria relating toworld capitalist rationality. Second, a political ca-pacity to operate social progressive reforms throughadvances of democracy. This political capacity is acondition of delinking—since existing hegemonic clas-ses have no interest in it. Delinking without thattransfer of political hegemony has little chance ofemerging, and if it did emerge under such conditions,it would lead to an impasse. Third, a capacity fortechnological absorption and invention, withoutwhich the autonomy of decision making acquiredcould not be realized.

Thus defined, the conditions for a positive responseto the challenge of history appear severe, and anymerging of such conditions remote. That is notsurprising. The response to new challenges nevercomes spontaneously. It takes time for the socialstructures to stabilize, for the new forms of socialmovements to produce efficient strategies, for them toformulate legitimate ideologies in keeping with thereal challenges. In the meantime, what we have israther chaos, and therefore disarray and nostalgias ofthe past, in other words, false responses to realproblems. It is in this frame that we can observerevivals of movements which label themselves‘national liberation,’ usually on the basis of ethnicityand religion, denying importance to any other di-mension of social reality, such as class. Often presentedby the dominant ambiguous ideologies as ‘primordial’in the sense of being the expression of a transhistoricalfundamental ‘difference’ and ‘specificity,’ these move-ments are in fact more of the nature of being asymptom of the crisis rather than an answer to it.

See also: Capitalism: Global; Colonization and Colo-nialism, History of; Environmental History; Imperi-alism, History of; Imperialism: Political Aspects;Nationalism: General; Nationalism, Historical As-pects of: Africa; Nationalism, Historical Aspects of:Arab World; Nationalism, Historical Aspects of: East

Asia; Nationalism, Historical Aspects of: South Asia;Nation-states, Nationalism, and Gender; SocialMovements, History of: General; Third World

Bibliography

Albertini M 1978 L’Etat National. Fe�de� rop, ParisAmin S 1976 Unequal De�elopment. Monthly Review Press, New

York, Chap. 5Amin S 1994a L’Ethnie a� l’Assaut des Nations. L’Harmattan,

ParisAmin S 1994b Re-reading the Post War Period. Monthly Review

Press, New York, Chap. 5Amin S 1997 Capitalism in the Age of Globalization. Zed Books,

London, Chap. 4Anderson B 1983 Imagined Communities. Verso, LondonBauer O 1907 Die Nationalita� ten frage und die Sozialde mobratis.

ViennaBenot Y 1975 Les Independences Africaines Ideologie et Realites.

Maspero, ParisBlunt J M 1987 The National Question, 2nd edn. Zed Books,

LondonBottomore T, Goode P 1978 Austro Marxism. Clarendon Press,

Oxford, UKCohen M 1994 Ethniciti Politique. L’Harmattan, ParisDavis H B 1967 Nationalism and Socialism. Monthly Review

Press, New YorkDavis H B 1978 Toward a Marxist Theory of Nationalism.

Monthly Review Press, New YorkGibson R 1972 African Liberation Mo�ements. Oxford Uni-

versity Press, Oxford, UKHaupt G et al. (ed.) 1974 Les Marxistes et la Question

Nationale 1848–1914: Etudes et Textes. F. Maspero, ParisHobsbawn E J 1990 Nations and Nationalism since 1780.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UKLenin V I 1970 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Progress Publishers, MoscowRiazanov 1923 Le Komintern et l’OrientStrasser J, Pannekock A 1974 Nation et Lutte de Classe. Union

Generale d’Editions, ParisWallerstein I 1974 The Modern World Systems. Academic Press,

New York, 3 Vols.Wallerstein I 2000 The Essential Wallerstein. New Press, New

York

S. Amin

National Security Studies and War

Potential of Nations

Klaus Knorr wrote The War Potential of Nations in1956. This book marks a key transition betweendifferent approaches toward the study of nationalsecurity. Through much of the nineteenth and into thefirst half of the twentieth century, the security of anation depended heavily on the balance between itsown war potential and that of its adversaries andallies. In the second half of the twentieth century that

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relationship weakened in the context of cold warbipolarity and a massive nuclear standoff betweensuperpowers. The relationship is changing again infundamental ways at the start of the twenty-firstcentury. The war potential of nations surely willcontinue to affect national security, but it will notnearly determine it. More importantly, almost all theterms in that statement are coming to mean verydifferent things than they did in 1956.

1. Historical Perspecti�es

In the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘warpotential’ was a narrow conceptual proxy for‘measuring’ the military power of nations. The found-ations of war potential were the economic and tech-nological resources that could be mobilized formilitary purposes. This made good analytic sense in anera of industrial warfare—when nations maintained inpeacetime a small fraction of the military capabilitiesthat they could mobilize for war by simply redirectingproduction. World Wars I and II were won bynations with greater war potential, not by those withthe advantage of existing forces at the start of the war.

Knorr understood well the promise—both analyticand practical—of being able to measure this potential.If national security were some function of objectivemeasures of power, then parsing out the problem (atleast) would be made a much simpler task for scholarsand policy makers. He distinguished among threecritical components of war potential—economic andtechnological capacity, administrative skill, and thepolitical foundations of military power. The idea wasto calculate war potential: if each component could bemeasured with reasonable precision and some argu-ments about their interactions could be built.

Knorr assessed this enterprise carefully enough tosee clearly its inherent limitations. Except in the veryfew cases where nations use sheer force simply to seizesomething, the purpose of deploying military powerwas to influence the behavior of another actor. In allcases of influence there clearly were objective com-ponents to power. But these were always and every-where put into play in the context of relationships oranticipated relationships that had many other com-ponents of power. Without using formal models oreven ‘soft’ game-theory metaphors, Knorr wrote inrather precise analytic terms about the importance ofinformation assymetries, domestic political con-straints, reputational effects, and the like in relation-ships of mutual coercion. He argued strongly that netassessment (the detailed counting and analysis ofmilitary forces) was by itself a very weak tool. Withoutreference to particular objectives and contingencies, tostudy and measure the war potential of nations wouldbe a fragile approach to thinking about and planningfor national security.

These arguments today seemobvious, almost trivial.What was less obvious to Knorr, and remains more

difficult today, is how to move the intellectual andpolicy debate forward. The consolidation of a bipolarpower distribution during the middle years of the ColdWar, along with the deployment of massive nucleararsenals that essentially overwhelmed any realisticmeasures of ‘war potential,’ made that problem moreimmediate.

2. Twentieth-century Strategy

Thomas Schelling’s 1960 work The Strategy of Conflictproposed one kind of solution. The new studies ofstrategy focused much less on the war potential ofnations and much more on the war potential of situ-ations. It did this by abstracting away from precisemeasures of capabilities and even more importantlyfrom precise understandings of the intentions andobjectives of an adversary—a major analytic moveduring a period of time when American policy makers(at least) felt they had a poor understanding of theUSSR.

At a time when net assessment was becomingintellectually stagnant (and arguably boring), the turnto ‘strategic studies’ opened up a new and extremelyinteresting intellectual agenda for national securityscholars to explore. It also pulled into the picture anew set of tools that were developing rapidly inmathematics and economics—in particular, mixedmotive game-theory models. The combination ofnewly configured research questions and fast-improv-ing tools led to an explosion of work that clarifiedpowerfully the strategic logic of situations like nucleardeterrence, brinkmanship crises, and coercive dip-lomacy.

This knowledge came at a cost, of course. Thepower of abstract-deductive theory to produce gener-alizable arguments rests in part on a set of assump-tions about the characteristics of the actors orplayers in the ‘game.’ It has always been a centraldisagreement among scholarswhether (more precisely,when and under what conditions) the benefits of thisapproach are worth the cost.

The end of the Cold War sharpens both the in-tellectual and practical consequences of that disagree-ment. Bipolarity was a significant clarifying force ininternationalpolitics—while theColdWarwasneveras‘simple’ as some nostalgic views would have it, it didcreate a marked explicitness about the major lines ofconflict that the twenty-first century so far lacks. Thenational security environment for many nations, andsurely for the USA, is now much more fine-grainedthan it was in 1965.

3. Future Directions

The problem with flattening out the past is that itmakes it harder to see the future inmultiple dimensionswithout becoming frightened and confused. It may be

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that the USA has enjoyed a post-Cold War honey-moon since 1990 and that the future will be in-creasingly challenging and unstable. Of course, thereare periods of modern history where linear extra-polations of contemporary trends would have workedtolerably well as a foundation for planning thefuture—for example, between 1950 and 1975. Thereare other periods—for example 1925 to 1950, or 1975to 2000—where discontinuous changes in world poli-tics, technology, social forces, and the economyradically displaced what were assumed to be core‘realities’ of security planning. The period around thestart of the twentieth century was such a period.Between 1895 and 1920, applications of the internalcombustion engine, electricity, and the airplane—along with the rise of the German nation, socialDarwinist ideologies, and decolonization—recast fun-damental features of the security environment fornations.

Such periods present two distinct kinds of chal-lenges: to master the technology, and to understandthe social, economic, and military implications andpossibilities that come with it. National securityplanners recognize the new uncertainties of threatsthat are smaller, more diffuse, and likely coming frommany different directions. From a theoretical per-spective, the strategic approach (to build increasinglysophisticated, generalized models of situations) willneed at a minimum to be supplemented with renewedattention to the actors and players in the game.

4. Questions of National Security

The historic literature on war potential of nations is areasonable place to start. It forces certain questions:What is war going to be? What potentials are relevant?And are nations still the appropriate central focus forthe investigation? The answers to these questions werenever clean and simple, and they are becoming farmore complex in ways that matter deeply for thinkingabout national security.

4.1 The Meaning of ‘Security’

One important complicating factor is simply thatsecurity has come to mean much more to many peoplethan the core issues of territorial integrity and politicalautonomy. The discourse of international politics(both popular and scholarly) now embraces conceptslike economic security and environmental security.There may be instrumental political reasons to importmetaphors from the security debate into these otherimportant areas of national interest, but there areintellectual costs as well.

The broadening of the realm of ‘security’ makesthinking and theorizing about it as a dependentvariable of anything a much more complicated task.The war potential of other nations would play a small

(although not insignificant) part in an analysis of USenvironmental security. Environmental interests arenot necessarily any less important than securityinterests. But the clarity of focusing on security in anarrow sense as territorial integrity and politicalautonomy is diluted by stretching the definition.Realists argue that security is a prerequisite for almostanything else that nations want to achieve in worldpolitics. Nonrealists may disagree with the vehementemphasis on security. But few doubt that militarypower is still a critical restraint on the freedom ofnations to act internationally, and particularly to actin ways that threaten the vital interests of the possessorof military power.

4.2 Globalization and Mobility

A second complicating factor comes from a set oftransformations that fall under the rough heading of‘globalization.’ More precisely, the ability of politicalunits to produce and deploy organized violence forpolitical ends (an updated notion of war potential) isbeing deeply affected by changes in the global econ-omic environment.

The simplest way to think about globalization is tosee it as a story about the causes and consequences ofan increase in mobility. For most of human history,neither goods, nor capital, nor most people, nor manyideas moved very far from their place of origin. Overthe last several hundred years, mobility of many(although not all) things has increased—unevenlyacross time and with some setbacks.

Political economists recognize that mobility makespossible the expansion of markets beyond the physicaland other borders that previously contained them.There is simply no serious theoretical framework inwhich security is unaffected by this change. The warpotential of nations effectively stretches beyondnational borders in a profound way. This is mademore conspicuous by the ‘spin-on’ phenomenon. Thecommercial sector now leads the military sector inmost key technologies that underpin military power.And the logic of the commercial sector is decidedly notnational. The so-called revolution in military affairs(RMA), and particularly the increasing informationintensity of military operations (which is part of thatrevolution), cuts in the same direction. Information isinherently more mobile than tanks, airplanes, oralmost any physical asset. Of course, it is also harderto secure in most settings than an aircraft carrier or anuclear missile buried deep underground.

The most significant exception to increased mobilityis people. People do not move across borders asreadily as other technological and economic resources.This may be a key national factor of power thatnations still control or contain—although it is notclear for how long that will remain the case. In anycase, national security concerns about the increased

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mobility of people may complicate economic global-ization as well as vice versa. Technology can beanywhere, but people still have to be somewhere, andwhere they are may matter a great deal for individualnation states. The current US lead in informationtechnology owes a great deal to Indian, Taiwanese,and Israeli engineers and entrepreneurs who haveimmigrated to the USA (or come temporarily on H1Bvisas) and maintain strong network links to evolvingtechnology clusters in their home nations. At somepoint nations will experience in a much more acuteway the tension between the mobility of people whocarry key technological talent and the ‘national’security implications of allowing that talent to crossborders freely.

In addition to mobility (which has increased mark-edly in the past, most dramatically during an earlierperiod of ‘globalization’ at the end of the nineteenthcentury), the next phase of globalization is also abouta dramatic increase in speed. The digital revolution isreducing the cost of moving a piece of informationaround the world in real time to near zero. Big, heavythings move much faster as well because they can bemoved more intelligently with the use of information.This is unsettling to humans, who think and actslowly. It is even more unsettling to political organiz-ations, because aggregating a bunch of slow humansinto a polity usually makes them even slower. Anincreasing number of those polities now have someform of democratic decision-making system which hasthe effect (indeed, is designed explicitly in some ways)to slow things down even more.

This disconnect in speed will have profound impli-cations for national security. There is a straight-forward and narrow version of the argument. If warswill be faster—that is, time limited by military tech-nology and by the constraints of democratic control—then existing forces may once again become a moreimportant determinant of who wins than ‘war po-tential’ in a deeper sense. Yet there are inherentstrains—and not just fiscal ones—for democraciesmaintaining large existing forces during peacetime.

There is a broader version of the argument as well.Balances of power have been an important stabilizingfactor in international politics because balancingbehavior has prevented the consolidation of hegemonyby an aggressor nation. But balances do not formquickly. Napoleon nearly conquered the Europeanlandmass before an effective balance formed againsthim. The Grand Alliance did not fully come togetherto oppose Hitler until 1942—quite late in an offensivethat actually began almost a decade before. Whencompeting systems move at increasingly asymetricspeeds the results are likely to be unstable andsurprising. Balance of power both as theory andpractice has been an important part of the relationshipbetween national security and the war potential ofnations. Yet balances may become less stable andmore volatile in the future than nations expect.

4.3 Size of the War Machine

A third complicating factor, loosely connected toglobalization arguments, is the issue of size. The toolsof large-scale organized violence are getting smaller.Nuclear weapons were the first modern step in thisprocess, but they were hard to engineer and build, evenfor large nations. Biological weapons are different: abiological agent can be microscopic. More import-antly, the equipment to produce custom-designedvirulent biological agents will soon be available insuitcase size for US$10,000 or less. An effectivecomputer virus may be even easier and cheaper tomanufacture. In more than 50 years no subnationalgroup has yet gained possession of and ‘used’ a nuclearweapon (including in a bargaining situation) forpolitical purposes. Almost certainly it will not bepossible to say the same of the next generation ofweapons of mass destruction or disruption 50 or farfewer years hence.

5. Conclusions

Perhaps this kind of capability does not represent warpotential in a traditional sense. One conclusion todraw from this is that it makes sense fundamentally torethink the term itself, as well as the range of actorswho can possess war potential. Changes in mobility,speed, and size have dramatically increased the poro-sity of national borders. Given that porosity, be-havior that in the past might have been thought of asterrorism could increasingly become much more likewar, in the sense that the goals of the behavior mightnot simply be revenge or the placing of pressure on aparticular, discrete policy. The goal—realistically—might be to undermine the foundations of a nation orbring down a government. In that scenario, eachimportant term in the phrase ‘national security and thewar potential of nations’ will have taken on a verydifferent meaning.

See also: Cold War, The; Defense, Economics of;Geopolitics; Globalization: Political Aspects; Inter-national Relations:Theories; Military and Politics;Military Geography; Military History; Military Psy-chology: United States; Military Sociology; War:Causes and Patterns; Warfare in History

Bibliography

Art R J, Waltz K N 1999 The Use of Force: Military Power andInternational Politics, 5th edn. Rowman and Littlefield,Lanham, MD

Bull H 1977 The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in WorldPolitics. Columbia University Press, New York

Katzenstein P J, Social Science Research Council (US) Com-mittee on International Peace and Security 1996 The Culture

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of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics,New Directions in World Politics. Columbia University Press,New York

Kennedy P M 1987 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 1stedn. Random House, New York

Knorr K 1956 The War Potential of Nations. Princeton Uni-versity Press, Princeton, NJ

O’Rourke K H, Williamson J G 1999 Globalization and History:The E�olution of a Nineteenth-century Atlantic Economy. MITPress, Cambridge, MA

Ruggie J G 1996 Winning the Peace: America and World Order inthe New Era. Columbia University Press, New York

Schelling T C 1960 The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge, MA

Walt S M 1999 Rigor or rigor mortis? Rational choice andsecurity studies. International Security 23(4): 49–80

Waltz K N 1964 Man, the State, and War: A TheoreticalAnalysis. Columbia University Press, New York

Weber S 2001 Globalization and the European Political Economy.Columbia University Press, New York

S. Weber

National Socialism and Fascism

Italian fascism and National Socialism signify a newtype of political mobilization which came into beingafter the end of World War I. Both movements wereideologically influenced by integral nationalism andracism, but drew their specific political impetus byexploiting the widespread anticommunism and anti-socialism among the bourgeois strata of postwarsociety. Italian fascism in particular was taken as amodel by comparable movements all over Europe,but, with the exception of that in Spain, only Italianfascism and National Socialism were able to establisha dictatorship.

1. Italian Fascism

1.1 Origins

The origins of Italian fascism are closely connectedwith the extreme legitimacy crisis of the liberal regimefacing protest strikes and factory occupations by ruraland industrial workers. Hence, Giovanni Giolittitolerated the use of violence against organized labourby the fascist Squadre d’azione, which resulted in theemergence of a dualistic power structure, reflected inGabriele d’Annuncio’s expedition to Fiume in 1919and the actionism of the Black Shirts who terrorizedthe countryside and socialist municipalities. Mussoliniused the opportunity to create the veterans’ organi-zation of the Fascio di Combattimento and to shape itinto a non-partisan mass movement which he reorgan-ized in November 1921 as Partido Nazionale Fascista(PNF). By holding out the threat of the revolutionary

potential of quadrism and unleashing the march onRome on October 27, 1922, Mussolini became primeminister in a right-liberal coalition cabinet, althoughthe PNF controlled only a minority of seats in theparliament.

1.2 Fascist Dictatorship

Mussolini used his new position to establish hispersonal dictatorship by skilfully extending theprerog-atives of the prime minister through legal means. Byan ostensibly manipulative reform of the electoralsystem he attained an overwhelming parliamentarymajority for the governing coalition in the 1924elections. By a series of ‘fascist decrees’ the civilliberties, the freedom of the press, and the space ofaction for the parliamentary opposition which formedthe antifascist Aventin were severely curtailed. Theensuing Matteotti crisis provided a pretext to dissolvethe opposing parties and to promulgate a one-partystate relying on the extraparliamentary power of theFascist Great Council. Mussolini thus managed tomaneuver both the cabinet and the parliament—whichin 1938 was reshaped on a corporatist basis—into thebackground. The introduction of the fascist calendarand the adoption of the fascist emblems as statesymbols completed the creeping process of shaping afascist state. Mussolini achieved this by carefullyevading open clashes with the constitution and achiev-ing a modus �i�endi with the conservative elite and bigbusiness.

Mussolini’s tactical flexibility climaxed in conclud-ing the Lateran treaties which, by comprehensiveconcessions in social and cultural matters, secured thesupport of the Catholic church. The combination ofsocial propaganda and compulsion, as reflected in theprogram of ‘dopo la�oro,’ together with co-operationwith big business, enabled him to neutralize thesyndicalistic trade unions. The PNF, which in 1943comprised 4.75 million members combined hetero-geneous social and political groups and exhibitedstrong inter-regional tensions. By isolating the partyradicals under Roberto Farinacci, who endorsed theprinciple of forming a cadre party, the PFN becamemore or less bureaucratized and was controlledthrough local and regional administration. Thus,despite terrorist police and the abolition of civil rightsby the lege fascissimi in 1925�26 the system was notcompletely totalitarian, particularly in comparison tothe Nazi regime. The monarchy, the army and cer-tainly the Catholic church preserved a certainindependence, and the fascistization of the adminis-trative apparatus was only partially attained.Mussolini’s rule relied primarily on a continuousorganization of consensus—his domestic policy lackedany clear direction and ideological consistency. Themyth of the indispensable role of the Duce for Italiannational survival kept everything together, but thedisastrous consequences of Mussolini’s alliance with

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Copyright � 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.

All rights reserved.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7