National Liberation Mo
ements
peripheries they are bound to be compradore trans-
mission belts of domination of the first. Therefore, the
national question remains on the agenda; it continues
to be a real challenge. What can be said in that respect
is that the change marks the end of an epoch which in
the case of Asia, Africa and, Latin America can be
called the century of the national bourgeoisie, in the
sense that it has precisively been marked by successive
national bourgeoisie edification attempts. The Third
World bourgeoisie now finally sees its own devel-
opment in terms of the comprador subordination
imposed upon it by the expansion of transnational
capitalism. A new wave of NLMs should therefore be
expected, different in their social targets and methods
from the previous ones. The crystallization of the
alternative new national popular (not bourgeois)
strategy involves a merging of three conditions. First,
delinking in the sense of a strict submission of external
relations in all areas to the logic of internal choices
taken without consideration of criteria relating to
world capitalist rationality. Second, a political ca-
pacity to operate social progressive reforms through
advances of democracy. This political capacity is a
condition of delinking—since existing hegemonic clas-
ses have no interest in it. Delinking without that
transfer of political hegemony has little chance of
emerging, and if it did emerge under such conditions,
it would lead to an impasse. Third, a capacity for
technological absorption and invention, without
which the autonomy of decision making acquired
could not be realized.
Thus defined, the conditions for a positive response
to the challenge of history appear severe, and any
merging of such conditions remote. That is not
surprising. The response to new challenges never
comes spontaneously. It takes time for the social
structures to stabilize, for the new forms of social
movements to produce efficient strategies, for them to
formulate legitimate ideologies in keeping with the
real challenges. In the meantime, what we have is
rather chaos, and therefore disarray and nostalgias of
the past, in other words, false responses to real
problems. It is in this frame that we can observe
revivals of movements which label themselves
‘national liberation,’ usually on the basis of ethnicity
and religion, denying importance to any other di-
mension of social reality, such as class. Often presented
by the dominant ambiguous ideologies as ‘primordial’
in the sense of being the expression of a transhistorical
fundamental ‘difference’ and ‘specificity,’ these move-
ments are in fact more of the nature of being a
symptom 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
10314
Asia; Nationalism, Historical Aspects of: South Asia;
Nation-states, Nationalism, and Gender; Social
Movements, History of: General; Third World
Bibliography
Albertini M 1978 L’Etat National. Fe! de! rop, Paris
Amin S 1976 Unequal De
elopment. Monthly Review Press, New
York, Chap. 5
Amin S 1994a L’Ethnie aZ l’Assaut des Nations. L’Harmattan,
Paris
Amin S 1994b Re-reading the Post War Period. Monthly Review
Press, New York, Chap. 5
Amin S 1997 Capitalism in the Age of Globalization. Zed Books,
London, Chap. 4
Anderson B 1983 Imagined Communities. Verso, London
Bauer O 1907 Die NationalitaW ten frage und die Sozialde mobratis.
Vienna
Benot Y 1975 Les Independences Africaines Ideologie et Realites.
Maspero, Paris
Blunt J M 1987 The National Question, 2nd edn. Zed Books,
London
Bottomore T, Goode P 1978 Austro Marxism. Clarendon Press,
Oxford, UK
Cohen M 1994 Ethniciti Politique. L’Harmattan, Paris
Davis H B 1967 Nationalism and Socialism. Monthly Review
Press, New York
Davis H B 1978 Toward a Marxist Theory of Nationalism.
Monthly Review Press, New York
Gibson R 1972 African Liberation Mo
ements. Oxford Uni-
versity Press, Oxford, UK
Haupt G et al. (ed.) 1974 Les Marxistes et la Question
Nationale 1848–1914: Etudes et Textes. F. Maspero, Paris
Hobsbawn E J 1990 Nations and Nationalism since 1780.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Lenin V I 1970 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
Progress Publishers, Moscow
Riazanov 1923 Le Komintern et l’Orient
Strasser J, Pannekock A 1974 Nation et Lutte de Classe. Union
Generale d’Editions, Paris
Wallerstein 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 in
1956. This book marks a key transition between
different approaches toward the study of national
security. Through much of the nineteenth and into the
first half of the twentieth century, the security of a
nation depended heavily on the balance between its
own war potential and that of its adversaries and
allies. In the second half of the twentieth century that
 National Security Studies and War Potential of Nations

relationship weakened in the context of cold war difficult today, is how to move the intellectual and
bipolarity and a massive nuclear standoff between policy debate forward. The consolidation of a bipolar
superpowers. The relationship is changing again in power distribution during the middle years of the Cold
fundamental ways at the start of the twenty-first War, along with the deployment of massive nuclear
century. The war potential of nations surely will arsenals that essentially overwhelmed any realistic
continue to affect national security, but it will not measures of ‘war potential,’ made that problem more
nearly determine it. More importantly, almost all the immediate.
terms in that statement are coming to mean very
different things than they did in 1956.
2. Twentieth-century Strategy
1. Historical Perspecti
es Thomas Schelling’s 1960 work The Strategy of Conflict
proposed one kind of solution. The new studies of
In the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘war
strategy focused much less on the war potential of
potential’ was a narrow conceptual proxy for
nations and much more on the war potential of situ-
‘measuring’ the military power of nations. The found-
ations. It did this by abstracting away from precise
ations of war potential were the economic and tech-
measures of capabilities and even more importantly
nological resources that could be mobilized for
from precise understandings of the intentions and
military purposes. This made good analytic sense in an
objectives of an adversary—a major analytic move
era of industrial warfare—when nations maintained in
during a period of time when American policy makers
peacetime a small fraction of the military capabilities
(at least) felt they had a poor understanding of the
that they could mobilize for war by simply redirecting
USSR.
production. World Wars I and II were won by
At a time when net assessment was becoming
nations with greater war potential, not by those with
intellectually stagnant (and arguably boring), the turn
the advantage of existing forces at the start of the war.
to ‘strategic studies’ opened up a new and extremely
Knorr understood well the promise—both analytic
interesting intellectual agenda for national security
and practical—of being able to measure this potential.
scholars to explore. It also pulled into the picture a
If national security were some function of objective
new set of tools that were developing rapidly in
measures of power, then parsing out the problem (at
mathematics and economics—in particular, mixed
least) would be made a much simpler task for scholars
motive game-theory models. The combination of
and policy makers. He distinguished among three
newly configured research questions and fast-improv-
critical components of war potential—economic and
ing tools led to an explosion of work that clarified
technological capacity, administrative skill, and the
powerfully the strategic logic of situations like nuclear
political foundations of military power. The idea was
deterrence, brinkmanship crises, and coercive dip-
to calculate war potential: if each component could be
lomacy.
measured with reasonable precision and some argu-
This knowledge came at a cost, of course. The
ments about their interactions could be built.
power of abstract-deductive theory to produce gener-
Knorr assessed this enterprise carefully enough to
alizable arguments rests in part on a set of assump-
see clearly its inherent limitations. Except in the very
tions about the characteristics of the actors or
few cases where nations use sheer force simply to seize
players in the ‘game.’ It has always been a central
something, the purpose of deploying military power
disagreement among scholars whether (more precisely,
was to influence the behavior of another actor. In all
when and under what conditions) the benefits of this
cases of influence there clearly were objective com-
approach are worth the cost.
ponents to power. But these were always and every-
The end of the Cold War sharpens both the in-
where put into play in the context of relationships or
tellectual and practical consequences of that disagree-
anticipated relationships that had many other com-
ment. Bipolarity was a significant clarifying force in
ponents of power. Without using formal models or
international politics—while the Cold War was never as
even ‘soft’ game-theory metaphors, Knorr wrote in
‘simple’ as some nostalgic views would have it, it did
rather precise analytic terms about the importance of
create a marked explicitness about the major lines of
information assymetries, domestic political con-
conflict that the twenty-first century so far lacks. The
straints, reputational effects, and the like in relation-
national security environment for many nations, and
ships of mutual coercion. He argued strongly that net
surely for the USA, is now much more fine-grained
assessment (the detailed counting and analysis of
than it was in 1965.
military forces) was by itself a very weak tool. Without
reference to particular objectives and contingencies, to
study and measure the war potential of nations would 3. Future Directions
be a fragile approach to thinking about and planning
for national security. The problem with flattening out the past is that it
These arguments today seem obvious, almost trivial. makes it harder to see the future in multiple dimensions
What was less obvious to Knorr, and remains more without becoming frightened and confused. It may be

10315
National Security Studies and War Potential of Nations
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, there
are periods of modern history where linear extra-
polations of contemporary trends would have worked
tolerably well as a foundation for planning the
future—for example, between 1950 and 1975. There
are other periods—for example 1925 to 1950, or 1975
to 2000—where discontinuous changes in world poli-
tics, technology, social forces, and the economy
radically displaced what were assumed to be core
‘realities’ of security planning. The period around the
start of the twentieth century was such a period.
Between 1895 and 1920, applications of the internal
combustion engine, electricity, and the airplane—
along with the rise of the German nation, social
Darwinist ideologies, and decolonization—recast fun-
damental features of the security environment for
nations.
Such periods present two distinct kinds of chal-
lenges: to master the technology, and to understand
the social, economic, and military implications and
possibilities that come with it. National security
planners recognize the new uncertainties of threats
that are smaller, more diffuse, and likely coming from
many different directions. From a theoretical per-
spective, the strategic approach (to build increasingly
sophisticated, generalized models of situations) will
need at a minimum to be supplemented with renewed
attention to the actors and players in the game.
4. Questions of National Security
The historic literature on war potential of nations is a
reasonable 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 for
the investigation? The answers to these questions were
never clean and simple, and they are becoming far
more complex in ways that matter deeply for thinking
about national security.
4.1 The Meaning of ‘Security’
One important complicating factor is simply that
security has come to mean much more to many people
than the core issues of territorial integrity and political
autonomy. The discourse of international politics
(both popular and scholarly) now embraces concepts
like economic security and environmental security.
There may be instrumental political reasons to import
metaphors from the security debate into these other
important areas of national interest, but there are
intellectual costs as well.
The broadening of the realm of ‘security’ makes
thinking and theorizing about it as a dependent
variable of anything a much more complicated task.
The war potential of other nations would play a small
10316
(although not insignificant) part in an analysis of US
environmental security. Environmental interests are
not necessarily any less important than security
interests. But the clarity of focusing on security in a
narrow sense as territorial integrity and political
autonomy is diluted by stretching the definition.
Realists argue that security is a prerequisite for almost
anything else that nations want to achieve in world
politics. Nonrealists may disagree with the vehement
emphasis on security. But few doubt that military
power is still a critical restraint on the freedom of
nations to act internationally, and particularly to act
in ways that threaten the vital interests of the possessor
of military power.
4.2 Globalization and Mobility
A second complicating factor comes from a set of
transformations that fall under the rough heading of
‘globalization.’ More precisely, the ability of political
units to produce and deploy organized violence for
political ends (an updated notion of war potential) is
being deeply affected by changes in the global econ-
omic environment.
The simplest way to think about globalization is to
see it as a story about the causes and consequences of
an increase in mobility. For most of human history,
neither goods, nor capital, nor most people, nor many
ideas moved very far from their place of origin. Over
the last several hundred years, mobility of many
(although not all) things has increased—unevenly
across time and with some setbacks.
Political economists recognize that mobility makes
possible the expansion of markets beyond the physical
and other borders that previously contained them.
There is simply no serious theoretical framework in
which security is unaffected by this change. The war
potential of nations effectively stretches beyond
national borders in a profound way. This is made
more conspicuous by the ‘spin-on’ phenomenon. The
commercial sector now leads the military sector in
most key technologies that underpin military power.
And the logic of the commercial sector is decidedly not
national. The so-called revolution in military affairs
(RMA), and particularly the increasing information
intensity of military operations (which is part of that
revolution), cuts in the same direction. Information is
inherently more mobile than tanks, airplanes, or
almost any physical asset. Of course, it is also harder
to secure in most settings than an aircraft carrier or a
nuclear missile buried deep underground.
The most significant exception to increased mobility
is people. People do not move across borders as
readily as other technological and economic resources.
This may be a key national factor of power that
nations still control or contain—although it is not
clear for how long that will remain the case. In any
case, national security concerns about the increased

mobility of people may complicate economic global-
ization as well as vice versa. Technology can be
anywhere, but people still have to be somewhere, and
where they are may matter a great deal for individual
nation states. The current US lead in information
technology owes a great deal to Indian, Taiwanese,
and Israeli engineers and entrepreneurs who have
immigrated to the USA (or come temporarily on H1B
visas) and maintain strong network links to evolving
technology clusters in their home nations. At some
point nations will experience in a much more acute
way the tension between the mobility of people who
carry key technological talent and the ‘national’
security implications of allowing that talent to cross
borders freely.
In addition to mobility (which has increased mark-
edly in the past, most dramatically during an earlier
period of ‘globalization’ at the end of the nineteenth
century), the next phase of globalization is also about
a dramatic increase in speed. The digital revolution is
reducing the cost of moving a piece of information
around the world in real time to near zero. Big, heavy
things move much faster as well because they can be
moved more intelligently with the use of information.
This is unsettling to humans, who think and act
slowly. It is even more unsettling to political organiz-
ations, because aggregating a bunch of slow humans
into a polity usually makes them even slower. An
increasing number of those polities now have some
form of democratic decision-making system which has
the 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 wars
will 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 more
important determinant of who wins than ‘war po-
tential’ in a deeper sense. Yet there are inherent
strains—and not just fiscal ones—for democracies
maintaining large existing forces during peacetime.
There is a broader version of the argument as well.
Balances of power have been an important stabilizing
factor in international politics because balancing
behavior has prevented the consolidation of hegemony
by an aggressor nation. But balances do not form
quickly. Napoleon nearly conquered the European
landmass before an effective balance formed against
him. The Grand Alliance did not fully come together
to oppose Hitler until 1942—quite late in an offensive
that actually began almost a decade before. When
competing systems move at increasingly asymetric
speeds the results are likely to be unstable and
surprising. Balance of power both as theory and
practice has been an important part of the relationship
between national security and the war potential of
nations. Yet balances may become less stable and
more volatile in the future than nations expect.
National Security Studies and War Potential of Nations
4.3 Size of the War Machine
A third complicating factor, loosely connected to
globalization arguments, is the issue of size. The tools
of large-scale organized violence are getting smaller.
Nuclear weapons were the first modern step in this
process, but they were hard to engineer and build, even
for large nations. Biological weapons are different: a
biological agent can be microscopic. More import-
antly, the equipment to produce custom-designed
virulent biological agents will soon be available in
suitcase size for US$10,000 or less. An effective
computer virus may be even easier and cheaper to
manufacture. In more than 50 years no subnational
group has yet gained possession of and ‘used’ a nuclear
weapon (including in a bargaining situation) for
political purposes. Almost certainly it will not be
possible to say the same of the next generation of
weapons of mass destruction or disruption 50 or far
fewer years hence.
5. Conclusions
Perhaps this kind of capability does not represent war
potential in a traditional sense. One conclusion to
draw from this is that it makes sense fundamentally to
rethink the term itself, as well as the range of actors
who 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 as
terrorism could increasingly become much more like
war, in the sense that the goals of the behavior might
not simply be revenge or the placing of pressure on a
particular, discrete policy. The goal—realistically—
might be to undermine the foundations of a nation or
bring down a government. In that scenario, each
important term in the phrase ‘national security and the
war potential of nations’ will have taken on a very
different 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 and
International Politics, 5th edn. Rowman and Littlefield,
Lanham, MD
Bull H 1977 The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World
Politics. Columbia University Press, New York
Katzenstein P J, Social Science Research Council (US) Com-
mittee on International Peace and Security 1996 The Culture
10317
National Security Studies and War Potential of Nations
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, 1st
edn. 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. MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA
Ruggie J G 1996 Winning the Peace: America and World Order in
the New Era. Columbia University Press, New York
Schelling T C 1960 The Strategy of Conflict. Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, MA
Walt S M 1999 Rigor or rigor mortis? Rational choice and
security studies. International Security 23(4): 49–80
Waltz K N 1964 Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical
Analysis. Columbia University Press, New York
Weber S 2001 Globalization and the European Political Economy.
Columbia University Press, New York
S. Weber
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
National Socialism and Fascism
Italian fascism and National Socialism signify a new
type of political mobilization which came into being
after the end of World War I. Both movements were
ideologically influenced by integral nationalism and
racism, but drew their specific political impetus by
exploiting the widespread anticommunism and anti-
socialism among the bourgeois strata of postwar
society. Italian fascism in particular was taken as a
model by comparable movements all over Europe,
but, with the exception of that in Spain, only Italian
fascism and National Socialism were able to establish
a dictatorship.
1. Italian Fascism
1.1 Origins
The origins of Italian fascism are closely connected
with the extreme legitimacy crisis of the liberal regime
facing protest strikes and factory occupations by rural
and industrial workers. Hence, Giovanni Giolitti
tolerated the use of violence against organized labour
by the fascist Squadre d’azione, which resulted in the
emergence of a dualistic power structure, reflected in
Gabriele d’Annuncio’s expedition to Fiume in 1919
and the actionism of the Black Shirts who terrorized
the countryside and socialist municipalities. Mussolini
used the opportunity to create the veterans’ organi-
zation of the Fascio di Combattimento and to shape it
into 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
10318
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
potential of quadrism and unleashing the march on
Rome on October 27, 1922, Mussolini became prime
minister in a right-liberal coalition cabinet, although
the PNF controlled only a minority of seats in the
parliament.
1.2 Fascist Dictatorship
Mussolini used his new position to establish his
personal dictatorship by skilfully extending the prerog-
atives of the prime minister through legal means. By
an ostensibly manipulative reform of the electoral
system he attained an overwhelming parliamentary
majority for the governing coalition in the 1924
elections. By a series of ‘fascist decrees’ the civil
liberties, the freedom of the press, and the space of
action for the parliamentary opposition which formed
the antifascist Aventin were severely curtailed. The
ensuing Matteotti crisis provided a pretext to dissolve
the opposing parties and to promulgate a one-party
state relying on the extraparliamentary power of the
Fascist Great Council. Mussolini thus managed to
maneuver both the cabinet and the parliament—which
in 1938 was reshaped on a corporatist basis—into the
background. The introduction of the fascist calendar
and the adoption of the fascist emblems as state
symbols completed the creeping process of shaping a
fascist state. Mussolini achieved this by carefully
evading open clashes with the constitution and achiev-
ing a modus
i
endi with the conservative elite and big
business.
Mussolini’s tactical flexibility climaxed in conclud-
ing the Lateran treaties which, by comprehensive
concessions in social and cultural matters, secured the
support of the Catholic church. The combination of
social propaganda and compulsion, as reflected in the
program of ‘dopo la
oro,’ together with co-operation
with big business, enabled him to neutralize the
syndicalistic trade unions. The PNF, which in 1943
comprised 4.75 million members combined hetero-
geneous social and political groups and exhibited
strong inter-regional tensions. By isolating the party
radicals under Roberto Farinacci, who endorsed the
principle of forming a cadre party, the PFN became
more or less bureaucratized and was controlled
through local and regional administration. Thus,
despite terrorist police and the abolition of civil rights
by the lege fascissimi in 1925\26 the system was not
completely totalitarian, particularly in comparison to
the Nazi regime. The monarchy, the army and cer-
tainly the Catholic church preserved a certain
independence, and the fascistization of the adminis-
trative apparatus was only partially attained.
Mussolini’s rule relied primarily on a continuous
organization of consensus—his domestic policy lacked
any clear direction and ideological consistency. The
myth of the indispensable role of the Duce for Italian
national survival kept everything together, but the
disastrous consequences of Mussolini’s alliance with
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7