translated from Spanish: Nation, nationalism and plurinationality – The Counter

In one of his usual opinion columns, the director of Radio Bío Bío, Tomás Mosciatti, refers to the Plurinational State that a majority of conventionals have declared as one of the fundamental aspects that the new constitution must consider.
The column is entitled “La Araucanía hacia la independencia”, and in it Mosciatti takes a tour of the modern concept of nationhood and its characteristics, among which stands out the customs, traditions and homogeneous language of those who inhabit the same territory, but especially, “a common awareness of shared interests that allows them to wish to continue living together” , says the analyst.
One of the self-dissolutive consequences of modern universalism is precisely to have conceived cultural identities on the basis of mechanisms of exclusionary inclusion, so that the Chilean nation and its legal basis, the State, were built by crushing the autonomy of the Mapuche world.
However, Mosciatti does not disguise his adherence to this civilizing machine that promotes colonialism, and recognizes that the Mapuche are a nation, but a defeated nation. Therefore, the fact that Chile’s cultural unity is under threat today is not a problem of plurinationality or even of autonomy, but of the most atavistic nationalism that only validates Mapuche culture when it represents a devalued expression of Chilenity in its primacy, today managed by the politics of recognition.
But Mosciatti is a lawyer and his problem, in effect, is the state, the nation’s substrate in Chile’s history. What- to paraphrase Walter Benjamin — worries the director of Radio Bío Bío is the location of violence outside the law, much more than its content, because colonization and territorial usurpation is the process by which violence is monopolized by the State, which logically is not the result of voluntary abduction.
As we know, things can always be different, to the extent that power relations are not immutable modes of subjection. However, the nation’s device has served just that purpose: to de-enstorize the senses of belonging and link them to an abstract spiritual (or biological) origin that predates any political organization.
It is in this sense that a normative concept of nationhood comes to evidence another type of fear, which Mosciatti has not been able to admit. What is at stake is the model of development and a whole episteme that has been interrupted by the emergence of a subjectivation that, far from the disintegrating and apocalyptic ghosts of the right-wing reaction, what it wants is to be a nation in another way, to live together in a different way than it has been until now.
That is why the gesture of the Chilean flag and the Mapuche flag flying in the same intensity during the revolt, is the emerging imagination of a plurinational thought inasimimilable to the friend-enemy dialectic that is at the base of Schmittian political theology and to which Mosciatti seems dangerously close, by reducing the political to the form-State. If Chilean subjectivity had been constituted from the hierarchical division with the Mapuche people, it is because the sovereign person only had to correspond legally to the State and culturally to the only possible nation in this territory: Chile, with its traditions, its customs and its language.
On the other hand, plurinationality (which would cause a fissure in the state model) proposes an idea of the common whose purpose is that the existence of some does not pass through the subordination of others. Far from neutralizing the irrevocable conflict of the political, what it does is to transfer it to the level of multiplicity. Hence, the territorial, cultural and economic autonomy of the Mapuche nation certainly means problematizing the economic theology of neoliberalism, in its apprehension of the land as a natural resource causing its devastation, at the service of the income of financial capital.
That the Mapuche world receives in flesh this damage of what modernity has called progress, is in direct harmony with its notion of life, irreducible to the Cartesian conception of the subject (heir to the personalist tradition) that is based on the anthropocentric dualism between nature and culture. But the interweaving between nature and human being in the Mapuche worldview is not a simple environmentalism to save the planet, but a social ontology that is different (not necessarily contrary) to the metaphysics of the Christian West.
There is no need to denounce the horrors committedos by the Chilean State against the Mapuche nation during 200 years of republican life. Recent events have been responsible for showing how that same colonizing violence is turned against Chileans every time they claim in defense of their dignity, so that the enemy is not only a foreign nation, but those who, within it, resist this way of life.
The Mapuche evolution of the Chilean people is what colonialism considers unacceptable, calling for a delirious struggle between nations, when for a long time even the Chilean identity has been trivialized in favor of the interests of the global market order. This is the reason – incomprehensible to Mosciatti – that there are no young people willing to join the ranks of the Army (or carabineros) and go to defend the homeland on a border of war.
This true nineteenth-century nostalgia of Mosciatti, is a symptom of contemporary paranoia that sees its interests threatened by every gesture that is prepared to invent a future, codifying all conflicts as a security crisis. However, no one will forbid us to dance cueca or sing the national anthem, only now that traditions must be subjected to the critical judgment of diversity, in its plurinational or autonomous drift, and to the just rebellion of the peoples, so often betrayed by their homeland.

The content of this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish