Nationalization Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Although there is no universal agreement on how to define nationalization precisely, this term is used to describe the government’s actions to exercise control or ownership over assets such as private property, industry, land, or financial/business institutions. Theoretical works focusing on nationalization tend to emphasize government control of private property, government influence over financial/business institutions, and degrees of government ownership of industry and land.

In political science and political sociology, the term has been used in several other contexts. Nationalism studies use this term to refer to language, citizenship, migration, and similar policies pursued by nation-states to integrate multiethnic regions into one body politic or, alternatively, to create a monoethnic state without integrating ethnic minorities. In studies of political parties, this term has been used to describe the “increasing similarity of geographic units” in terms of the resemblance of voting patterns. The so-called nationalization of the vote is seen as an indicator of how politically integrated a country is. This approach attempts to establish whether the constituents tend to vote for the same parties at the regional and national levels.

The term nationalization is often used in studies of communism and socialism. In this context, it refers to the process by which the government assumes various degrees of control over private property. The government is conceived as the primary owner of industry and land (but not necessarily of all private property).

Nationalization As Conceptualized By Communist And Socialist Theories

Communist and socialist theories of nationalization are based on Karl Marx’s theories about the creation of a classless society, which, according to Marx, was the final evolutionary stage in the political development of humankind—a development that consists of a series of struggles between the haves (those who own the means of production) and the have-nots (those who do not own the means of production and are exploited by those who do). According to this theory, the stage when the government becomes the primary owner of industry and land (that is, the nationalization of the most important assets) is an important step toward the creation of a classless society.

A prominent critic of capitalism, Marx warned about the concentration of the means of production in the hands of one class (the bourgeoisie). He argued that this will lead to a revolution by the have-nots (the proletariat). Marx proposed the nationalization of the means of production as the strategy necessary to create a classless society. In The Abolition of Landed Property (1869), he wrote, “Leaving aside the so-called ‘rights’ of property, we affirm that the economical development of society . . . [renders] the nationalization of land a ‘social necessity,’ against which no amount of talk about the rights of property will avail.” In The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Marx (together with Friedrich Engels) identified the actors who will pursue nationalization—the working class (the proletariat). They will undertake this pursuit because “they have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.”

Hugh Clegg’s Critique Of Socialist And Communist Approaches To Nationalization

In the late 1940s and 1950s, after the French and British governments took control of the coal, electricity, gas, and transport industries in their countries, nationalization attracted the attention of theorists and practitioners in Western democracies. During 1950 and 1951, Hugh Clegg, a former member of the British Communist Party and father of the Oxford school of industrial relations, published two works—Labour in Nationalized Industry and Industrial Democracy and Nationalization—that put forward a powerful critique of the Marxist concept of nationalization. Industrial Democracy and Nationalization outlined the expected benefits of nationalization that were predicted by socialist theories, such as better planning, better coordination, and happiness coupled with a feeling of freedom from oppression, which workers would experience because they would know that they were toiling for the

public good. It pointed out major weaknesses in nationalization projects as conceptualized by Socialist and Communist theories—the lack of accountability, issues with productivity, and the difficulty of assessing the effectiveness of nationalized industries, because “their products are not fully determined by competition, [and] their accounts may be made to show profit merely by pushing up the price.” Clegg made several suggestions about how to make nationalized industries more accountable to the people. These suggestions included creating national boards responsible to the appropriate minister and to Parliament as well as setting up special agencies. He also identified several other government strategies that might be able to achieve results similar to those expected by socialist theories of nationalization, such as the progressive taxation of incomes and the financing of social services from this taxation.

Nationalization In Practice

The best-known example of nationalization took place in Russia and the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century. During the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, the Russian government nationalized numerous industrial and banking institutions. After the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922, the Soviet government became the primary owner of industry and land. Similar processes of nationalization took place in Soviet satellite states after World War II (1939–1945).

During the second half of the twentieth century, there were several famous nationalization projects that were aimed at getting rid of foreign control of industries and companies seen as vital to the national interest. These cases include the nationalization of foreign businesses by the Cuban government in 1960, the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company by Egypt in 1956, and the nationalization of the oil industry in Venezuela in 1975–1976.

Recently, the nationalization of oil assets has received a lot of attention. In 2004, the Russian oil company Yuganskneftegaz (a subsidiary of Yukos) was de facto nationalized by the Russian government, at least partly for political reasons. Those opposed to the nationalization of oil assets pointed out the dangers (some of which had been pointed out earlier by Clegg): a decline in management standards, reduced productivity, and increased investment risks. Those in favor argued that the nationalization of oil assets could benefit the country’s economy as a whole by providing raw materials at affordable prices.

In 2008–2009, in the public discourse in the United States, the term nationalization has been used to describe increased levels of government control in managing the financial crisis. Examples include arranging mergers for troubled financial institutions and investing significant sums of public money in the banking sector. These actions, however, do not constitute full government takeover of these financial institutions and exemplify only low levels of nationalization.

Bibliography:

Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Claggett,William,William Flanigan, and Nancy Zingale. “Nationalization of the American Electorate.” American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 81.
Clegg, Hugh. Industrial Democracy and Nationalization. Oxford: Blackwell, 1951.
Labour in Nationalized Industry. London: Fabian, 1950.
Ishiyama, John T. “Elections and Nationalization of the Vote in Post- Communist Russian Politics: A Comparative Perspective.” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 18, no. 3 (September 2002): 30.
Mironov,Valery, and Sergey Pukhov. “The Russian Economy in the Context of Global Market Trends.” Social Sciences 38, no. 1 (2007): 9.
Marx, Karl. “The Abolition of Landed Property. Memorandum for Robert Applegarth.” December 3 1869. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1869/12/03.htm.
Marx, Karl. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” 1848.
Marx Engels Archive. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ ch01.htm.

This example Nationalization Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.