ABSTRACT
In 1848, Marx and Engels famously wrote that ‘working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got’. They were right then. The ‘bourgeoisie’, not workers, were engaged in ‘nation building’. Most workers, peasants, women or minorities could not vote. Nor did they have rights as citizens to public healthcare, education or pensions. Now the situation is largely reversed in countries where ordinary people have won or inherited such citizens’ rights. In many countries, corporate elites are disengaged from country and nation, live in segregated communities secured by armed guards and electronic surveillance (Sklair 2001: 20–1), express a distinct, transnational class consciousness and share similar lifestyles (Cox 1987: 358–60; Huntington 2004). Their highest loyalty is to profit making. Most support neoliberalism, which combines capitalism with cosmopolitanism, not bourgeois nationalism. They oppose national economic development and domestic ownership policies.
