Towards Authentic Economic Nationalism in Nigeria

Abstract

One important problem of Third World development is the lack of intellectual articulation of anti-imperialist ideology and strategies. This flaw in strategic planning is unfortunate because of the fact that in the international power relations between the Third and advanced worlds the latter has perfected and systematized the strategies with which it dominates and underdevelops the former. One outstanding example of an anti-imperialist strategy that lacks intellectual articulation is economic nationalism. 1 The nonarticulation of the concept of Third World economic nationalism must be a reason for its general failure as an anti-imperialist strategy in contemporary international relations. This paper seeks to advance that articulation. I suggest that in order to be successful as a strategy, Third World economic nationalism must first be clearly articulated as a concept. Policy makers, having hopefully internalized such a conceptualization, must then demonstrate a mentality of economic meaning that their decisions would begin to be guided by the intemalized tenets of economic nationalism, however conceptualized. From the standpoint of the Third World, this scenario is important in strategic thinking because the concept of economic nationalism arises, as will be shown in this paper, directly from the realities of the dominance-dependency relations in the contemporary capitalist world economy, which is responsible for the Third World's structural underdevelopment and external dependency. The objective of this paper is to underline the disparity between the concept and practice of economic nationalism by putting it in a clearer perspective in the context of Nigeria's political economy. The thesis is that economic nationalism has failed because it has not been articulated and internalized by the ruling class as an important ideological concept and it has not been applied systematically as a strategy against imperialist relations that underdevelop the country.