National Soldiers and the War on Cities

In an inconspicuous footnote towards the end of his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci presents us with a startling observation. Writing in a very different time and place, he suggests that a political-geographic rift had emerged between urbanism and cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and ruralism and nationalism on the other. Gramsci offers the intriguing thought that, “these conflicting attitudes can in a sense be seen as two sides of the coin of fascist imperialism.” While ‘fascist’ may not be an apt term to describe contemporary imperialism, the rest of the equation seems strangely fitting. I characterize this observation as ‘startling’ in part because it speaks to a formidable challenge of politics and geography in our own time, but also because it remains an overlooked footnote. This paper takes Gramsci’s observation seriously. In fact, my analysis is crafted in the shadows of this footnote, and in its interstices with another. The second note not a literal footnote like the first is instead a social ‘fact’ that has largely been treated as a footnote, a point of marginal importance. This second footnote tells us that the militaries of advanced capitalist nations with voluntary forces are made up overwhelmingly of rural soldiers, and that rural areas have become the heartland of militarism and ‘authentic’ patriotism. I will suggest that this second footnote is extraordinarily important in that it is a constitutive element of contemporary forms of organized violence. Far from a banal detail of ‘location’, urban/rural geographies of militarism and military service are a key to the historical geographies of citizenship that constitute our violent present.