Resource Nationalism: Defending Sovereignty While the UN Courts Global Capital -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

This cycle of armoring cooperation in language forms a feedback loop that has been weaponized against the very states it seeks to protect for decades. No more so than in the international debate over resource nationalism. If developing countries attempt to gain stronger control over minerals, oil, gas and forests or ‘strategic’ metals they are often labelled as “protectionist,” “populistic” or anti-investment. But when the resources that formed this wealth are locked away by contracts, forced arbitration systems and political pressure from multinationals, financial institutions or powerful states, the world is told not to worry; if businesses do something like hold public money for ransom because they have power it must be fine. It is not a subtle double standard. It is structural.

Resource nationalism is not an outlier. It is the lexicon of political survival. It arises when states see that what is counted as the glorious “open investment climate” often just ends up being domestic capitulation of sovereignty at its national expense to better-funded foreign capital with more experienced lawyers and superior political backing. Resource rich countries have continually been promised development, late state building and wealth. Instead, all they too often receive are pollution, elite capture of the mineral wealth for a few; endless debt servitude and enclave export processes that benefit overseas shareholders while their economies languish. In these circumstances, regaining control of public ownership is not radical. It is belated realism.

The most uncomfortable question is, What role does the United Nations play in this fight? The UN system is a record of the just recognition, on paper at least, that states are sovereign equals and has usually upheld permanent sovereignty over natural resources in default. In practice, however, the structure of global governance tilts ever more decisively toward capital mobility rather than democratic control. Sustainability, partnership, good governance rhetoric is often applied to discipline states more than corporations. Far from decolonizing extraction, governments in the Global South are lectured about transparency and rule of law while transnational extractive actors go on to occupy spaces that exploit legal asymmetries, regulatory loopholes and investor protection mechanisms which were never intended for the benefit of people living over or around the land being extracted.

The issue is not merely one of institutional debility. It is ideological capture. The international system as a whole is now effectively programmed to regard foreign investment as an unchallengeable public good, even when the social results are disastrous. States will be expected to stay “predictable” which translates almost always as predictable for investors but guaranteed not workers, Indigenous peoples of future generations. When a government increases royalties and domestic processing, limits raw export or renegotiates exploitative contracts, it is described as destroying the investment climate. The most destabilizing thing of all: that an assertion, by a state, to sovereignty over its own resources is some sort of threat rather than the condition for peace; or that wealth owned in common cannot be restored into and claim this option permanently from any territory.

This is where the UN begins to wear its credibility a little thin. It cannot keep saying and calling for decolonization while at the same time allowing a post-colonial economic order that retains colonial logic in contractual terms. Formal empire has declined but extraction remained in place. It has only changed its words. The forms of plunder today come via stabilization clauses, investor-state disputes, debt conditionalities, carbon transition supply chains and the sanctification of “market confidence.” The flags have changed. The hierarchy remains.

The imperfections of resource nationalism are legion but it describes a moral and political fact that technocratic globalism would rather bury: unless a nation is in control its own strategic resources, full sovereignty will always elude it. Resource nationalism, alarm critics as breeding ground for corruption, inefficiency and chauvinism. That danger is real. The answer, however, is not foreign economic guardianship masquerading as multilateral virtue in the face of national failure. The solution is accountability at home through democratic reform, greater fairness with respect to international rules that govern global capital flows and the ending of the fiction on which we build our development partnerships–that global capital is a neutral partner between governments.

The actual scandal is not the reclaiming of resources by states. Their biggest scandal is that they have to do this against an international order which trumpets the amen of justice again and again but only bucks under pressure from capital. The United Nations is either serious about preserving the moral authority it claims, or must accept that its role will continue to serve as nothing more than a sophisticated diplomatic veneer overlaying a system whereby sovereignty loses both meaning and dignity whenever profit demands.

It is not about resource nationalism. It is the alarm bell. The problem? An international order that hears the alarm and responds with stress, crisis management techniques (or their absence), stigma, criminalisation or other forms of legal coercion. A world that deprives nations of anything but a feeble say over their own resources should stop pretending to be in favor of self-determination.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia